Still a Hole. I work in Manhattan and sometimes take the Newark PATH train (an interstate subway), from the "World Trade Center" station in Lower Manhattan, which departs from alongside, and looks out upon, the enormous hole in the ground left by the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Last month, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was bitterly criticized for having defended the poor progress in repairing the vast devastation to mile after square mile of his city after one year, when New York still hasn't filled in one big hole in the ground after five years.* But he was right.
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Last nite, the Superdome had a grand reopening, in which the New Orleans Saints trounced the Atlanta Falcons 23-3. Cash-strapped, poor New Orleans managed not only to avoid demolishing the badly damaged Superdome, but even to raise $185 million to repair and reopen the stadium only 13 months after it was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. By contrast, New York, capital of capital and focus of vast inpourings of foreign money, has been unable to rebuild a signature tower at the World Trade Center site in five years.
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Not only has the WTC site not been filled in, by anything, but some loud New York media voices want it to remain a hole for years more! Last Friday, the New York Post published an opinion piece by conservative real-estate commentator Nicole Gelinas, "a contributing editor to City Journal" (whatever that is), which contains this recommendation:

The best thing for the Freedom Tower would be for New York, and the Port Authority, to just leave it alone for a while. Perhaps after, say, another three years, when visible development is taking place on Silverstein's towers, rationality would at last prevail at Ground Zero: The new governor and the Port Authority could let the private sector start from scratch on a commercially viable office building — rather than a skyline landmark designed by committee.

And why does she want the gaping hole in Downtown to remain an open sore and continuing reproach? Because, she says, brave New Yorkers are scared sh*tless at the prospect of working in another landmark skyscraper:

The Freedom Tower's fate remains far from certain. Earlier this week, PA Chairman Anthony Coscia made headlines by confirming that he'd resign rather than force Port Authority employees to work in the tower after having experienced the horror of 9/11.

That outburst didn't do much for the tower's prospects — and though the PA's proposal is to line up lease agreements from state and federal agencies instead, it's not clear that those employees will want to work in the tower, either.

Oh, please. New Yorkers have not been scared out of working in skyscrapers by the WTC attack, nor, before that, by the disaster movie The Towering Inferno, nor by any number of actual fires or other problems with high-rises, such as power failures that required them to walk down dozens of floors. I myself have worked various temp spots in both the World Trade Center and Empire State Building. I don't see the Empire State emptying out because it is now the tallest building in the Nation's greatest city, and thus presumptively the biggest target for people like al-Qaeda.
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It is not fear for their lives from New Yorkers, nor New Jersey commuters, that is holding up development of the World Trade Center site.
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Part of the problem is the political power of the survivors of the people who died at that site. Many want the whole world to stop, and have us leave the site undeveloped in perpetuity, as sacred ground. Their mawkish sentimentality has no place in the real world. Lower Manhattan is not a graveyard, and the mere fact that a lot of people died at a particular spot is no reason for us to live forever in sadness. Life goes on, people. Get over it.
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That may seem harsh, but the idea that anyplace anyone dies should be forever thereafter set aside as a memorial and never developed is insane. We are building an Arena for hockey and other events here in Newark. In early August, a workman fell 85 feet to his death from open steelwork. Are we to end the construction of the Arena because that is now sacred ground?
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Many of the greatest building projects in history have entailed the death of workers. Are all to come screeching to a halt because those deaths bar anything but a memorial in that location? I don't think so.
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The Great Wall of China has been called the longest graveyard in the world, given how many people died in its construction. Should all work on the Wall have come to an end, so the barbarians could invade centuries before they finally took over China? (The First Emperor, who forced hundreds of thousands of people to work on the wall under such awful conditions that thousands and thousands died, was a monster, but that's a separate issue, irrelevant to modern construction projects governed by OSHA protections.)
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People die all over the place, in private homes, hotel rooms and apartments, on roadways and ocean liners, and other places of every description. Should all those places be made into permanent memorials that no one else can ever thereafter use for any practical purpose? Of course not. Life goes on.
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The extravagant memorial now planned for the victims of the WTC attack is preposterous. The sponsors want to spend as much as a BILLION dollars, on what is, at end, a gravestone! A billion dollars on the dead! Absurd.
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Are there no better uses for a billion dollars? The dead don't need monuments. Indeed, they don't need anything. But there are now living people all over this planet who will die from things a billion dollars could go very far toward curing.
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Worse, the memorial wants to preserve the "footprints" of the two towers, with the intention of reminding people over and over and over again of the events of that day, like the endless repetition of the collapsing towers we were subjected to by ghouls in media. There are things that should be remembered, and things that should be forgotten.
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Remember the lives. Forget the deaths. Hold onto the good. Let go of the bad.
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It is enuf to remember, in general terms, what happened. But there's a difference between respectful and reverent on the one hand, and morbid on the other.
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Moreover, we need to stop falsifying what happened on 9/11, stop pretending it was an "attack on freedom" and that the people who died were utterly innocent victims, from an angelic country that never did anything to anyone as would warrant any retaliatory violence. The tragic reality is that U.S. policy in the Middle East, decades of injustice to ordinary Arabs, provoked a counterattack by Arabs that killed a tiny fraction of ordinary Americans as the many Arabs the U.S. has killed, directly and thru endless support of every atrocity committed by Israel. Iraq alone has suffered literally uncounted deaths at U.S. hands, in two vicious and unjustified wars and an additional decade of monstrous "sanctions" that may have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, mostly children, the elderly, and the poor. Arab innocents died at our hands; our innocents died at their hands.
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Unless a memorial makes us accept our unclean hands and causes us to resolve to end the injustice that fuels this "permanent war" that Zionists and neocons have forced upon us, it is better never built.
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A modest brass plaque or dignified marble wall with the names of the dead engraved thereon would be more than enuf. And it should stand beside the tallest building on Earth, proof that we are not cowards afraid to build high and proud into the sky.
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And when we build it, let us not give it some stupid name like "Freedom Tower", dishonestly to pretend that it is our freedom, rather than our Zionism, that was attacked on 9/11. Let it indeed bear no name that harkens back to 9/11.
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"World Trade Center" was a good name in its time. It both looked outward and claimed for New York a central position in world commerce. I'm sure we can come up with an equally good name for a new tower, as proud and self-referential as "Empire State Building". Something that dedicates us to world diversity, tolerance, justice, and progress.
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Islamist fanaticism seeks to impose narrow-minded conformity and return us to the Middle Ages. We could not do better in renouncing that program than to dedicate the world's tallest building to the future.
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* Exact quote: "That’s alright. You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair."
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,705 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:08 PM