![[photo]](gx/_wtc0wst.jpg)
West Street at Murray, 7 June 2002
1 WTC: North Tower
2 WTC: South Tower
3 WTC: Vista Hotel
4 WTC: Southeast Plaza Bldg:
Commodities Exchange
5 WTC: Northeast Plaza Building
6 WTC: U.S. Custom House
7 WTC: Tishman Center
1 WFC: Dow Jones
2 WFC: Merrill Lynch
3 WFC: American Express
(north of Winter Garden)
![[photo: "luxury lofts"]](gx/_wtc_9lx.jpg)
15 July: With a new neighbor like this,
wonder how long the Dakota
Roadhouse can survive.
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Circumnavigating the frozen zone
Five fortnights walking the perimeter
And now ...
6 July 2002
Copyright © 2001-2005 Diane Fisher.
photos: adpFisher
NEW YORK CITY south of 14th Street, 3 July 2002--I've
tried to stay divorced from preliminary
discussions of the site's future because
no visionary is anywhere to be seen, and that
certainly includes myself. But I'm as entitled
to my opinions as everyone else weighing in.
While I don't favor rebuilding the WTC (the
terrorists win if we give them the satisfaction
of spite buildings) or anything like it (it's
time to move on, time for 21st century--post-Moses
era--planning, time for something better, not
bigger, than the WTC), I agree entirely with
those who want to see the streets that used
to cut through the 16 acres remapped and repaved.
And I agree with the current mayor and the side
that wishes to see the victims memorialized,
not sentimentalized, that declares that downtown
must not be turned into a cemetery.
My father was a WWII hero. Should the islands
where he fought or the hospital where he died
have been dedicated to him? I don't think so.
The wishes of the folks who live in those
places get top priority. Calls for a sprawling
memorial, for even higher replacement towers,
represent a failure of imagination that's not
representative of New York City. Some WTC
survivors' demands are so extravagant you
have to wonder about the quality of counseling
they're getting.
Now Rudy is agitating extremist survivors--fearing
history might otherwise fail to give his performance
of duty (awesome the first two weeks), his
FDNY, his NYPD, their due? Next thing you
know, he'll be charging City Hall again à
la the notorious police riot he led before he was
elected. Without the power of public office, this
relentlessly pernicious little man has it in him
to be at least a public nuisance if not dangerous.
Who, however, would deny the need for a prominent
memorial?
At the base of each tree on Clarkson
Street adjacent to James Walker Park is a simple
brass plaque with the name of a perished firefighter
from the nearest firehouse or cop from the nearest
precinct house. Collectively, they
are non-maudlin, affecting,
living reminders. I'd wish for a vast
extension of the concept, a tree with a plaque
for each of the nearly 3000 victims along the
sidewalks of as many blocks as it takes radiating
from the WTC site--each something of a "Portrait
in Grief" translated to the sidewalks of all
downtown New York. At 10 trees on each
side of the street, 40 per square block, by my
math that would be a much farther-reaching
memorial than the WTC site's 16 acres,
more than 70 tree-lined blocks. Think about it. ...
June 2002
In addition, a museum devoted to the WTC's
planning, construction, '93 injury and rebuilding,
everyday life and calamitous death, and the
international outpouring that followed should
fill the finished lower floors of an otherwise
skeletal memorial observatory tower, the tallest
of many structures of varying height, all
exemplifying the best in contemporary urban architectural
![[photo]](gx/_wtc01fc.jpg)
thinking, none trying to out-macho the others
or existing buildings, built alongside many
ungated, usable vest-pocket parks
along many streets on the 16 acres. Maybe
a floor of the tower should be assigned to
a think tank devoted to studying the readiness
of U.S. counterterror agencies.
6 July 2002
And some or all of the Battery Park City riverfront
park might be dedicated to the memory of all
WTC victims, '93 and '01. ...
None of those ideas is original. I haven't heard
any better but I've heard some worse. (A photographer
who chronicled the recovery has proposed, e.g.,
a tree planting for each victim at the WTC site.
I don't know how much space one tree needs to
thrive, but nearly 3000 surely would turn the entire
site into a dense forest and require some extra
land besides.) Nothing's going to satisfy everyone.
I see now that Michael Tomasky has made the point
a lot more effectively than I that bigger
is not better in "Try to Remember,"
his 8 July New York Magazine column. I can only
hope that the piece has some impact where it
matters. I know Tomasky has at least been
interviewed once on radio about it.
<Glimmer of hope, maybe, 30 June 2002:
The Times speculated last week that the woman
who founded
Creative Time--sponsor of many of those imaginative
"beachfront" events at the Battery Park City
landfill and elsewhere whose memory I so treasure--was
about to be named to head WTC memorial planning. 2 July:
The appointment is official. See "Arts
vet to oversee WTC memorial," by Daily News
staff writer Emily Gest, New York Daily News
Online, 3 July 2002.>
As for the other structures: First, I'd encourage
the financial industry to move to midtown where some
brokerages already have relocated, and Long Island
City, eagerly waiting right across the East River,
both near the upper East Side digs and restaurants,
entertainment, etc execs favor, and the transportation
employees take home to the suburbs. Extending rail
transit to the midtown Javits Center area, where it's
already sorely wanted, would certainly be less
expensive and disruptive than extending it downtown
to the huge new commuter hub that seems to be in
the works now. Who'd want such a neighbor? The U.S.
senator who's leading the charge strikes me as
someone with absolutely no sense of place. Look
at the dead or dangerous streets around Penn and
Grand Central stations and the Port Authority
Terminal to imagine the impact on a now vibrant
neighborhood. Whereas the Javits Center's only
neighbor is adjoining-wasteland-owner Donald Trump.
Downtown, the proximity of the upper harbor and
rivers causes an extraordinary quality of light
that--no offense intended--is wasted on financiers.
I'd turn the area into artists and mixed-income
housing, a cultural district with publishing and
communications and computer-related businesses,
small theaters, the kind of studio space dancers
need, light manufacturing, and small-scale retail.
Let's hear it for urban funk.
I'm not thinking Metropolitan Opera, which
apparently is going to move down here. The problem
isn't the Met, it's the inevitable prospect of
another uninviting concrete desert like those
surrounding Lincoln Center and the WTC. When
I think WTC plaza my first memory is haste
to duck into 5WTC out of the brutal heat the
plaza was firing back at the sun the last times
I crossed it. (Once inside 5WTC, the last door
on the right I'd pass before entering Borders
was a PAPD station. Wonder how many of the folks
I so often passed there without a second thought
lived to tell the tale. The PAPD took a bad
hit.) If I think further, I remember overpriced
concession stands, and the icy gray hopelessness
the plaza projected all winter. Please, if it
must be the Met, give us a nonsprawling streetfront
Met like Carnegie Hall and the pre-LC Met without
public amenities, thank you.
![[photo]](gx/_wtc3lux.jpg)
While New York City has a more
arts-friendly mayor now,
even Rudy had to acknowledge NYC cultural
institutions' value as revenue generators--far
more than sports, e.g. But high rents have disabled
the city as an arts incubator. Time was, the
upper East Side was the southernmost extension
of Westchester County. Now gentification has
devoured virtually
![[photo]](gx/_wtc1lux.jpg)
all of Manhattan except the
projects. Predators with warehouses
full of "Luxury
Condos for sale" signs stalk artists.
As soon as artists find a shabby but
habitable area, developers make their moves,
and there goes the neighborhood. More workers
and artists can't hope to be able to afford
to move in. Greenwich Village is long gone
(what's not upper East Side luxury is sleaze
steered this way to Disneyfy Times Square.
The East Village is gone.
So are Soho and Noho (all these names are real
estate industry constructs). The signs are up
now on every other building from Tribeca
south. ...
Bleecker Street, 1 July 2002
Under Trump's only-the-rich-deserve- Manhattan
banner,
![[photo]](gx/_wtc_ht4.jpg)
developers are waging an undeclared war
against diversity. They've almost won.
How much is enough already? I declare it
time finally to zone out luxury developers downtown
and nurture art and artists and others trying
to live and work here without trust funds.
... nearby Sixth Avenue, May 2002
![[photo]](gx/_wtc4lux.jpg)
Whatever. Pols never listen to anyone but
developers and pressure groups. The current mayor
so firmly opposes certain proposals that have been
made for the site and for Governors Island,
one can only wonder what undisclosed plans
he does support.
Tribeca snapshots, 9 July 2002
(I really don't mean to berate Mayor Bloomberg,
who so far has conducted himself with a decency
and dignity rarely found around City Hall in the
previous eight years and has stood up to St. Rudy
when he's surfaced, if not to any other powerful
Republican publicly.)
I admit I had a very brief moment of irrational
hope, but then the governor named the decision-making
body, led by a suburbanite (huh?!?), the same bunch
of mediocre male palefaces who make all important
decisions. (A WNYC call-in host made, in regard
to the present administration, one of the more
astute observations I ever heard on Important
Decisions. A caller asserted darkly
that early in the election cycle a few rich
Republicans had colluded in California at a
very private place for rich people and chosen
W. as the party apparatus's nominee. The host
heard him out, then said, in effect: So what's
your point? That's what we call politics.)
A few rich white Republican men who live
somewhere else will decide before long what
ordinary New Yorkers will have to live with
downtown, and that's just the way it is.
Most of the WTC site leaseholder's surfacings
relate to suits against insurance companies,
and the Port Authority reminds everyone
occasionally who's really boss. The oversight
architects the governor's men chose did a
terrific restoration of the Hoboken train
station, but the WTC isn't a restoration
project. Oh, yeah, Tribeca residents do have
one rep on the board--non-male as it happens
but of course rich--and the board has
energetically solicited public comment; comment
and a Metrocard will get you on the subway.
<update, 16 July: The board
published six
preliminary plans, all focused on memorials,
today and is scheduled to hear public comment
Saturday at Javits Center.>
Get a load of
"Pataki's
Surprising Limit on Ground Zero Design"
(2 July)! You have to wonder why they waste
everyone's time going through the motions. The
idea of Pataki, who fled this city for the
'burbs and who has never got the city's vote,
single-handedly deciding the future of such an
important chunk of Manhattan--and in order to
get suburban votes!--is beyond sickening. Mailer
and Breslin, where are you now that we need you?
Never has secession looked more desirable.
You can call these sour words the usual
rant of the disenfranchised--in New York
City's case by both the state and federal
governments. We just pay the bills. And the
price. Schadenfreude is, however, an experience
I know well and enjoy free of guilt. I've had
the sublime pleasure of watching karma catch
up with an awful lot of jerks (who nearly
always are too full of hubris to realize
that's what they are)--but, alas, only
after they'd already done irreparable harm.
Nonetheless, after a certain age the best
revenge is staying alive and watching the
creeps croak. Life's full of funny little
surprises. Why, just last night I was idly
leafing through a book I didn't know existed
at my neighborhood bookstore and chanced upon
a reference to myself. While that and a Metrocard
will get me on the subway ... one never knows.
<Update, 24 July: No,
one never does. Negative response to the
six plans--except for the memorials all
offices all the time in predictably banal
buildings--offered 16 July was so
widespread and so deep the poohbahs actually
have had to back off. Unreal. (The Times was
brutal; search Lower Manhattan Development
Council.) The three proposals--the only
proposals--that were widely praised were
restoring the grid, burying West Street
(excellent idea), and--I'll be darned--an
arboreal memorial boulevard, block after
block, a tree for each victim, along the
buried West Street. We'll see. ... At least
the proposterous idea of turning the whole
site into a memorial seems to have slunk
away.>
--adpF
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