These are some of the pictures I took on September 11, 2001, from the roof of my apartment at 109 St. Marks Place.
9/11 photos
6
Category Archives: New York
World Trade Center proposals:
Some of the skyscrapers proposed last week for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center might be grand, but what’s the point of this exercise? As a Washington Post article makes clear, there is a surplus of office space in the area. Some projects try to address this with staggered building plans, but such an approach has a major flaw: Financial firms are moving out, not in, because the lesson of September 11 is that the future is decentralized. Any gradual approach, then, will result in an incomplete project, an Antwerp Cathedral of a building, with towers that will never be finished. Much better to realize this and to turn the site into something which the city needs more of: a park, albeit above a transit hub.
If one of the plans has to be realized, I would vote as often as I can for the Foster plan, purely on esthetic grounds. Those towers are grand. They are also what the World Trade Center should have looked like the first time around. There’s two of them, they are the tallest buildings ever, they restore the balance of the skyline as we knew it, yet they are better: more approachable, more lissome, more graceful. Other plans have good ideas, but most fall flat on a crucial point here or there.
Felix‘s favorite suffers from looking like a group of people who need to pee badly. It reminds me of the Burghers of Calais after a very long sitting for Rodin. It is also guilty of the same criticism Felix leveled against this proposal—that it cuts off downtown from the rest of New York. And one more psychologically dubious selling point: Are New Yorkers really ready to walk _under_ the equivalent of a leaning World Trade Center after this whole ordeal? I don’t think so.
Other proposals suffer from delusions of grandeur. They are not designed on a human scale, an unfortunate tendency in modern architecture that the good people of Canberra and Brasilia will gladly tell you about. To a certain extent, the original World Trade Center suffered from this as well. I almost always walked through the mall to work, only rarely on the plaza above.
Finally, I’d like to argue against over-memorializing. This is not the Holocaust that happened in New York. 2,800 people lost their lives in a terrible attack, but we should not build memorials that rival those remembering the sacrifices made in WWII. Let’s look at the Pearl Harbor memorial as an inspiration; it is understated, and gains power from that. It is also similar to one proposal’s memorial that plays with the shadow of the WTCs over the Hudson. It is simple and powerful. There can never be enough parks in New York.
So, my plan: Turn the whole thing into a park, with a transportation hub underneath, and perhaps some cultural magnets, but enough with this obsession with office space already. In this scenario, if you must have a tall structure, play with the concept of needles, light, telecommunications towers, etc… But realize that Sept. 11 is the moment that people of the future will point to as the moment when the internet-connected world began realizing that the economic argument for decentralization was compelling.
But if this lesson is not yet learned, and we must build office buildings, then let’s improve on the original, with Foster’s buildings. As for memorial, I’d pick the park in the Hudson.
Demean Streets?
David Denby’s review of Scorcese’s Gangs of New York in The New Yorker finds too many faults with it to even call it a flawed masterpiece, but praises Daniel Day-Lewis effusively. So I will have to see the movie but be disappointed. (In an anticipatory mood, I had already watched the relevant episode from the Ric Burns documentary again, and had gone looking for the exact location of Five Points on maps.)
Denby seems to confirm what a previous reviewer intimated: That Gangs shoehorns historical facts into a plot that revolves solely around Protestant nativists and Catholic Irish, at the expense of an exposition of the real losers of the draft riots of 1863: the blacks. The Irish, who most directly competed with blacks at the bottom rung of society, opposed the idea of being drafted into a war that aimed to emancipate blacks in the South. In the ensuing violence, about 100 blacks were maimed, drowned or lynched by the Irish. Some 85 Irish rioters did die before the riots ended; shot by troops sent back from Gettysburg to contain the uprising.
Meaner Streets
The hype for Scorcese’s Gangs of New York is ratcheted up a notch, and I for one hope it’s all true. Except for one little detail. In the interview, Scorcese says how he was struck with the similarities of what was going on in New York in the 1860s and on September 11, 2001. I see little similarity beyond the location. Is he is trying to say that the World Trade Center attacks are just another case of two tribes having a go at each other? If so, isn’t that a little relativist? Which tribe is supposed to mirror the west in the conflict–the Catholics or the Protestants?
Or perhaps we are meant to equate the violent poor–both the nativists and the Irish–as the losers of history as they are superceded by a more complex, modern society. This happens to have been the case, but there is little similarity between an outcome where extremists are trodden on, as in the second half of the 1800s in NYC, and where the extremists did the trodding, as on September 11.
I demand that this movie be much more complex than that. I really want to love it.
The faint praise I have ever heard
The IHT’s People section today carries a quote attributed to David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, about his fiction and literary editor Bill Buford, who will be quitting at the end of the year. Buford was “one of the great fiction editors that The New Yorker has ever had,” says Remnick.
Did the editing go awry in Remnick’s head, or in the head of an IHT copy editor, as I suspect? Or perhaps Remnick meant exactly what he said?
Virtually There
I am listening to WNYC on the stereo. It’s 4 am in New York so the BBC is on. Soon, the news shows will start for the earliest of commuters. I’ve already checked the Wall Street Journal and New York TImes. In the NYT, there is a report on Bloomberg’s Mayor’s Management Report, which this year has an interactive component. I check the East Village and find, to my surprise, there was only 1 murder in the 12 months to June 2002. I would love to see a chart of that number for the past 20 years.
Later today, I will log on to my computers on Rector Street through a secure connection. I might do a spot of programming on them, or perhaps do some hedging if I need to fill in for someone. I will stay in touch with friends via the same email and instant messaging addresses as before.
So, you see, it is possible to be in more than one place at the same time. Physically, it is impossible to get a Volcano Roll at Zen One. But I’ve traded that in for yesterday’s late summer sailing trip with Joachim through the Stockholm Archipelago to Sandhamn, a beautiful and secluded island.
Smoke-free markets
I can’t find the original results or the methodology behind this poll, and it sounds fishy too me, but the NYC Coalition For a Smoke-Free City is propping up mayor Bloomberg’s plan to ban smoking in all bars with a poll that says 75% of New Yorkers would support the ban. But hold on: It sounds like the question was a vague one about banning smoking in the workplace? And was it explained that the group considers bars and restaurants workplaces (for waiters and bartenders), while many respondents probably think of those places as recreation-places? If I was asked if they should ban smoking in the workplace, I’d say of course. But if they asked me if they should ban smoking in bars, I’d disagree completely.
But let’s say it’s true that 75% of New Yorkers prefer to go out to smoke-free restaurants and bars. That would constitute a spectacular argument against the need for government controls on consenting adults pursuing a social vice: In the highly competitive New York bar and restaurant scene, owners would spontaneously decide to make their bars smokefree in order to attract this overwhelmingly non-smoking clientele. A smaller number of venues–say 25%–would continue to welcome smokers. Non-smoking waitstaff (about 75% of the total, say) would work in the non-smoking places, smoking waitstaff in the other places.
Why isn’t this happening? Perhaps because the “poll” is a load of bollocks?
No wonder this rat is leaving the ship
It’s a favorite conceit of mine that wherever I happen to live is the absolute coolest place in the world. For the past 6 years this place has been the East Village in New York City, or more precisely, the block of St. Marks Place between Avenue A and B [er, 1st Ave.–Ed.]. My block has everything you need for full-bore living–from Irish pub to Moroccan cafe to Italian restaurant to Korean sushi to experimental theatre to vegan bakery (ugh)…
So how does one move from such a place with the conviction that whatever is next will be the new coolest? You depend on Mayor Bloomberg. He’s decided he’s going to turn New York City into a Californian health spa, by pushing for a total ban on smoking in all bars and restaurants. He’s been on something of a roll recently–raising cigarette prices to about $7.50, which has led to a 50% drop in cigarette sales, down to 16 million packs a month. That’s not a 50% drop in consumption, though; most people now buy cigarettes in New Jersey or upstate New York, or on Indian reserves.
I don’t smoke, of course. But St. Dymphnas without smoke is like alcohol-free beer. Cafe Pick-Me-Up without overflowing ashtrays is like rap without swearing. What’s the point?
A week from now, I’ll be on my way to Israel, there to visit friends and family, then a week or 2 in the Mediterranean before ending up in Stockholm September 18. They smoke there. Cool.
Suba rue
I wanted to reserve a table for 8 for tonight at Suba. They wanted my phone number. Then they wanted my email. Why? To send me a form to fax back:
Suba’s Cancellation Policy:
A credit card is needed to guarantee your reservation.
You may cancel without charge up to 2 p.m. on the date of the reservation. If you do not cancel by 2 p.m. on the date of the reservation and/or are less than the reserved number by three or more people you will be charged $25 per missing person. Reservations must be honored within 30 min. of the reserved time, or you will be considered a “no show”.
Please fax back this form to 212-982-3034
with a photocopy of both sides of your credit card.
What’s next? $10 penalties if you don’t finish your plate? An inspection of the toilet after your visit? A dungeon for bad tippers?
And who still faxes these days?
Transforming the East Village
Sometimes I wonder… Usually, playing word association with the words “transformer” and “East Village” leads directly to Lou Reed’s classic album and that East Village anthem (for me), Perfect Day. Today, it’s a transformer fire on 13th and D. As you can see, the view from my roof is never dull. I was at my computer when my air conditioner suddenly sounded like it went into overdrive. Instead, it was a whole power plant that had gone berserk, just a bit further away.