The Freedom Tower and the Fourth of July

"...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator [or whatever you happen to believe] with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men [and Women], deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness..."

Two hundred and twenty-nine years ago today, the Second Continental Congress voted for American independence from England. Pennsylvania delegate John Dickinson, who opposed independence primarily out of a deep reverence for the mother country, had craftily proposed that any vote on the issue had to be unanimous in order to carry. (On the grounds, he said, that no colony be torn from its British affiliation without its own consent.) Even so, the vote was not unanimous. There were twelve yea votes, and one abstention, and that was New York. Lewis Morris and Robert Livingston, New York's delegates to the Congress, said that the state's legislature could arrive at no consensus about how to advise them to vote.

The thirteen colonies, as a union, didn't actually endorse independence until July 15, 1776, when Morris and Livingston persuaded their legislature to allow them to add New York's name to the Declaration. Most of the Congress signed the document gradually, over the next year. The idea that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4 lives on in American mythology, but the only member of Congress to sign on that date was its president, John Hancock. Over the next few weeks, anticipating the hangman's noose, Hancock grew increasingly nervous and suggested that some of his colleagues might add their names, too.

Having declared its sovereignty on paper, the newborn Unites States of America then had to win an impossible war. With little more than 6,000 soldiers present and fit for duty, General George Washington understood that he was the leader of a tiny little insurgency. That insurgency, in a series of bloody battles which largely centered on New York City, had to face down the greatest superpower in the world. It all worked out for Washington, of course; history shows that insurgencies fighting intruders almost never lose. When the Continental Army, at long last, was able to take back Manhattan, Washington knew that he could deliver on the Declaration's promise.

Twelve years later, on April 30, 1789, Washington found himself standing on the steps of Manhattan's Federal Hall, on the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street. There, for the first time, he was referred to by a title no previous statesman had held: President of the United States. In a concession to lingering puritan mores, which linger to this very day, Washington's inaugural procession marched up Broadway to St. Paul's Chapel. There, our first secular deist Commander-in-Chief knelt on a pillow and prayed for the future of the nation.

St. Paul's Chapel was actually a good place to launch the ship of America, because its mere presence was something of a miracle. Most of the buildings in Manhattan had been lost to the Great Fire of 1776, and what had sprung up on their graveyard by the time of Washington's inauguration was a brand new city, which contained almost no reminder of its hundred-and-fifty-year European colonization. But St. Paul's survived the fire, which reached the barren lots surrounding the church, and inexplicably chose just that moment to die away as embers on the wind.

St. Paul's, the oldest New York City building in continuous public use, is fortified by the essence of Manhattan Island itself. Its exterior, though trimmed with brownstone, is chiefly comprised of locally quarried Manhattan schist. The schist, reddish and granite-like, is the literal bedrock of Manhattan. Its unmatched strength is what gives our skyscrapers permission to rise so high, with two-story basements. Where the schist is strongest -- Midtown and Lower Manhattan -- the skyline reaches its highest peaks. The shape of Manhattan's skyline, to a degree, is geologically mandated by the stone quarried to build St. Paul's Chapel.

It was built in 1766, when today's international economic nerve center was still a scrappy countryside village. The chapel stood alone, facing the Hudson River. Over the next two centuries, as the Financial District blossomed around it, the building's orientation changed. Instead of facing the Hudson River, it eventually faced the World Trade Center, but not really, because its rear entrance had become its front entrance. So it faced Broadway. It's not necessarily surprising, but it is symbolic, that this ancient survivor of the 1776 fire also survived 9/11. St. Paul's Chapel is in a position to take things in stride. It stood in the shadow of the Twin Towers for thirty years, but that was a mere fraction of its historic scope. It's stood in the much more substantial figurative shadow of Ground Zero for almost four years now, and it knows it will one day cool in the eclipse of something called the Freedom Tower.

Last week, Governor George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled the latest redesign of the proposed skyscraper, hastily conceived to appease the NYPD's concerns about safety from car bombs. The new design has had its critics, but the general consensus seems to be that it is, at least, a vast improvement over the previous design. There's no doubt about this. The new Freedom Tower design is much better. It evokes the Twin Towers, yet it's more graceful than they ever were. It culminates in a convincing central spire which references the city's greatest skyscrapers, the Chrysler and Empire State buildings.

But it's been my opinion for some time now that whatever we do with Ground Zero, one thing we should absolutely not do is build an immense skyscraper. Sure, that's the obvious compulsion, but wouldn't it be better not to? How about a series of smaller buildings? How about an actual neighborhood? Before the Port Authority bulldozed sixteen acres of homes and businesses to build the original World Trade Center, that's what the place was -- an actual American neighborhood, a home to people from all over the world. Wouldn't that send a stronger and more defiant message to those who would like to do us harm?

Donald Trump suggested recently that we should rebuild the Twin Towers faithfully, but one story taller. It's just what Donald Trump would do. And it's appalling. It falsely suggests that 9/11 made us stronger, somehow, better. It has the exact same effect as another popular suggestion, recently mentioned to me by a guy on my tour: "We should build five skyscrapers there, in the shape of a huge hand, giving the finger." Giving the world the finger is exactly why 9/11 didn't make us better. And with all due respect, sir, why don't you go to work every day in the enormous "fuck you" sign downtown? Why don't you go to sleep at night in a city whose most prominent region has become both a target for terrorists and a showcase for the preposterous cowboy hubris of tiny little millionaires?

Even now, the creators of the Freedom Tower are practically begging for another 9/11. It's going to be the safest building in the world, they sang at their press conference. It really did have the tone of musical comedy. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly did a catchy little ditty about how "the Police Department had sought to protect the building against bomb blasts, which our counterterrorism experts agree present one of the greatest threats to such iconic structures." And Pataki, looking more like a potato on a stick than ever, sang, "If one of those giant corporations occupies the top floors and wants to hire one of my kids, I'd be honored to have them working there and be confident in their safety." Really, George, no kidding? You wouldn't be worried that they'd die in a terrorist attack? Wow! Sold!

Cheeky defiance is a distinctive American tradition, and there might be a convincing argument for the Freedom Tower if Lower Manhattan actually needed office space. If we need it, we should build it, but we don't. There is not a single tenant engaged for the new tower, nor is there a single tenant for the new building at 7 World Trade Center, which is almost finished. The Financial District is already full of empty offices, and it doesn't need more. It needs retail and housing -- and also, perhaps, a fitting memorial to the horrific event which continues to haunt our national dreams. Since the Twin Towers themselves were built on a Lenape Indian burial ground, it has been wisely suggested that we actually need two memorials there. Regardless, the only real justification for the new tower is the superficial need of people who don't live in Lower Manhattan to see another tall thing where the Twin Towers used to be. Bloomberg said the new tower "will be a spectacular addition to the city's skyline," which is hard to deny, and that "its construction will climax the greatest comeback in the history of our city," which means nothing.

In my career as a New York City tour guide, I've spent much of the last several years thinking and talking about the city and its symbols. On September 10, 2001, I performed my last tour which included the Twin Towers, and in April of 2002 I performed my first which included the unsettling new landmark, Ground Zero. These days, when my tour works its way around the bank of the Lower Hudson, I start with Forty Wall Street, the former headquarters of the Bank of Manhattan. Forty Wall Street, I usually say, is one of my favorite chapters in the New York story, because it was the tallest building in the world for about twenty minutes. The Chrysler Building was finished on the same day. That's New York. What can you say about a town like this -- where a building can be taller than anything else on the planet, but not after dinner. A city which is always changing -- a skyline that never stays still -- can inspire you, but it can also break your heart. Ahead of you and on the right, there's a tragic gap in the skyline, which ultimately is part of that story.

The Twin Towers, of course, were two of the seven buildings that made up the World Trade Center. All together, two hundred thousand people worked in those seven buildings every day. About fifty thousand in the towers themselves. In strong wind, the Twin Towers swayed a foot and a half in any direction. They had their own zip code.

The main reason why we're having such difficulty replacing the towers is that it's hard to memorialize what you have not yet come to terms with. But whether it's the 9/11 attacks, or the General Slocum disaster, or the Triangle Fire, or the Fire of 1776, or the Civil War Draft Riots, unspeakable tragedy has devastated this city many times, and New Yorkers have always responded with two questions. The first is "What can I do to help?" One of the beautiful things about that terrible day was the juxtaposition of people willing to fly planes into towers with people willing to walk into those towers to help other people out of them. And the second question is, "When can I go back to work?" When the British marched in in 1664 and New Amsterdam became New York, nobody minded much; the invasion was peaceful and not a single shot was fired. The businesspeople of Manhattan were utterly indifferent to whether the Dutch or the British controlled the island, as long as they could keep going to work. They just wanted to know what the new name of the city would be, so they could alter their letterheads accordingly.

New Yorkers are determined to go on, and that's why New York City is so resilient. We accept our unpredictable skyline. We want to see what happens. After 9/11, we heard this sentence a lot: "We are all New Yorkers now." We are all New Yorkers now. It's a beautiful sentiment, and it was true long before 2001. The City of New York is the most diverse place in the entire world; it's everybody's home. Its most characteristic features seem totally out of place. Now, whether you like New York is of course a matter of personal taste, but everyone has the ability to belong here. New York City is here when you need it. Whoever you are and whatever your background, even if you've never been to New York, its story overlaps with your story; and somewhere in its five boroughs there is a tiny room where you might reinvent yourself someday.

New York City is big, over three hundred square miles. But when we talk about New York City, we usually mean Manhattan, which is easily its smallest borough. Manhattan feels enormous, but it's less than one twelfth of the city's total area. Manhattan is twenty-three square miles, and that's all; it's thirteen miles long, and its average width is two miles. We like to pretend that we touch the sky out of some vertical manifest destiny, but the truth is that Manhattan is tall because it's small. The skyscraper came of age here because there was no way the island could expand horizontally. Originally, before downtown and midtown were flattened by progress, the whole island was green and hilly -- so hilly that its original human inhabitants, the Lenape, named it Manahata -- "island of hills." There's actually some argument about this. Some have said that Manahata translates more accurately to "island of inebriation," which is also an apt description. It's basically the same meaning: Whether it means high on a hilltop or high in a delirious mental state, that's what Manhattan means -- it means high, it means up. It's significant that even before we came here, with our technology and ambition, there was already a Manhattan skyline.

Because I make these points so often when I'm on the tour, and because I've spent so much time traversing Manhattan by double-decker bus and circling it by boat, I have a particularly intimate relationship with the city's skyline. To me, the Hudson River is the Ganges and the spires of Manhattan are the Himalayas; the city is a bookshelf, and I can't really look at it without reading the stories. It all means something to me -- something sacred and uplifting and desperate and sad.

Despite my convictions about the future of Ground Zero, it's been obvious for years now that there will be an immense skyscraper constructed there, no matter what. So if it's going to happen, it's going to happen, and since it is, I'm cautiously pleased with the new plans. I must confess that I was taken by surprise when I saw these graphics from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. What surprised me is that I was moved beyond belief.

I don't know what to say. I think it's beautiful. I think it's unnecessary and misguided, and an ominous, frightening shame. But beautiful. And in spite of what I know in my head, these pictures are incredibly reassuring to my heart.

But tonight, when I'm out on the harbor, singing the city's praises under fireworks, I won't think of Manhattan's image as "post-World Trade Center" or "pre-Freedom Tower." The skyline is the skyline. Take a picture of it at any moment, and you'll capture something that's both transitory and eternal. You can never take the same picture of it twice.

P.S. Happy Fourth of July, everyone. Be sure to stop by tomorrow for Amanda's inaugural NERO FIDDLED article (see Friday's entry), and I'll be back on Wednesday.

8:00 AM

3 comments

Comments

Hey Noah,
You paid a very nice tribute to your city! I went to New York City for the first time two weeks ago so that my husband could attend the Promax Convention (media promoters). I fell in love with the Big Apple, especially Greenwich Village. Boy, I wish I had known you were a tour guide. The only tour I went on was the Sex and the City tour. Not very high culture, but I did get to see a lot of the city.
The World Trade Center site was moving, and I recall thinking that a tall building would just have a bullseye on it. It'll be interesting to see if your city will ever be comfortable with that. I'll miss your daily posting, but I'll be interested to see what Amanda has to say. Take care.

# posted by Madmomma : 7/04/2005 9:19 PM

Aw, thanks, Madmomma! The next time you find yourself in New York, by all means get in touch with me -- it would be an honor to show you and your husband around. My heart, too, is definitely in the Village.

I regret having to scale back on the number of weekly articles, but I decided it's better to do that than to force five a week and have them not be as good. You're definitely in good hands on Tuesdays.

Hope your Fourth of July was great! I just finished a fireworks boat tour in New York Harbor -- pretty spectacular.

# posted by Noah : 7/04/2005 11:18 PM

Thanks, Madmomma.

I haven't even looked at Noah's entry today because I've been too busy concentrating on my own.

I'm still deciding between something about Paris Hilton or "Barbie and Ken: The Breakup." What do you think?

Love
A

# posted by Sisk : 7/05/2005 12:13 AM

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Monday, July 04, 2005

The Freedom Tower and the Fourth of July