Read Online Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Phillip Lopate
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the line of duty, but the only banner I wanted to fly from mybrownstone window was the orange, green, and white flag of New York City, with its clunky Dutchman and beaver.
People claim that the city will be changed forever by this attack. It is easy to say, less easy to understand exactly how. New York's history has not exactly been a stranger to tragedy. A few days after September 11, I did notice subway riders being unusually polite to each other, whether out of communal solidarity and respect for human life, or from wariness of the Other's potential rage, I cannot say. That nuance has faded. No New Yorker expected America's warm feelings toward the city to last very long; it was like getting licked by a large, forgetful St. Bernard dog. Meanwhile, the towers that anchored Lower Manhattan are gone, pfft.
I ask myself how I have been changed personally. On the morning of September 12 I awoke and remembered immediately what had happened, like a murderer returning to the horror of his altered moral life. I sensed I would, perhaps, never be the same, though not necessarily better. I have never bought the idea that suffering ennobles people. Rather, I expect that this awful experience will add scar tissue to the other atrocities in life, like the death of one's parents, the illnesses of one's children, or the shame of one's nation (My Lai, for example), sorrows over which one has no control but that cause, for all that, the deepest regrets.
THE VOID LEFT in the heart of Lower Manhattan by the September 11 tragedy provoked considerable speculation about what should go there. Inevitably the discussion took on awkward tones from the start: the bad taste of dreaming design utopias or sending résumés around while bodies were still being excavated. Nevertheless, we all knew that after a suitable pause, with predictable wrangling between officials and developers, the area would have to get rebuilt. It was too important to lie fallow.
Much of the discussion seemed to me misdirected. How avant-garde the new buildings should be, what architectural brand should go on the site, mattered less to me than what sort of public environment ought to be created there. What would the streetlife be like? How would pedestrians, tourists, workers experience it on the ground? How could we most gracefully integrate the new complex into the surrounding area?
Lower Manhattan has a specific character. It is not Midtown, with its regular, flat-terrain blocks of high-rise density. It is the oldest part of New York, and the “grid” down there (if you can call it that) is more casually variable, the streets smaller and narrower, given to sudden surprises and winding perspectives. To the east are the canyons of Wall Street, a dramatic topography in itself, which it might be possible to prolong. Whatever gets built, there already seems a commendable push to extend the east-west streets river to river, as they originally ran, before the World Trade Center created an obstruction.
In many ways the World Trade Center marked a significant break with New York City's spatial form. Its superblock interrupted the circulation of pedestrians; its introverted, mall-life retail was hidden from the street; and it buried its transportation modes (the PATH and subway lines) deep within. It may have made an impressive contribution to the skyline, but it was not very effective at street level.
The design by Daniel Libeskind and Associates that was finally chosen to replace the World Trade Center, after a bitterly contested architectural competition, may or may not work better at street level, may or may not be severely compromised by the pressures of conflicting clients and a weak economy; it's too early to tell. Practically speaking, there is no reason why some of the 13 million square feet of offices destroyed in the attack shouldn't be replaced, though, partly because there is already a glut of office space downtown, I would prefer a more varied mix of office,
People claim that the city will be changed forever by this attack. It is easy to say, less easy to understand exactly how. New York's history has not exactly been a stranger to tragedy. A few days after September 11, I did notice subway riders being unusually polite to each other, whether out of communal solidarity and respect for human life, or from wariness of the Other's potential rage, I cannot say. That nuance has faded. No New Yorker expected America's warm feelings toward the city to last very long; it was like getting licked by a large, forgetful St. Bernard dog. Meanwhile, the towers that anchored Lower Manhattan are gone, pfft.
I ask myself how I have been changed personally. On the morning of September 12 I awoke and remembered immediately what had happened, like a murderer returning to the horror of his altered moral life. I sensed I would, perhaps, never be the same, though not necessarily better. I have never bought the idea that suffering ennobles people. Rather, I expect that this awful experience will add scar tissue to the other atrocities in life, like the death of one's parents, the illnesses of one's children, or the shame of one's nation (My Lai, for example), sorrows over which one has no control but that cause, for all that, the deepest regrets.
THE VOID LEFT in the heart of Lower Manhattan by the September 11 tragedy provoked considerable speculation about what should go there. Inevitably the discussion took on awkward tones from the start: the bad taste of dreaming design utopias or sending résumés around while bodies were still being excavated. Nevertheless, we all knew that after a suitable pause, with predictable wrangling between officials and developers, the area would have to get rebuilt. It was too important to lie fallow.
Much of the discussion seemed to me misdirected. How avant-garde the new buildings should be, what architectural brand should go on the site, mattered less to me than what sort of public environment ought to be created there. What would the streetlife be like? How would pedestrians, tourists, workers experience it on the ground? How could we most gracefully integrate the new complex into the surrounding area?
Lower Manhattan has a specific character. It is not Midtown, with its regular, flat-terrain blocks of high-rise density. It is the oldest part of New York, and the “grid” down there (if you can call it that) is more casually variable, the streets smaller and narrower, given to sudden surprises and winding perspectives. To the east are the canyons of Wall Street, a dramatic topography in itself, which it might be possible to prolong. Whatever gets built, there already seems a commendable push to extend the east-west streets river to river, as they originally ran, before the World Trade Center created an obstruction.
In many ways the World Trade Center marked a significant break with New York City's spatial form. Its superblock interrupted the circulation of pedestrians; its introverted, mall-life retail was hidden from the street; and it buried its transportation modes (the PATH and subway lines) deep within. It may have made an impressive contribution to the skyline, but it was not very effective at street level.
The design by Daniel Libeskind and Associates that was finally chosen to replace the World Trade Center, after a bitterly contested architectural competition, may or may not work better at street level, may or may not be severely compromised by the pressures of conflicting clients and a weak economy; it's too early to tell. Practically speaking, there is no reason why some of the 13 million square feet of offices destroyed in the attack shouldn't be replaced, though, partly because there is already a glut of office space downtown, I would prefer a more varied mix of office,
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