MAY 22, 2009
Saying Goodbye to Ground Zero
By BRET STEPHENS
WSJ
In just a few weeks, The Wall Street Journal, for more than 20 years headquartered at 200 Liberty Street in lower Manhattan, packs its bags and decamps for new offices in midtown... For nearly five years, I have looked into that pit most every working day, both from the street level and from our offices about 150 feet above it. Five years ago, after the site had been cleared of debris but before most of the reconstruction work had begun, Ground Zero still meant just two things: outrage and defiance.
(snip)
Back then, in other words, my emotional connection to Ground Zero was a combination of nostalgia and sadness. Also, expectation: I liked Daniel Libeskind's original design for the new World Trade Center site, with its five new towers all sharing a shard-like look that gave the whole a sense of common origin and purpose, and I looked forward to seeing them built with a sense of urgency. This was a national project, after all, a gigantic rebuke to terrorists in the form of steel and glass.. If my grandfathers' generation could build the Empire State Building in 14 months flat, how much longer could it possibly take, using modern methods, to build at least one of Mr. Libeskind's towers?
Today, by contrast, my emotional connection to Ground Zero mainly involves disillusion. Disillusion with the new smorgasbord design that replaced Mr. Libeskind's, the various elements of which are testaments to the egotism of their several rock-star architects. Disillusion with the endless bickering between developer Larry Silverstein, the city and state of New York, the Port Authority, and the rest of the "stakeholders," real or self-styled, with their never-ending Demands That Must Be Met. Disillusion with the fact that today, three years after the cornerstone of the 1,776 foot Freedom Tower was laid (for a second time!), only a few steel beams rise above street level to a height of about 100 feet. Disillusion that the name "Freedom Tower" has now been dropped. Disillusion that in 2007 two firefighters, Joseph Graffagnino and Robert Beddia, died in the damaged Deutsche Bank building adjacent to Ground Zero because the Environmental Protection Agency, or whoever, wouldn't countenance the thought of simply demolishing it with a few well-placed charges of dynamite. Disillusion that it will cost more to deconstruct that squalid tower one floor at a time than it did to build it. Disillusion upon disillusion, compounded into a sense of disgust.
Yes, I know: Rebuilding the site, as various responsible officials endlessly repeat, is a "three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle." What do they suppose the Apollo missions were? It took eight years for the U.S. to go from John F. Kennedy's 1961 man-on-the-moon speech to an actual man on the moon, a distance of about 240,000 miles. At Ground Zero, it has taken about as long to move just one corner of the site from 70 feet below ground to 100 feet above. The whole endeavor is fast turning into the American version of Barcelona's Sagrada Familia, under construction since the 1880s.
At least Gaudi's cathedral is majestic in its incompleteness. And at least its incompleteness hints at some higher purposes, perhaps, or suggests that tracing patterns of a divine will takes time. At Ground Zero, there is a pit. With broad slabs of concrete and some rust-colored steel. Testifying to a society in which everyone gets their say and nothing gets done. To a system run by craven politicians and crass developers and an army of lawyers for whom gridlock is profit.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124294850558545269.htmlPrinted in The Wall Street Journal, page W13
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