Eight Years of Staring at a Hole
A few months after September 11th, 2001, I found myself on business in Brussels. I’d never been to the city before, so I did a little walking about with colleagues who worked there, and naturally enough we visited the Grand Place.
The Grand Place of Brussels was constructed in the 15th century, and was almost completely obliterated near the end of the 17th century when the nearly defenseless city came under heavy French bombardment. One of the few structures left standing was the Town Hall.
Within four years, the Grand Place was rebuilt, in a glorious Baroque style. The reconstruction was undertaken by the city’s guilds, subject to quite strict planning by the city council to make sure that the result was harmonious and functional, with all plans requiring pre-approval before construction could begin.
Here’s the result:
The Grand Place is no longer the commercial center of Brussels – the demands of business change over time – but it is a glorious monument beloved and regularly used by its citizens.
By contrast, eight years after the World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorists, this is what Ground Zero looks like:
Assuming anything ever gets built in the heart of downtown Manhattan, what are the odds that it will be considered one of the jewels of the city, both beautiful and commercially vital? What are the odds that, if anything ever gets built, we won’t all just hate it?
And this bothers me even more than our failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and the rest of the top leadership of al Qaeda, because rebuilding lower Manhattan was entirely up to us. All we had to do was care as much about our city and our legacy as did the burghers of Brussels three hundred years ago.
About 7 months after 9/11 I was commission to make a film about people’s experiences in New York in the weeks and months after the attack. I made what I thought at the time and still believe was a very good film; gentle, circumspect, sentimental without being maudlin. It was a small film, intended to be seen only by a limit audience, and was mostly very well received.
But as well liked as the film was by most, the reaction from those who did not like it was breathtakingly hostile. These hostile voices were marginal stakeholders in the production and distribution of the film, and as such they were kept at the margins until the film was completed. If this had not been possible, I doubt the film would have been undertaken, or if it had been undertaken that it would have been finished, or if it had been finished, that the result would have been something I would be proud of. None the less, even as marginal stakeholders, the offended were able to virtually quash any distribution of the film.
That a gaping wound remains in downtown Manhattan is lamentable in the extreme, but it is not surprising.
— Tony Comstock · Sep 11, 03:47 PM · #
It is almost unbelivable that no one (I guess that means Bush, or Obama, or Congress – those who would have been able to) has just cut through the red tape and gone ahead with building something there. It almost makes one believe that American institutions are as corrupt and useless as they are presented in The Wire.
— Magnus · Sep 11, 06:36 PM · #
Jim Glass has written about this several times at scrivener.net. It’s heartbreaking.
— J Mann · Sep 11, 07:01 PM · #
America is scared to be great. We have no vison. During the Great Depression the government built the Hoover dam, this week they repaved the street in front of my house.
— BrianF · Sep 11, 07:03 PM · #
Maybe Donald Trump could….no wait, I think he moved to Florida with John Galt.
— jd · Sep 11, 08:25 PM · #
As Mr. Comstock indicates, you have to form a consensus around a large number of private and public actors, representing interests worth billions of dollars; speed in rebuilding the WTC was never likely. That isn’t to say things couldn’t be better than they are – but not too much better. Consider how long it took to go from planning the original WTC to building the darn thing.
— Withywindle · Sep 15, 01:25 AM · #