How the feel of New York has changed
Vertiginous doesn’t begin to describe the experience of the original World Trade Center, home to my career’s beginning, birthplace of my adulthood. The towers, glowing, hopeful, almost innocent, stood in stark contrast to the raw streets and sidewalks of late 1980s New York. Crack, AIDS and homelessness raged. The city was still crawling out of the too-often-forgotten fiscal crisis of the 1970s, but it was also the land of the free and the home of the brave. For many a freshly minted graduate, it was the cult of Bret Easton Ellis — preppy by day, Palladium by night. Vodka and tap water were interchangeably clean. Nancy Reagan’s dictum to “just say no” fueled our Xer cynicism: we worked hard to pay for rent (in my case in cash — an illegal sublet from Shah and his wife, Candi, always with an “i”), jaw-dropping student loans, and lip-smacking contraband, all while not giving a hot damn.
I hadn’t fully heard my life’s calling in architecture, in part because I was partying too much to listen, but mainly because the sirens that engulfed the city were not the kind that inspired. Much like today, most developers built banal rental apartments and boring office buildings. Highfalutin luxury condos weren’t yet a thing. There were no shiny new museums. The subways had improved but were still a train wreck. Famed and now shamed architect Richard Meier had proposed — wait for it — a plan to fix Penn Station that, shockingly, failed. Contemporary architecture in New York before 9/11 was zero sum: Form followed finance.
Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Towers, inspired by Gothic architecture that similarly reached for the sky, were the exception. Despite being loathed at the time by many, the skyscrapers were gargantuan yet delicate in a way that is inconceivable today. Each held twice the square footage of just one of the portly buildings at Hudson Yards, but they were far more elegant. Yamasaki chamfered the corners, developed a glimmering aluminum alloy with Alcoa for the facade, and worked with brilliant structural engineer Les Robertson to create the lightweight ribbed structure that would give the towers their soar. The lobbies were luminous with structural “forks” that opened to the light, reminiscent of the famed cathedrals in Chartres, Rouen and Amiens. The towers and their awkward surrounding step-cousins formed the infamous plaza that drew the derision of urban planners — “windswept” was its ubiquitous descriptor.
Altogether, the complex lacked “human scale,” according to the emergent postmodern ethos, having none of the charm of older European squares. But in the F. Scott Fitzgerald sense of two contradictory things being true at once, many of the rightful criticisms belied a beauty we will never again see. On Liberty Street, there was a small staircase that skirted past World Trade Two; there you ascended to the plaza on the plinth, and could stare directly up the side of the edifice, no setbacks to mitigate the scale, no material changes to distract the eye, just 1,362 feet of vertical aluminum ribs merging into heaven — it was the audacity of dope. So for fuck’s sake, Mrs. Reagan, just say yes.
Within weeks of the murder of 2,977 innocents and the city’s most unapologetic modern landmark, architects and planners began publicly decrying the towers. Out of scale and anti-urban they were. Replaced they could be, with a memorial, museum, commercial office buildings and a train station that could double as an atrium for blaring chain stores. Few asked themselves why the World Trade Center was the target — twice — instead of, say, the Empire State Building or the Chrysler. In that determined choice, the terrorists had a horrifying clarity many of my criticizing comrades lacked. The fundamentalists understood that the Twin Towers were a beacon of universalism that threatened any jihadist, abroad or here. They housed companies from around the world. Every walk of life worked to keep that massive facility ticking. Its architecture was not a European high modern import, like Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building; it was American, designed by a brilliant son of immigrants born in Seattle.
The physical being of New York City, its corpus, would forever change after that fateful day, for good and for bad. Without 9/11, a billionaire named Mike Bloomberg would never have become mayor. Recovery from the tragedy, a far more tenuous prospect than people today begin to understand or imagine, demanded the steady hand of a manager and his subject matter experts, hard chargers like Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and City Planning Chair Amanda Burden, under whom I served as Manhattan planning director. Each of us in our own way enabled the corporal transformation — Doctoroff in terms of Hudson Yards and countless other massive citywide development initiatives, Sadik-Khan in her eventual introduction of shared bikes and “road diets,” and Burden in terms of the High Line, the waterfronts and the city’s public realm. As her aide-de-camp, I fought the wars at the Trade Center site alongside her, especially for the successful reintegration of Fulton, Cortlandt and Dey streets. In that sense we had metabolized the critique of the WTC complex and helped to break down its superblock, the right thing to do for a different era. But for me at least, I wish it were all still there, I wish Elvis hadn’t left the building.
The original World Trade Center was insanely irrational in a wondrous sense because it was a public-sector building endeavor taken on by the State and supercharged by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and his visionary brother David in a questionable effort to revitalize the then-moribund Lower Manhattan — no developer would or could have built such a gargantuan structure. Of course, most of us now condemn the urban renewal that enabled the Twin Towers’ construction. But today, save for our current efforts at Penn Station and our aesthetic new mayor’s talk of Sunnyside Yard, one wonders whether there are any ambitious public-sector building endeavors — particularly of the “make no small plans” variety — even when they don’t entail eminent domain and do demand public input. Save for some scattershot climate and transit one-off projects, there have been few truly bold public construction initiatives since the “bad old billionaire” Bloomberg days of the High Line, the extension of the 7 train line, and remade streets, parks and waterfronts.
During the subsequent years, that imperative was replaced by a transactional mindset largely focused upon building affordable housing as widgets without the glue of meaningful public spaces and good design that create actual places. Of course, there is fair criticism that the Bloomberg emphasis on quality of life, which was the agenda we enacted to pull the city out of its post-terrorist tailspin, resulted in a widespread lack of affordability. But given the larger national forces that would play out ranging from the subprime mortgage crisis to the pandemic to rapid technological change, it’s not clear whether Bloomberg policies caused or simply correlated with the affordability crisis that ultimately overtook the nation. And when we speak about Brooklyn and Queens in particular, I cannot help but notice that it is the gentrifiers who most loudly complain about gentrification.
The Bloomberg years did bring to our city a new emphasis on design, especially in the public realm, something I largely attribute to the efforts of Amanda Burden. The competition to replace the World Trade Center, led by the late Alex Garvin, put Pritzker winners on the front page of the Post. Luxury condominiums, enabled by both the cheap money of the early aughts and the enormous growth of both the financial and tech industries in New York, resulted in the marketing of architecture, with the neighborhood around the High Line and the far more grotesque supertalls along 57th Street engaging serious design talent to largely mediocre ends. More recently we have seen a surfeit of star-studded museum projects from MoMA to the Frick to the Studio Museum to the New Museum. If on the day before 9/11 you told one of the city’s machers that Renzo Piano would design a new Whitney Museum in the meatpacking district, you would have been laughed out of town.
Imperfect as many of these cultural projects may be, the city is better for them. Quality is contagious, and must now pervade the dialogue of equity to convince a more progressive public that great design can be for everybody, as opposed to just the elite.
Lastly, one of the biggest differences I note in the quarter century since 9/11 is how divided we are as a city and nation versus the galvanizing horror of that day. My family and I lived downtown in the days, months and years that followed, and in that gut-wrenching aftermath I remember little talk of class warfare, of the Democrats at each other’s throats, or of left and right questioning whether we are indeed one nation. Perhaps in the next quarter century, by the 50th anniversary of this tragedy, we might find a path back to our national narrative, to our city with its statue in the harbor.
Architecture plays a small but important role in that national narrative; when design excellence is executed with public purpose, as it was, however imperfectly, during the City Beautiful movement and Roosevelt’s WPA, we were reminded that we are all in this together. We are surrounded by a new brand of politics that does indeed make us feel like we are a nation torn asunder. If after 9/11 we found both some unity and some belief that our physical world matters to the lived experience of our daily lives, perhaps in this next quarter century, we can bring these sentiments together, and build again — not only for our greater good but as a reminder of our common bonds as a city, nation and people.
