Subj: a farewell & a question, Jan 11, 2002
A new year has arrived in New York, with new realities, a new mayor and a new dose of an old lesson: What goes up must come down. New York has always been governed by economic cycles, and the onset of a prolonged downturn is a shock for those who’ve never been through one.
In 20 years, I’ve lived through two entire cycles. I moved here in the fall of 1981, just as the downturn sparked by the second oil crisis hit hard. The mid to late Eighties were a riotious expansion a la “Wall Street,” though by the time the movie came out, Black Friday had ended the growth in 1987. The early Nineties were tough, though a good time to buy real estate. And we all still remember the mid and late Nineties, when a “New Economy” was going to change the rules and prosperity would reign untrammeled.
Ah well.
Now my third downturn is here. The flyers on phone booths advertising apartments for rent (“no fee, immediate occupancy!”) hadn’t been seen in 10 years. Empty storefronts pop up overnight. Sometimes they’re filled by week-long “Huge Clearance Sale, Dozens of Designer Labels, All 50% or More OFF!” bazaars that vanish after the good stuff is gone, the rest given away or just dropped at the curb in lumpy garbage bags.
Aside from business in general (NYC’s religion), much talk is of the downturn. Friends are anxious. Their company is in play, the big client could walk, the private school raised fees again, the department should downsize, sales are down 9% … and the numbers are the numbers. Restaurants are a little emptier. Friends and colleagues meet for coffee rather than dinner and drinks. It’s the economy, stupid.
There’s also the weather. We did, finally, have a dusting of snow one day. But it has been a temperate winter, with just a bit of rain and days in the high 40s. Having lived upstate as a kid, I was strangely reassured by the 7 feet of snow that blanketed Buffalo. Somehow Buffalo’s suffering seems to be part of normality, an echo of childhood routine. (Easy for me to say, of course — I don’t have to shovel it!)
As the angle of the sun slowly start to rise, New York life is back in gear, just four months after 9/11. One day last month, the barricades preventing access to the blocks that house police stations just vanished. On Monday, the sand-filled garbage trucks protecting the United Nations growled away, reopening all of First Avenue to traffic.
At the end of the year, The New York Times completed its “Portraits of Grief,” a daily collection of short profiles of almost 2,000 of the dead and missing from 9/11. Heart-wrenching in their simplicity, Pultizer quality in their totality, the pieces reveled in the mundane details of loving lives, warm friendships, incredible deeds by warm people. And the photos captured the contrasting faces of New York, day after day, week after week, month after month. The dead were all races, all national origins, all backgrounds. Recent immigrants from Africa sat comfortably next to Connecticut WASPs next to fresh-faced Midwest students at their first job next to cops next to bond traders next to repairmen next to tourists next to seminar attendees. The one steady drumbeat of consistency was the 300+ firefighters, all men, all but one or two white. Their uniformity stood in stark contrast to the diversity of the citizens they served. Perhaps two thirds were Irish Catholic, leavened with a sprinkling of Italian surnames and even the odd non-Catholic.
(A side note: As devastating as the FDNY’s loss of 3% of its entire force has been, triple that number may soon retire, permanently disabled by respiratory problems from fighting the smoky fires at Ground Zero.)
New York’s contentiousness is back too, in spades. Larry Silverstein, who signed a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center just months before 9/11, is in court to press his view that the attack on each tower was a discrete event. This would compel his insurers to pay him not one $3.5 billion settlement, but two. The insurance companies strenuously disagree.
Ground Zero attracts visitors in numbers that rival Times Square and Liberty Island. Until this week’s introduction of free tickets with times stamped on them, a long and orderly crowd waited three hours or more in line to spend a few minutes on the newly built viewing platform (the first of four planned). Just 12 feet above the street, of simple plywood, it offers a view of … a void. Several buildings around Ground Zero are scarred, swathed in orange construction fencing. But the former World Trade Center is entirely erased; nothing now remains above ground level at all.
The death toll continues to fall (now just 2,895 at the Twin Towers, not including the hijackers). A final number, says the city, is very close. The volume of wreckage removed rises: a cumulative total of 1 million tons this week. The job will be complete, the entire site scoured, by June.
The TA will repair tunnels and reopen the 1 subway line by November, though the crushed Cortlandt Street station will be demolished altogether. West Side residents throughout Manhattan will be deeply grateful when the intricate ballet of locals, expresses and switches is restored to its pre 9/11 harmony.
So the city faces a conundrum: What to do with a need to rebuild that is suddenly, shockingly closer to hand than almost anyone could imagine just weeks ago?
Some things are clear. Planning must be done. Families of the dead (known simply as “the relatives”) must have their say. A memorial must be created. Transportation infrastructure will take precedence, to make the area easier to reach and buttress downtown’s very shaky position as a center of gravity for the finance industry.
The Port Authority has already begun planning. It will build an entirely new station for its PATH train to New Jersey, ironically on the site of the twin-towered Hudson Terminal office building and station it demolished in 1969 for the WTC. A massive underground passageway connecting PATH to no fewer than 14 subway lines is being planned. It would stretch 2/3 of a mile, from the World Financial Center on the west to William Street on the east. There is even talk, astoundingly, of provisions for a future downtown connection to the Long Island Rail Road.
Silverstein spoke in October of four new 50-story office towers. In December, he said he’ll break ground on a replacement for 7 WTC by the end of the year. Much of it is likely posturing, or at least exploratory. Until the insurance is settled, he won’t build much.
Some people I’ve spoken with will settle for nothing less than twin towers of 110 stories, or higher. That’s highly unlikely. Buildings above 50 or 60 stories offer less efficient floors and are more costly to build, hence far less profitable. And many tenants will not rent offices on that site that are higher than the surrounding 50-story buildings — no matter how cheap they might be.
On the other end of the scale, Mayor Giuliani opined that the entire site should become a “soaring memorial”. That too is unlikely, as our new mayor, Mike Bloomberg, has said, quietly but firmly.
In between is an enormous range of possibilities that will keep architects, urban planners and ordinary New Yorkers arguing … or, more charitably, discussing … for months and years, no doubt even after the site is built out, whether 2 or 20 years from now. Concepts, sketches and renderings are starting to fill newspapers and galleries. Critics are weighing in. (The NY Times’ Herbert Muschamp has easily written half a dozen articles on the topics.)
So, a question. What do you, readers, think should go on the WTC site? Send me your thoughts, your ideas, your dreams, your designs. I’ll recapitulate (entirely selectively) in a future letter.
When I started writing, I had in mind to note the departure of a remarkable mayor. Giuliani was a deeply flawed man and a deeply flawed mayor, but he did remarkable things before 9/11 and heroic things after. My unfavorable view of his temperament has been permanently changed in the last four months, and — to my shock — I find I will miss him.
But a different farewell had New Yorkers of many ages pausing a moment to ponder another lost constant in our lives. After four decades, nine presidents and six mayors, “The Fantasticks” will close on Sunday. It has run at the Sullivan Street Playhouse since May 1960, the longest-running show in New York, our version of London’s “Mousetrap” (which will soon celebrate its 50th anniversary).
Like most New Yorkers, I’ve never actually SEEN the show. The Times noted gently that, “The piece bruises easily; in lazy productions, the artsy conceits … fall prey to preciousness.” Indeed, audiences have been pretty sparse over the last, oh, decade or so. But almost everyone knows its most memorable song.
So I close this letter by unashamedly cribbing from the Times. It ended a front-page article on the show by quoting famous lyrics made painfully, achingly poignant of late:
Try to remember the kind of September When life was slow, and oh, so mellow …
love, jv.