What Will Grow at Ground Zero?

There are times when great decisions must be made?nearly always at moments of high emotion, uninformed, half in fright, half in boldness. Michelangelo had to decide whether the pope would dig his nude males zipping across the top of the Sistine Chapel. John Morton, a frightened pacifist, having arrived late to Philadelphia in 1776, had to cast the deciding vote on something called the Declaration of Independence.

We are now making a similar decision in Lower Manhattan. Last year, 10 million tourists came to Ground Zero to gape at a hole in the ground. Whatever now rises in that honey pot will mean far more to the entire world?to our culture, to our economy?than any other building, monument or manmade symbol ever has.

The question before us is simple yet profound: Do we replace the old, despised World Trade Center with the new "vision of freedom" much discussed by our governor, or do we slobber back down into the past? Do we step up to say that no half-crazed murderer will scare us, shut us down, take the future?or give in to stupidity and safety?

 

Cut quick to immediacy.

A long time ago somebody told me that the day after 9/11, an architect drew two new towers almost exactly like the original WTC uglies and handed them to the man who had just bought the ground they stood on. The owner-developer's name, as you know, is Larry Silverstein, and I'm told he loved those sketches of the WTC clones. As this story made its way through the world of architecture, 90 percent of our finest designers began doodling the new WTC old-style.

My friend Daniel Libeskind did the reverse. He offered something entirely unlike the World Trade Center?a twisting, transparent tower, covered from middle to peak with shimmering glass, topped by a spire soaring 1776 feet into the air, offering the world a startlingly transparent face focused on the future. Beneath, its body echoes our beloved French femme in the harbor, massaging that arched little flame beside her lovely head.

What at the top? The higher you go, the fewer offices?the more restaurants, playgrounds, observation decks. Above that? A "sky garden" of sorts, a nest of trees and flowers?a dare to our enemies to attack naked nature, unveiling the true darkness of their hearts. Down below, there were plans for at least 60 floors of white-collar workers.

There is nothing like this model anywhere else in the world. And isn't that what Manhattan has always been about? Newness? The new? Emerson summed this up when he asked us to turn away from the florid European past and regard each morning as the dawning of a new era. "We live in a new and exceptional age," he declared. New and exceptional?how better to express the possibilities as yet unformed that surround downtown Manhattan?

But we almost didn't get this new age. We almost got the boxed past, not the future, not even the present.

Wait a minute!

While you learn how we narrowly escaped disaster?that is, another ugly box, provoking a dead, know-nothing neighborhood, a place where no company would dare to bring its bright, "New Creative Class" colleagues?let me tell you about going to Libeskind's office and chatting with his wife and an anonymous co-designer.

"What will they use to stop this?" I asked.

"A box," the designer replied. "David Childs and his colleagues will try to give the developer exactly what he wants...another World Trade Center, this time in singular form...exactly 1776 feet high, matching our height, but nothing else."

"And what's at the top? More offices for Osama to blow up?"

He shook his head. "Worse. The top 30 stories are covered with glass and a lattice frame that reminds you of a prison."

"What's inside? Does the garden survive?"

"No," he answered, "and I'm not going to tell you what's in there. It's not bad. You'll find out."

In brief, they might do what we've seen in our nightmares: one more dumb block of stone, one more rectangle, one more proof that big American money is scared of its shadow. Never would big oil or big realtors or the big brokers dare give us our prizewinner, Libeskind's glistening evocation of the Lady, soaring above the spot where the old WTC stood, spiked inside greenery, sprouting up?a reformed Everest?nothing like what we expected to get from the forces of darkness eating up the insides of our city: a scone of the horrid, deficit-ridden World Trade Center, or perhaps something worse?topped off with?

 

Cut again to raw immediacy.

On December 10, I went to 25 Broadway, not far from Bowling Green, to hear Daniel talk to prospective art dealers who were considering jumping Chelsea and the Meat Packing district?as they were jumping Soho when last I wrote about the downtown crisis for this paper in 2001. The organizer is art realtor Susan B. Anthony, suffering her life and fortune to get art dealers to move, to open up themselves and the work of their artists to new audiences, audiences down in Zero, where already the average yearly income is approaching $100,000?nearing Soho style.

But that morning, the New York Times had told us exactly what we had dreaded, exactly what I had been told at Daniel's office. Developer Silverstein and his pals discarded Libeskind's ethereal "vision" of the spire and handed the job of designing what Governor Pataki dubbed (upon seeing Libeskind's sketch) "The Freedom Tower" to David Childs, one of the losers in the democratic design competition, the pride and joy of the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill architecture firm.

We looked at the Metro Section and gaped at the grotesque boxes rising into the sky, covered, yes indeed, with a prison-style lattice network at the top, housing windmills. Not a bad environmental practicality, it must be granted, but it's no garden. Instead, high in the sky, a complex of engines and whirring blades expected to power 20 percent of this new office monster, presumably saving you and me, the taxpayers, a couple of cents each year.

As the event pressed on at 25 Broadway, as Daniel sang in his lyric fashion about how much the arts can mean to this neighborhood, this "capital of the world" (yes, he said it), I waited for the question: What on Earth can the arts do in a neighborhood dominated by an imbecilic box?

No one would ask it, and the conversation between speaker and audience carried blithely on, as if nothing had happened, as if Pearl Harbor had never occurred. I could stand it no longer, so in the loudest voice I could manage without shouting, I asked Daniel, "How are all these beautiful things implied in your spire and in your master plan for the public spaces below going to occur? How are all these people going to bring their art galleries down here if David Childs and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill design the unfree Freedom Tower, as the Times has just told us?"

Short pause. It's clear to me that most of the audience hadn't read the Times and therefore didn't know. They began to buzz, grumble, growl; Daniel, as always, was unfazed. He launched into a half-mystical, half-visionary discussion of how, yes, David Childs would be a part of the design team, he was the master planner, not supposed to design every inch, but?

"I'm optimistic we can work together."

I shook my head, began to protest, but the moderator of the evening, Carl Weisbrod, commander-in-chief of the "official" Downtown Alliance, shut me off and asked us all to go home.

In the next few days, most papers and media outlets revealed themselves to be relentlessly convinced that the once-sacred spire was dead and that Skidmore, Owings and Merrill was on top.

Which wasn't entirely true. The decisions had not yet been made.

But when would we know for sure? Long ago, Pataki promised to reveal "the Freedom Tower" on Monday, Dec. 15?the ides of December. Later, he delayed until Dec. 19.

 

It ought to be clear by now that this means a lot to me. Why?

Hear it all. Not only because it is comic, tragic and moving, but because it teaches you how we got here, why we will face vibrant life or horrific death when the final final decision is made.

In 1973, long before I met Libeskind, I went to the top of the World Trade Center. Before almost anybody else in the press?before even stolid Minoru Yamasaki, the architect. I had just gotten a job writing about the visual arts for Newsweek. A brilliant and edge-minded editor named Jack Kroll had yanked me out of a jerk town called Washington, DC. In 1970, he brought me up here, scared to death, bankrupt but victorious with the custody of my two daughters who needed six meals a day (in addition to my one). I intended to keep this job.

A then-famous man named Osborne Elliott, semi-darling of the publishing trade, the man who had brought Newsweek almost up to Time's level of circulation, the man who hired Jack Kroll, called me on the phone.

"Davis," he said, "the World Trade Center is about to open. You know it's the world's tallest building, don't you?"

"Yes," I said, knowing that I should know everything he thinks I should know. "And Mr. Elliott," I added, "there are two tall towers, not just one."

"I know that," he said, "and my name is 'Oz,' not 'Mr. Elliott.' Now, Davis, no writer or critic has been to the top of this thing to tell us what it's like to look down, over the top. I want you?"

"Yes, sir?"

"I want you to get your ass up there. And I want you to write the best goddamned architecture piece ever written about this goddamned controversial thing. Thirty million people will read it because I will lay it out big. I want them to love it, get me? I'm not telling you to praise those hulks. That's your decision. But make your words ring with the immediacy of this event. At last the arts can have a headline in my magazine. Understand?"

The next morning, I showed up early and was met at the door by none other than the architect Minoru Yamasaki, with all of his mafia, including the Secret Service agents who guard the Port Authority. Why such a welcome? Because this tall, scared nobody from Newsweek was about to tell the whole nation about their maxi-mega-dollar investment.

"We want you to get it right," someone said, smiling, pumping my hand. "Forty million readers will be reading every word."

"No, only 30 million," I corrected. "You're thinking about Time."

"Well, Time's not here. It's you or nothing."

Yamasaki grabbed my arm and took me off on a guided tour, with beefy agents holding onto my other arm and both legs?or so I imagined. They wanted me to see big, furnished offices with huge picture windows way up, around floors 65, 70 and 75. They wanted me to see grandeur and impressive modernity.

I saw, instead, stolid, linear, deathly gray halls all around me. The World Trade Center, with all the world watching, had decided to become boring. When you looked out those picture windows, you saw nothing except empty plots of land and a waterfront decked with dumpsters and garbage. (Nobody lived or worked way downtown then, except a few illegal artists.)

Yamasaki, pleasant, charming, filled with quips and facts, was getting on my nerves. I wanted the freedom to see what was coming, the freedom to do my job (and thereby keep my job).

"I want to see the roof," I said suddenly.

"No, no, no," he told me. "It's impossible?There are no guardrails, the roof isn't finished."

Someone asked, "Why do you want to see it?"

"It's the tallest building in the world. I want to see what you see when you look down."

"Nothing," they assured me, "nothing."

"Makes no difference," I declared, anger mounting. "My editor ordered me to go up there?and it makes sense. What does the world look like from the highest man-made point on Earth?"

In the end, they had to agree or risk losing my 30 million readers. One hulking carpenter agreed to lead me?nauseous at every step?up the one rickety pair of stairs that led to a door that led out to?

And there I was, outside, at the highest point in man's world of that time.

"Don't go any further," he cautioned. "You might slip and fall over the edge."

The World Trade Center was shaking and trembling as much as I was. When I looked across to its brutish brother, it, too, was swaying.

"This is enough," I told my guide. "I can't see a thing up, and the damned thing is shaking like Mitzi Gaynor on the dance floor."

He guided me down the stairs with a firm, fatherly hand: "Don't worry. We'll fly you over the top tomorrow in a helicopter."

When I later met the engineer, he explained away the buildings' movement.

"All tall buildings shake," he said. "The Empire State is worse. We build in balance weights to keep everybody inside steady. We're not worried about shaking."

There we were, in one of the world's two tallest buildings, and I'm being told that the world must shake, that it was to be expected.

Then he said it: "We're worried about airplanes."

"Airplanes?"

"Yes," he said, "we're in the flight path to JFK and LaGuardia. What if a pilot loses control or gets drunk and smashes his 707 into Tower 1 or 2?"

"Yes, what if?" I asked.

"It's all under control. Plenty of fireproofing. Even if the building cracks under the impact, we're okay. We've constructed the inner structure so that the tower collapses straight down. It won't fall across the highway, where we expect new buildings and people to grow up. Nobody dies except?"

"Those inside?"

"Yes, though we're fireproofing and perfecting the elevators so they can get out."

It would be a pity, we agreed. Then he added: "It will never happen."

 

What about Soho? Why must we yoke the two?Zero and Soho?together here? Disparate in scale, aura, funding, populations, they are nonetheless a form of question and answer, linked as one. To see how Ground Zero will survive?that is, how it will become a community, a place where millions upon millions will want to live, work and visit?we must look back at Soho.

One short year after my 1973 Newsweek WTC story, I bought into an old but lively building on Wooster St. It was my friend and agent, a wizard wheeler-dealer and accountant named Rubin Gorewitz, who pulled it off. He took me to the fourth floor and introduced me to sculptor Charles Ross, who was dying to sell out as soon as possible. I was also shown the basement studio, where I met a dark, snarling, brilliant artist from Lithuania named George Maciunas.

Maciunas and the infamous filmmaker Jonas Mekas?whose work I already revered and whose showplace, Anthology Film & Video Archive, thrived on the first floor?had planned the future of Soho down in that basement studio, where they took turns living, along with Yoko Ono, John Lennon and others. Maciunas and Mekas put their radical vision down on paper for the prestigious J.M. Kaplan Foundation, led by Joan Davidson, intensely interested in finding studio and living space for artists to keep in the city.

"Soho is zoned light-industrial," Gorewitz told me. "Miller Cardboard owns this building you're going to move into, but nobody cares, least of all the city because there is no more light industry down here. Just artists and galleries? And they're paying taxes, which the World Trade Center isn't."

Soho and Ground Zero are irreversibly linked in my mind?and in their economic futures. Low-lying, asymmetrical Soho, created by artists moving into illegal spaces nobody else would use, bringing loads of tax money for the city, loads of tourists, much brilliant vanguard art. And now, steadily replacing high art comes the best of low art, comes the most elite and hippest boutiques, some of them?Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Issey Miyake, Anna Sui, Barneys Loft and the powerhouse Bloomingdale's settling in on Broadway?spreading huge billboards all over Midtown boasting their Soho addresses.

Will the artist-writer-philosopher-performer, the Maciunas, the Mekas, the choreographer Trisha Brown (who also helped found Fluxhouse II, my building atop which she directed an historic dance piece in 1972), the Nam June Paik, the Bill Beckley, the James Seawright, survive? Will the daring, progressive New York Foundation for the Arts on Spring St. and Sixth Ave.?the only "public-private" foundation left in this state that can directly fund artists or their works?the first institution to thoroughly research the financial value per capita of bringing artists into downtown?survive?

As for Ground Zero, Susan B. Anthony and others want to find spaces for us down there, so the dealers have nearby artists to show. Other wise heads want to keep alternative art organizations like Franklin Furnace (which, with the old, revered Kitchen on Wooster and Broome Sts., pioneered what we now casually call "New Media Art"). The richness, density and speed of this development will be slowed if Libeskind's lively public plaza in his victorious master plan, infused with spaces for culture and fun, which invites museums and tiny buildings into the public plaza down there, is ignored on behalf of more boxes and office space.

They may not remember that what finally saved those half-empty WTC towers was the arrival of Battery Park City, which gave workers someplace to live and brought schools, bars, shops, restaurants, art galleries. When the mayor and his planner, Amanda Burden, talk of Ground Zero as a "24/7" community, not just a nest of towers, this must be what they mean.

Last cut?perhaps?to immediacy.

It has been my good fortune to scour the world, to unravel mysteries found only in distant cultures and peoples. I have been to Russia and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Austria in the Cold War, to Croatia and Slovenia, to Sarajevo and Belgrade? I nearly lost my life in a performance on the Berlin Wall in 1978? In Japan, Australia, China, throughout the East, there, too, I sought what I knew was not here. Finally?just to put an end to a parade too long?I risked and found my life in Argentina, Chile, Venezuela and Mexico.

What do I find, over and over? The Other thinks you and I are free. We can do, sing, perform, behave any way we wish. Of course, it's not true; we are hounded and harassed by capital, politics, pressures of unimaginable kinds. Worse, we expect too much of ourselves and of that fragile Constitution, its amendments, and most of all that Declaration of Independence (which Ho Chi Minh himself read to his new citizens on the day North Vietnam declared itself).

When I went in the fall of 2001 to Russia, Estonia, Croatia, all these countries, after lecturing and entertaining them with jokes, stories, serious theses and huge mural-scale images coming down from my website, their first question was always:

Why did you, the freest country, allow 9/11 to happen?

This spot, down in this Lower Manhattan and overseen by the Lady lusted after by all others on Earth, now stands for a kind of fantasy, a fantasy of total freedom?like your favorite intercourse fantasy?a fantasy that deserves pursuing.

These things are on my mind as I rush late into Federal Hall. Governor Pataki, fortunately, was also late. Waiting for him are Daniel Libeskind, of course, David Childs, Larry Silverstein, Mayor Bloomberg. The governor appears, stands before the podium, says, "Today we reclaim New York's skyline with a towering beacon."

He pulls apart the veil over the model that, yes, sprouts a metaphorical phallus straight up into the air?Daniel's spire?resting on 30 transparent gleaming stories of glass.

Take a look for yourself. The asymmetrical spiral, determinedly off center, soars over the twisted box below. Forgive me if I say that the torque-like 60-story base, which seems to spiral around itself, looks even more interesting than Daniel's first desire. Forgive me also if I say the top 30 stories, transparent all, carry windmills that are mind-blowing. And there are still those last virgin 276 feet not yet assigned (to the best of my knowledge, as of this writing) to any artist, designer or architect. They will be crucial, not least of all to the solons who count "tallest" and "second tallest" buildings in the world, but who may not count 276 feet in which nothing happens, where no human being acts, lives, creates, loves, eats, sleeps. This tip needs at least one Adam and one Eve, if not trees.

As Libeskind has said, what we do here must "mean" something to the entire world, to the Other, everywhere. And that is precisely why we must keep struggling to keep the form asymmetrical, unbalanced, open, in order to permit freedom, innovation, professions, products and artmaking never before dreamed. The box is inappropriate because we are unboxed right now, in the sciences, the arts, in gender, in religion, in politics, in architecture. Let us nourish. Let us prepare?for the unexpected.