Ground Zero Seven Years Later

N. Mills: Ground Zero 7 Years Later

On the day after presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain stopped campaigning to place flowers at the World Trade Center site on the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I went there myself. Work has progressed since I visited Ground Zero a year ago, but when you look into the pit from which New York’s new World Trade Center will rise, you don’t get much of a sense of the future as you stare through the chain-link fence surrounding the construction.

Fights over design and money have made any progress difficult to come by. Foundation work dominates the activity at the 16-acre site these days. What you see primarily is workers moving dirt and mixing cement.

It is not until you look at the four-story-high artist’s rendering of the future World Trade Center that hangs from developer Larry Silverstein’s 7 World Trade Center on Vesey Street that a sense of where things are headed becomes clear. And therein lies the problem if you believe that the new World Trade Center ought primarily to be honoring the nearly three thousand who died there on 9/11.

What the artist’s rendering, “World Trade Center 2012,” captures are the silhouettes of the buildings that will dominate Ground Zero in the future. The memorial and underground museum that architect Daniel Libeskind created as the centerpieces of his master plan for the World Trade Center are nowhere to be found. Office spaces and shops have already won the day.

Along Church Street, which borders the east side of the World Trade Center, the Millennium Hotel, a Century 21 discount store, and a Brooks Brothers set the tone, and within the World Trade Center, its giant towers will do the same. On Liberty Street, which borders the south side of the World Trade Center, the absence of sentiment is even more apparent. The glassy Tribute WTC Visitor Center charges adults who want to walk through its tiny galleries $10 a head, and down the block, where a bronze bas-relief of the rescue effort dominates the exterior wall of Ladder Company 10 and Engine Company 10, the effort to honor those firemen who lost their lives in the 9/11 rescue effort comes off as a belated gesture.

Tourists occasionally stop to look at the bas-relief and its inscription, “Dedicated To Those Who Fell. And To Those Who Carry On. May We Never Forget.” But most New Yorkers rush by. The one constant on my rainy afternoon visit was an old man with a gray beard and a red U.S.A. baseball hat who played “Amazing Grace” over and over on his flute, hoping that people would drop money into his flute case, in which he or passersby had already left a handful of dollars. The best spot for viewing World Trade Center, as the Japanese tourists with their endlessly clicking cameras have discovered, is the walkway that takes you across West Street to the World Financial Center that was built on Hudson River landfill next to the World Trade Center. But the unobstructed view from the walkway doesn’t really change what you see from street level.

On my way back home, I stopped briefly at St. Paul’s Chapel on Church Street. Completed in 1766 and modeled on London’s St. Martin-in-the-Fields, St. Paul’s is the oldest building in continuous use in New York. Its quiet graveyard, shaded by Sycamore trees, feels wonderfully out of place, and as the World Trade Center takes shape, St. Paul’s will only become more of an oddity. But on the afternoon that I stopped at St. Paul’s, it was comforting to think that the shadows from the future World Trade Center had not yet reached it. Back on Church Street, I gave a final glimpse at the building going on and noticed a handmade sign that had not caught my eye before. Taped to the upper windows of a building on Liberty Street were separate sheets of papers that in huge block letters declared, “Obama 4 Change.”

The crude hand lettering seemed cheerful in its spontaneity, especially when I compared it to the impersonal, glowing lettering I saw earlier on avant-garde artist Jenny Holzer’s animated text installation of prose and poetry that scrolls across the 65-foot wide, 14-foot high glass wall behind the reception desk at 7 World Trade Center, where Larry Silverstein, the developer of Towers 2, 3, and 4 has offices. By the time the World Trade Center is completed, there will be no room for handmade signs, but plenty of room for work like Holzer’s that, in the name of innovation, sings the praises of the new World Trade Center over and over.

In August, Ada Louise Huxtable, who at the age of 87 is the dean of America’s architecture critics, returned from a visit to the World Trade Center so angry that she could not even be ironic about her displeasure. “I would say that this has probably been the greatest planning fiasco in the history of the world,” she wrote. Huxtable was kind enough to avoid saying exactly what was the World Trade Center’s competition for awfulness, but it is hard to imagine that she erred by much in her final judgment.

Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower. (Derek Jensen / Wikimedia Commons).