Don't Rebuild
Jenkins, Holman Jr.
DON'T REBUILD BY HOLMAN JENKINS, JR. en a once-in-a-lifetime calamity befalls New rk s financial district twice in eight years, old assumptions are up for rethinking.There is no...
...Why this recognition didn't take hold after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, or the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa is an interesting question...
...Business will adjust quickly to the loss of 10 million feet of office space in the Twin Towers, so the question then becomes whether backwardlooking politicians can resist their urge to re-create the past...
...It looks good on television, and a stock market is a business and needs to sell its services to its customers...
...9 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 27...
...Back in the 1960s, clearing the ground for the World Trade Center, diggers found newspapers from 1883 buried in a rusted pipe, along with a note reading, "It is our hope that whoever finds this will be building a greater marketplace...
...More to the point, somebody should be asking why it was necessary for the securities markets to shut down for a week...
...He hit the jackpot when his brother became governor, and the towers did stem the exodus for a while, at great cost to bridge and tunnel tollpayers and airport users who subsidized the Port Authority's real estate speculations...
...Important north-south arteries in lower Manhattan will be congested with demolition vehicles for months to come...
...decades to Midtown, to Stamford and Greenwich, to Queens and Jersey City...
...It tells you something that the towers were built by a government agency called the "Port Authority," casting about for a new role...
...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2OO...
...The nation's phone network didn't quit...
...Insurance companies reaching into their pockets a second time have begun to think about redrawing their "acts of war" clauses...
...Even buildings that are sound on the outside have ash and cement dust and asbestos clogging their respiratory ducts...
...Now it has one more reason...
...CNBC earned its stripes by trying gently to combat this silliness, but the best way to sort myth from fact is to leave markets open and let them trade...
...Maybe it's time to let Wall Street complete its evolution to electronic trading...
...One blanches at the potential boondoggle now that Hillary and Chuck Schumer have extracted a promise of $20 billion from the president for the city...
...The process of moneymen bugging out of lower Manhattan to make way for condos, tennis courts, and tourist havens reflects a natural evolution in the purposes to which cities are put...
...NewYork City has always been an easy touch for tax breaks whenever the Big Board or investment banks flaunt thoughts of decamping for Jersey...
...The New York Times reported that dislocated firms were rushing to sign leases on nondescript properties outside the city, on terms suggesting no plans to come back...
...en a once-in-a-lifetime calamity befalls New rk s financial district twice in eight years, old assumptions are up for rethinking.There is no exaggeration in the statement that everyone has been touched by this disaster...
...The compaction of 210 floors of offices into a crater the size of a city block raises many questions, even short of the wisdom of creating highvalue targets...
...When banker David Rockefeller began proselytizing for a megaproject in the late 1950s, financial firms were already fleeing the congestion and antique architecture of the financial district, threatening to strand his bank's investment in local white elephantry...
...There is no good reason now to spend a zillion dollars trying to stop it just to prove a point...
...Copyrigkt 2001, Dow Jones & Company...
...Nasdaq trades electronically and could have kept going, yet closed down too out of"solidarity" with the specialists who execute trades on the big board...
...writes tke always excellent "Business World" column in tke Wall Street Journal, wkere tkis article first appeared...
...Executives calculating where to house their employees are factoring in the need not to build something a suicide bomber might be tempted to knock down...
...We've had to revise our thinking to include the possibility of a permanent terrorist threat...
...This column once defended the NYSE and its floorshow of shouting dealers as a wonderful branding tool...
...TV, radio, and the Internet were up and running...
...Technology and economics have been running against proud towers--they're now the province of vainglorious Malaysian despots and vice mayors of Shanghai...
...Cries went up against such unpatriotic real estate behavior, but what goes by the name Wall Street has been moving away for Holman Jenkins Jr...
...The markets are not essentially different from other electronic communications networks, yet were treated like the airlines, as if they were delivering physical things that might blow up...
...Talk of rebuilding the WTC is brave and understandable, but not especially realistic...
...When the New York Stock Exchange takes a holiday to protect a handful of Manhattan-based middlemen at the expense of its global customers, it's time to think again...
...But the recognition has arrived...
...But closing for a week ended up benefiting only savvy traders who dumped their soured positions on patriotically misguided investors who fell for the "Buy America" nonsense...
Vol. 34 • November 2001 • No. 8
