The City Rises: Rebuilding Meaning After 9/11
Berman, Marshall
MAN," SAID NIETZSCHE, "the bravest animal and the one most inured to trouble, does not deny suffering per se: he wants it, he even seeks it out, provided it can be given a meaning." A...
...Only those with connections (not me) could get close enough to really see it— though the newspapers and television flooded us with images of broken stone and twisted beams—but what we couldn't see loomed over us all...
...MARSHALL BERMAN is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at CCNY/CUNY...
...He addresses us from the lowest level of the site, inside what engineers call the "bathtub," close to the "slurry Manhattan...
...It's easy to see how hostile critics could disparage all this as just one more promotional gimmick...
...However, that might only go to show how little Heidegger grasped the true scope and depth of his thought...
...For that matter, what about the whole long great tradition of magnificent urban structures...
...he got his education at the Bronx High School of Science (full disclosure: my old school), and at Cooper Union, America's most philosophical school of architecture...
...He is fifty-seven years old, a child of Holocaust survivors, a charter member of the "Class of '46"—a black-humor idiom coined to describe the children of people who lost their whole families to the Nazis, then found each other in displaced person camps, and had children together as soon as they could...
...Many of its grand old places were born again...
...Daniel Libeskind, at once saintly and shady, projects a feeling both for existential urgency and for show-biz display...
...Veteran architecture critic Paul Goldberger spoke bitterness: "Never underestimate the power of banality— at least, not in the world of New York real estate...
...It looked like the trauma of 9/11 was being taken as seriously as it deserved...
...The land is owned by the Port Authority, which shortly before 9/11 signed a 99-year lease with Silverstein Properties, one of the city's biggest developers...
...MAN," SAID NIETZSCHE, "the bravest animal and the one most inured to trouble, does not deny suffering per se: he wants it, he even seeks it out, provided it can be given a meaning...
...New Yorkers had many problems with the menu of militant meanings that emanated from the White House after 9/11...
...But the next few months saw hundreds of meetings and forums, convened by many official and unofficial bodies: community boards, local libraries, public and private schools, churches and synagogues, newspapers and radio stations, bookstores and cafés, government agencies (of different and conflicting governments) and nongovernmental organizations, letters-to-the-editor pages, and forums online...
...1-UST AT THE start of spring 2002, the LMDC unveiled an amazing sight: two beams of blue light, rising 1,400 feet, filling the "footprints" of the destroyed World Trade Center towers...
...His family immigrated to New York and settled in the Bronx...
...Indeed, he thought in order to get away from and negate cities and democracy...
...They wanted building that would be truly public, that would rec ognize how much we have all gone through together...
...Alas, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, perhaps upset to see all this vibrant public space opening up, got the jitters, built fences, and closed the area down...
...But seriously, folks, isn't the whole idea of New York a gimmick...
...70 n DISSENT / Summer 2003...
...His enemies say he does nothing but transform all the real horrors of the twentieth century into gimmicks to promote himself...
...In one of Libeskind's Ground Zero videos, we see the architect in a black suit and a black shirt, his gray hair blowing in the wind...
...they showed how the lyricism of the skyscraper's form could be separated from the office space that has defined its principal function...
...In fact, 9/11 was, and still is, an enigma as well as a horror, and American bombs have done nothing to solve the mystery...
...Now it may be that Libeskind has never heard of Springsteen, or that, like me, he's a longtime fan...
...68 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 generate something special...
...The totality of this work was more than I could hold in my head—I was glad not to be responsible for judging it...
...Virtually overnight, a debris of malice piled up that threatened to bury the big questions that New York had to address about our future...
...If the world was divided into "Us" and "Them," what was the identity of "Them...
...When I saw Libeskind at the slurry wall, invoking "the ground of being," I right away knew that he would get the job, and I thought he deserved it...
...One persistent note was fear that real estate developers and their DISSENT / Summer 2003 • 67 THE CITY RISES politician friends would try to rebuild Ground Zero as ordinary commercial space, as if nothing had happened to the public at all...
...and that, after facing an underworld of suffering, could surge up and kiss the sky and blow everybody's minds...
...No one design was overpowering, but many were thoroughly admirable...
...City and state created a Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) to expedite reconstruction and preserve public memory and interest...
...Neither Osama bin Laden nor Saddam Hussein enjoyed much support in New York...
...But once you got, say, half a mile from Ground Zero, lower Manhattan was more intensely occupied, more filled with life than it had been in years...
...There was a shock: it was as if they had slapped us all in the face...
...Any grown-up New Yorker knew what he meant...
...Libeskind seems to have appropriated the great image of "the ground of being" from the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger...
...they resisted going home, and stayed up talking and arguing with total strangers through the nights even when they had to get up for work in the morning...
...There, as elsewhere, Libeskind has inspired rapturous adoration, but also ignited furious derision...
...The weird cauldron of his character may make him just the right man to be here now...
...I have not seen his 1999 Extension of the Berlin Jewish Museum, but several of my City College and City University students say that this building has been one of the great experiences of their lives...
...They made demands that not even the most practiced politicians or financiers could finesse away...
...He has grasped something deeper and more serious than any building, something about what the whole process of rebuilding can mean...
...the "Coop Himmelblau," from Vienna) began to imagine a distinctive form of public building that would be a monument to the twentieth century: a building that looks as if it has been bombed and is in the process of falling down, exploding or imploding, yet, Behold...
...New Yorkers should be grownup enough to affirm ourselves and to recognize one of our own...
...At that moment I didn't care what his designed buildings were like...
...If we have learned anything, we should know that we're all in this company together, all actors and angels, and that we really want the show to go on, so we can move from Ground Zero to Ground One...
...But I could see that a great deal of it was dazzling and fascinating...
...Once again, some people have vilified him as a thief, a cultural criminal...
...These people formed an amazingly intense and informed "public opinion"—a primary force in the life of democracy, according to democratic theory...
...The LMDC warned us not to get too attached...
...The ancient Athenians came to feel that the Parthenon itself was a gimmick...
...and yet that doesn't mean that these visions and values are wrong...
...But in fact this mode of theft is the life of culture...
...They didn't have any clear alternative in mind, but they were united in their rage at the LMDC: its sin was denial—to act as if nothing had happened to our city, as if we had gone through nothing together...
...As a matter of fact, this visual— the middle-aged man in black, surrounded by the void but looking solemnly into our eyes—appeared first in Bruce Springsteen's music video "My City of Ruins," on his "WTC album," The Rising...
...The strength of the wall, he says, symbolizes the power of democracy under attack to stand and hold together...
...they hung around the many clusters of "missing person" signs, and brought candles and stones...
...My favorite was Union Square, which overnight became the kind of thriving agora it was said to have been a hundred years ago...
...But while they lasted they lit up New Yorkers' imagination...
...But there are some pretty impressive ones standing today, and Libeskind has done more than his share...
...Was that one a disciple of Nazis...
...I felt instantly thrilled by this idea, by Libeskind's brilliance in finding a living image that could crystallize it, and by the directness and intensity with which he could speak to us...
...were destroyed, kept the waters of the Hudson River from rushing in and flooding downtown WRILE LIBESKIND was learning to be an architect, a number of architects (Peter Eisenman, his teacher at Cooper Union...
...and he would have died rather than see his ideas embodied in anything urban or democratic...
...At last, early this year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor George Pataki, who rarely agree on anything, agreed on Daniel Libeskind, and pressed the LMDC to give him the job...
...New York in the twenty-first century is a city whose life depends both on the culture and the entertainment industries...
...As a matter of fact, our greatest modern thinkers, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, said something like this about all our favorite ideas: they're all gimmicks, ideologies, magnifiers to puff us up and promote us beyond what we were meant to be...
...The bombing was surely an act of war, but who or what was the enemy...
...he grew up in "the Amalgamated," a utopian co-op created by the radical Jewish labor movement...
...Either way, he is appropriating and trying to share the moral authority of this singer and this song...
...it stands up...
...Was this one a friend of death squads...
...I mean, I thought they looked good, but also problematic—like his 1776-foot tower and his sunny (or maybe not-so-sunny) "Wedge of Light...
...Much of the public was skeptical and reserved judgment...
...A striking feature of New York life after the 9/11 attacks was the hunger of people to find meaning in it...
...Whether one has the right to steal depends on what one does with the loot...
...that could confront the existential dread at the foundations of so many of our lives...
...Over the next several months, there was great excitement as nine different sets of plans, models, and videos were displayed in the Winter Garden at Battery Park City, just next door to Ground Zero...
...It put itself in touch with some of the world's most brilliant and original arcl ,, ,-, s, and set up a second round at a far higher • -.( Maybe a group like this could help Ne14 , r...
...Facing this wall, he tells us, "We are at the ground of being...
...I mean a much larger body of everyday people who usually aren't much concerned with history, who are usually willing to let it be...
...A season later, this hope flared into rage...
...He spent his childhood in Warsaw and Tel Aviv...
...Downtown in those days looked weirder than ever...
...Then, however, this homeless cosmopolitan became a homeboy...
...Actually, the buildings I liked best in this competition were the open lattice-work twin towers proposed by Rafael Virioly and the group of architects who called themselves THINK...
...Libeskind's life and work are full of contradictions...
...It was an embarrassment of riches...
...It's a spectacular image...
...And speaking of gimmicks, what about American democracy...
...In July, when the LMDC presented six different "concept plans" for Ground Zero, they looked like totally conventional prospectuses for real estate...
...All through the fall of 2001, these people stayed out and filled up the downtown streets and squares...
...Couldn't we show the world, not only that we were still alive, but that we had the power to make modern life more radiant and thrilling...
...AFTER THE TRAUMA Of Ground Zero, the people of New York pushed themselves spontaneously (and unexpectedly) into the political ballgame...
...A generation ago, it was not at all clear if these buildings could be built (or if their creators cared...
...And yet, in the streets, in newspapers and on television, in letters columns, on talk shows and Web sites, people were saying they wouldn't stand for it...
...We have the right to magnify ourselves, so long as we are honest with ourselves and each other about what we're trying to do...
...Aren't skyscrapers a gimmick...
...What does Libeskind do...
...Officials kept saying people were getting sick of all the talk, but in fact people kept filling whatever channels of expression were there, and even asking for more...
...indeed, the lights were soon turned off...
...He developed into a special kind of Jewish man who flourished in postwar New York (Art Spiegelman is another): at once a promoter, a Broadway hotshot (whether on or off Broadway), and "the last man on earth," who carries THE CITY RISES all the nightmares of the twentieth century on wall," the concrete wall that, when the towers his back...
...These transparent towers of light offered all the heroic self-assertion of the WTC towers, without any of their oppressive bulk...
...Libeskind's real breakthrough post9/ 11 is to urbanize and democratize the idea of "the ground of being...
...As winter began and our Afghan campaign abated, the question of meaning took on a new focus: what should be built at Ground Zero...
...Amazingly, the theory worked: the LMDC (under the leadership of Alexander Garvin, its director of design) responded to public opinion, took the great rage to heart, and threw out its whole first round of plans...
...There was this enormous wreckage at the tip of the island...
...I don't just mean intellectuals, who live for meaning...
...Who can deny the show biz and self-promoDISSENT / Summer 2003 n 69 THE CITY RISES tion in our Liberty Bell, our Constitution, our Statue of Liberty (which Libeskind works into his design), the sacred relics of our Fourth of July...
...But it was a strain for people flooded out by shock and grief to work through these emotions, when their heartbreak here and now was being used as a pretext for a war that clearly had been planned years ago...
...they put its sculptor and builder, Phidias, behind bars for cost overruns...
...Near the date of decision, suddenly static filled the air: the media plunged into an orgy of character assassination and negative campaigning that shifted focus away from the designs, and onto the supposedly sleazy character of the designers...
...The site was lit by an immense array of floodlights, which could be blinding after dark, or else could make the streets nearby seem darker than ever, at a moment when darkness and emptiness felt so much like death...
...They're surely right...
...For most of his career, Heidegger was a Nazi...
...His politics have always moved in the orbit of the Jewish humanist left, yet he flaunts a plus-size personality that seems to step directly out of The Fountainhead...
Vol. 50 • July 2003 • No. 3
