New York 32
Practically speaking, there is no reason why some of the 13 million square feet of offices destroyed in the attack shouldn't be replaced, though, partly because there is already a glut of office space downtown, I would prefer a more varied mix of office, residential, cultural (opera house or museum), retail, and transportation uses. Whatever gets built, there are better ways of doing it than towers set off in plazas.
Thousands of commuters will again pour into the area daily, as they have in the past. Some sort of terminal or overt transportation structure seems in order, to express with aplomb their entry to the city's downtown area. Ideally, you could extend commuter rail from the Midtown terminals t0 the Lower Manhattan area, which would greatly enhance the attractiveness of the Financial District as a working environment.
A memorial must and will go up; the area is, after all, a massive gravesite. But I confess I am leery of the aesthetic range of contemporary monuments, pulled as they are between realist kitsch and tepidly tasteful abstraction, and I despair of any memorial doing justice to the victims and their families. As for the idea that a really spectacular memorial to September n would rejuvenate Lower Manhattan's tourist business by itself, that seems to me craven if not delusional.
The greatest tribute we could pay those who gave their lives on this site would be to make it into a convivial, lifeaffirming, urbane place, which would most aptly express New York's streetsmart character.
(But all such rhetoric on the subject, however well intended, finally makes one gag.)
EXCURSUS
THE HARBOR AND THE OLD PORT
And has it really faded from the port, the painful glamour? Has it really gone from them, the fiction that was always on the movements of the liners in and out the upper bay? Or has it merely retreated for a while behind the bluffs of the New Jersey shore, to return to us again tomorrow and draw the breast away once more into the distance beneath Staten Island hill?
-PAUL ROSENFELD, Port ofNew York
OR THE MAJORITY OF NEW YORKERS, EVEN NATIVE
BORN, THE HARBOR IS AN ABSTRACTION: ONE WOULD
HARD PRESSED TO SAY WHAT EXACT TERRITORY OF LAND
and water it encompassed. When the state agencies promoting tourism speak of a "Harbor Park" connecting the Battery, the Statue of Liberty Ellis Island, Snug Harbor in Staten Island, and EmpireFulton Ferry State Park in Brooklyn into one ferrybound entity, they are essentially imposing a hopeful verbal scrim over what is to most people an empty stage. We know the harbor used to dominate the city's consciousness, but we don't feel it anymore. I am skeptical that tourists with limited time in New York-say, a week-would give a whole day to exploring this harbor concept, by taking ferries hither and yon to island monuments far removed from Broadway.
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