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A Mistake In The First Place
By Robert Fitch
What value is history after September 11? Very little if it is true,
as we hear so often now, that nothing for us will ever be the same
again. Of course, it is true that no New Yorker alive today will ever
forget the bravery of those $30,000-a-year police officers and
firefighters who never flinched or gave a thought to their own
safety. These working people of New York City raced into the tower to
save those who earned 10, 20, and 100 times what they earned. Some
acts are sanctifying, forever transforming the Earth we stand on.
And yet, on the day after the tragedy, September 12, Donald Trump
said he stood ready to build the world's tallest tower on that same
ground, on the site of the World Trade Center. Some things, we can
safely assume, will remain the same.
We also heard for a while that because of the crisis following
September 11, the present occupant had to be allowed to continue in
office. Until recently, the most cited poet of September 11 has been
W.H. Auden. His "September 1st, 1939" seems to contain uncanny
premonitions of our disaster: "The unmentionable odor of
death/Offends the September night." Perhaps, though, it might be
useful to recall his equally prescient contemporary Bertolt Brecht,
who wrote, "Those who lead the country into the abyss call ruling too
difficult for ordinary men."
If the tragedy of September 11 can be exploited politically, to
promote a sense of total rupture with our history, it can also be
abused by economic interests to stimulate the need for a false
continuity with the past. The aim of the terrorists, we are told, was
to destroy New York's position as the Global Capital. In this,
naturally, they must not succeed. To defeat them, we must rebuild
downtown in a way that is greater and better than ever before. Says
the mayor, the new towers must be "very large." Globalization now
more than ever.
But how are these authorities able to interpret exactly what the
terrorists mean? How can they be so sure of their own interpretive
powers?
Ultimately, what ought to determine our civic response is not what
the terrorists mean, but what we mean; not their motivations and
intentions but our common interests and needs. And our understanding
of the origins of the World Trade Center may help us figure out what
those are, and what to do now.
DEMISE DOWNTOWN
Again and again it is said that New York has become the "nerve center
of global capitalism." Is this true? If so, how did we get there? Is
downtown, and particularly the creation of the World Trade Center, a
response in concrete and travertine to the city's increasing
dependence on world trade?
The truth is, postwar downtown development has been hugely subsidized
by the government, relying chiefly on state power and eminent domain
in order to overcome market forces.
Prior to World War I, downtown had all three elements of a Central
Business District: mass transit, so that employees could get to
office buildings; an upper-class residential neighborhood to provide
consumers for luxury shops; and private risk capital in office
buildings. After World War II, it had none of them.
The location in midtown of two great railroad terminals isolated the
downtown district and threatened its survival. In 1910, the
Pennsylvania Railroad built a terminal at 34th Street and Seventh
Avenue. Between 1903 and 1913, the New York Central developed Grand
Central Station at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue. After having
made a trip to midtown, commuters did not feel like making another
one downtown. When leases expired, corporations and financial
institutions began to move uptown. Downtown construction stopped
dead. No major towers would be built there for almost half a century.
The city's real estate establishment expressed its concern in the 1920s. Their dilemma
was obvious: Land owners could not move their land uptown to where the buildings and
tenants had gone. How could they staunch the flow
northward and get people and investment moving back downtown?
As early as 1921, the New York Times suggested moving the port of New York to Newark.
Why? The port and its traffic created a clutter that depressed real estate values. So
did manufacturing linked to the port.
The port had to go. More people had to come. In the 1920s, the Second Avenue Subway
was planned to get more of the right people downtown. But while the Depression brought
an unprecedented volume of federal funds, none cam
e down for a Second Avenue subway. In 1941, it looked as if New York State would come
through. Legislation was passed to move the port to New Jersey, create a downtown
World Trade Center and establish a World Trade Center
corporation headed by Winthrop Aldrich of Chase Manhattan Bank. Executive action,
however, was stymied by Pearl Harbor and then World War II. National defense
priorities precluded moving the nation's most vital port in w
artime.
A TALE OF TWO BROTHERS
It was not until the 1950s that the political movement ripened. This time, Aldrich's
nephew, Nelson Rockefeller, was governor. From Albany, he controlled appointments to
the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, whic
h had jurisdiction over port location. Under Nelson, the Port Authority would remove
the port and build the towers, becoming the city's largest landlord. Nelson's brother,
David, was chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank a
nd chair of the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association.
Together, the two Rockefeller brothers led the downtown urban renewal effort. Neither
gave even a fleeting thought to relying on market forces or private capital to shape
this second downtown. More relevant was the power
of eminent domain that cleared the old Radio Row, the retail electrical district of
30,000 workers and small business people.
Beside more publicly financed office towers to irrigate parched downtown portfolios,
what was the ultimate point? It was clearly expressed by the city's 1969 plan which
expressed the higher real estate consciousness: "In
the long run, New York does not want to retain the low skill, low wage segment of its
industrial mix. The displacement of manufacturing activity in the Central Business
District is the complement to the expansion of offic
e construction which results in more intensive land use, higher investment and more
jobs than the manufacturing activities they replaced."
1969 marked the city's all-time jobs peak: 3.9 million. Between 1960 and the present,
the city would lose nearly three quarters of a million manufacturing jobs. It would
never gain enough relatively higher-end jobs to pre
vent New York City from leading in income inequality, urban poverty and the number of
citizens without health insurance.
Meanwhile, public subsidies sustained private real estate enterprise downtown.
Billions in subsidies for the PATH train that brought commuters; billion in subsidies
for rich residents who lived in Battery Park City and co
nsumed in Tribeca. Hundreds of millions to the New York Stock Exchange and the Comex
which extorted tax benefits in exchange for not moving across the river to New Jersey.
Of course the deficits exacted a cost: Despite th
e 1990s boom, the only U.S. cities now more indebted on a per capita basis than New
York are Philadelphia, which just emerged from bankruptcy, and Detroit, where grass
and tree grow on tops of tall buildings.
HIGH TECH TO THE RESCUE
And yet, despite globalization, despite the growing debt and rising subsidies, as late
as 1993, it still looked as if the renewal of downtown had failed. The Downtown
Alliance, the successor to the Downtown-Lower Manhatta
n Association, seemed finally to recognize the futility of 40 years of state planning
designed to return downtown to its pre World War I glory. The next new idea: a plan
based on public subsidies to convert the office cor
e to residential space.
But then came the great Wall Street technobubble. The old megalomania quickly
returned. Far from being a second-rate artificial central business district, downtown
touted itself as the nerve center of world capitalism. Th
e capital of the global economy. Still, while Wall Street bonuses broke all records,
employment in finance, insurance and real estate during the bubble years of the 1990s
never even came close to reaching the peak of the
Koch era boom in the 1980s.
The first years of the third millennium are turning into a decade of lost illusion.
The image of American invulnerability, the End of History, the New Economy and of Wall
Street as the cornucopia of wealth and security fo
r all have been shattered.
Another illusion that we could well shed is the notion of Gotham as a natural
adaptation to the global ecology. If we decide to rebuild New York's economic
foundations directly on the faulty fault line created by financia
l speculation, at least let us not pretend that history tells us we have no
alternative.
Robert Fitch is a journalist and the author of The Assassination of New York
###
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