No more cities on hills?

Reflections on the stalled WTC rebuilding project

Louis Proyect

In a fascinating segment that appeared on Sixty Minutes last Sunday on the failure of the rebuilding of the WTC–to this day nothing but an open pit–reporter Scott Pelley mused:

New York has had leaders of vision in the past. Al Smith, the former governor, got the Empire State Building built in a year, during the Great Depression. But since 9/11 there have been three governors of New York, four executive directors of the Port Authority, and no one to see the project through. The next chapter may be written by judges. In January, an arbitration court threatened to create its own construction deadlines if Silverstein and the Port Authority failed to come up with a new plan by March.

When I heard him say this, it was like an epiphany. All of a sudden I understood why ruling class politicians in the United States have been dealing with “gridlock”. Writ large, the failure of the WTC rebuilding project is a perfect symbol of the inability of the bourgeoisie to get anything done—except launch imperialist invasions. Al Smith, like FDR, was not any smarter or nervier than politicians today. What has changed is the general failure of the bourgeoisie to grasp and act on its own long-term agenda. From climate change to health insurance, from the need to repair infrastructure like bridges and roads to the collapse of daily newspapers all around the United States (an essential means for the ruling class to maintain its ideological hegemony), we are witnessing a kind of paralysis. Nothing matters, however, as long as the biggest corporations in American can show an uptick in quarterly earnings so as to protect its shareholder’s investments. If the rest of the country is turning into Detroit, who cares? Eventually an aroused working class but that’s a risk they are willing to take for the time being.

The Sixty Minutes segment, as one might expect, hardly does justice to the clashing interests that have kept the project in a kind of limbo. It states that real estate developer is not interested in aesthetics and only seeks buildings that are commercially viable. The original architect Daniel Libeskind designed a tower that was 1,776 feet tall (heavy-handed symbolism, needless to say) that had hanging gardens at the top of a glass enclosed structure. It was obviously vulnerable to another attack and a clear waste of the philistine Silverstein’s money.

New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp found Libeskind’s design transparently “demagogic”, quite an acknowledgment from the gray lady in February 2003 when war fever was running high:

Compared with Think’s proposal, Mr. Libeskind’s design looks stunted. Had the competition been intended to capture the fractured state of shock felt soon after 9/11, this plan would probably deserve first place. But why, after all, should a large piece of Manhattan be permanently dedicated to an artistic representation of enemy assault? It is an astonishingly tasteless idea. It has produced a predictably kitsch result.

Mr. Libeskind’s Berlin-based firm, Studio Daniel Libeskind, has not produced an abstract geometric composition. It is an emotionally manipulative exercise in visual codes. A concrete pit is equated with the Constitution. A skyscraper tops off at 1,776 feet. As at Abu Simbel, the Egyptian temple, the play of sunlight is used to give a cosmic slant to worldly history. A promenade of heroes confers quasi-military status on uniformed personnel.

Even in peacetime that design would appear demagogic. As this nation prepares to send troops into battle, the design’s message seems even more loaded. Unintentionally, the plan embodies the Orwellian condition America’s detractors accuse us of embracing: perpetual war for perpetual peace.

Of course, it wasn’t the demagogy that did Mr. Libeskind in. It was his failure to pay sufficient attention to the bottom line, a sine qua non for New York real estate, a business that symbolizes short-term narrow interests perfectly. When Libeskind refused to rein in his more rococo design elements, Silverstein decided to go with a more practical architecture firm. But in order to make his decision more acceptable to a public that doted on WTC kitsch of the sort that Libeskind was marketing, it was necessary to tarnish the architect’s reputation. Silverstein’s friends at Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post were happy to pitch in.

The Post’s “Page Six” gossip column mocked Libeskind’s poetry collection “Fishing from the Pavement”, including some quotes from the book:

The island’s hysteria, language, is tied to the wanton burning of wealth. America turns its mass-produced urine antennae toward Cesar’s arrogant ganglion, while history is advocated by utopians as a substitute for defecating.

Rambunctious pinnacle–dreadful monument on which furious youth glows like a chromospheric flare, incinerated god in his swollen hand.

This poseur–lesbian whose medallion of wishes is effaced by training in history–holds a rare quarto from Utah, strives for new lies. But imagination is so thin that the past often breaks right through her sex Torah.

Jesus invented seduction by exposing the mother to a contemptible kangaroo court.

Page Six concluded: “Don’t quit your day job, Danny.”

Libeskind agreed to a revised design in 2008. Surmounting this hurdle was not enough to get construction going. It turns out that Larry Silverstein has some problems getting money from the insurance companies to fund the reconstruction. I am sure that all the people getting screwed by the health insurance companies can commiserate with poor Mr. Silverstein.

Meanwhile until Mr. Silverstein gets things sorted out with the insurance companies and the New York Port Authority, a bureaucracy that would fit in neatly with a Kafka novel, nothing remains at the WTC site except an enormous hole in the ground. This is perhaps the ultimate statement on the state of American imperialism, an aging tiger incapable of imposing its will on nearly all enemies, except for those as small as the island of Grenada.