2005-09-11 - 8:46 a.m.
One of the first things I read my last semester at Brown had a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne. Before he wrote stuff like The Scarlet Letter that we all had to read in high school (although I must say that �Young Goodman Brown� is one of my favorite stories), he worked as a magazine editor in lower Manhattan.
Near his workplace was a wharf called Coffee House Slip. Hawthorne saw an engraving of it (this was shortly before photography was invented) and was struck by the ability of paper image to outlast brick structure � the �singular truth that the mere shadowy image of a building, on the frail material of paper... is likely to have a longer term of existence than the piled brick and mortar of the building.�
Soon after I read this, I went back to visit Jake in Brooklyn, while he was back from Denver for a bit. He�s become a successful lawyer and bought a really nice loft. It has a beautiful view out over Brooklyn towards the Manhattan skyline. (It�s also not too far from a really excellent rotisserie chicken place, but that�s another story�)
It�s kind of near the Atlantic Avenue subway and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. When I was growing up there wasn�t much in this area and it didn�t even really have a name. It wasn�t like dangerous, just empty. Blocks of wasteland. A few hookers. BAM and Junior�s diner, the landmark cheesecake king, but that�s about it.
Now there�s all kinds of new construction. Office towers. Big-box retail at Atlantic Center. The New Jersey Nets are supposedly going to be bought and moved to a new arena right across the street (if this happens, whoever effects it � possibly developer Bruce Ratner or rapper Jay-Z � will earn a place in heaven for returning major league sports to Brooklyn so long after the departure of the Dodgers).
Urban renewal is a good thing of course and just what I�ve studied and devoted much of my life to. But I have to say � it�s a little weird to see things so changed. Even the streetwalker industry is gone. As a local cabbie noted: �Yeah, they don�t really do the whole pimps and �hoes thing no more. It�s all escorts these days.� Indeed.
I doubt anyone photographed the waste area of before. It�s only a memory in my mind. There is no paper image to outlast the brick (or lack thereof). No great loss, I guess. If future New Yorkers shop and work and go to Nets games where I once wandered through a barren nothing, I think the city will be a better place.
Right now there�s an entire generation of kids who�ll grow up in a New York without the Twin Towers as a part of their experience. Oh, they might remember them being attacked and collapsing in their childhood (although even this memory will become rarer as time goes on). But they won�t be able to tell which way is south by seeing them.
In 2001, Alithea got me a holiday card with a photo of the New York skyline taken in 1962. The World Trade Center hadn�t been built yet. I was quite touched by her message. There was a time before the World Trade Center and now there�ll be a time after it. New York goes on. As a poster said in an effort to boost civic morale after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993: �If you thought you could scare people, you came to the wrong place.�
Ground Zero will not remain a vacant hole in the ground, of course. I�m very proud that the teacher from my business class at Brown has taken a new job with Silverstein Properties, WTC leaseholder, as the COO for the redevelopment of the area. The construction of whatever goes up there will be facilitated by someone I know. Fuck yeah.
One of my last class sessions at Brown (in that same course we read the Hawthorne quote) looked at issues of memory and the 9/11 tragedy. New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp wrote �one feature great cities have in common is the capacity to recreate themselves after an assault.� Someday soon, there will be people doing their jobs and going shopping and eating lunch outside in the same space the WTC once occupied.
I don�t think anything will be a greater testimony to our way of life than the reestablishment of the same activities that went on before. As Muschamp said about whatever replaces the WTC: �Each time we look up at the sky, we can remember that our values are more resilient than theirs.�
� 2005 Geoff Gladstone
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