(derekbaker)

Achitectural Terrorism

My (very long) post yesterday was mostly about the people affected -- killed, traumatized, or emboldened -- by 9/11. One thing, or two things, that rarely get discussed anymore, however, are the buildings themselves. I don't mean the Pentagon. Not only does it still stand, repaired, the section that was hit had, coincidentally, just been reinforced just before Flight 77 crashed into it, which probably saved more lives than would have been lost otherwise.

By "the buildings," therefore, I mean the World Trade Center, the Twin Towers. This is old news by now, but shouldn't be forgotten: these were two ugly buildings that Osama bin Laden knocked down.

Somewhere, I have a picture I took (but can't find), looking down Seventh Avenue from Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village -- my old neighborhood -- in which the Twin Towers stand prominently at the end. As they did at the end of most avenues in downtown Manhattan. It was hard to miss them.

But in all honesty, nobody much loved those buildings. Yes, together they represented the largest office complex in the world. But who gets sentimental over an office complex?

They took up the entire horizon. I remember a trip to a Sandy Hook beach on the Jersey shore one weekend. Even there, looking north, you couldn't miss the Twin Towers. Sometime not long before that, I had moved up to the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan, as far north on this island as you can get. From our higher points (including the #1 train platform), you couldn't miss the Twin Towers. And landing at JFK or LaGuardia, the first thing you'd see if your seat window faced downtown Manhattan would be the Twin Towers.

Which is not to say that anyone had any fondness for them. They were just...big. Shorter and they'd be squat. But they were too tall to be squat. They were just big.

Other buildings in New York actually have fans. The Empire State Building is so popular, for residents and tourists, that it's basically a part of pop culture. The Chrysler Building is one of the true New York icons. Philip Johnson's AT&T (now Sony) building, the Citicorp Tower, the Woolworth Building, not to mention several insurance company skyscrapers -- any of these (which still stand) were probably better loved than the behemoth towers anchoring the south end of this island.

Now that they're gone, however, there's definitely more nostalgia for them. Since they went up in the early 70s, they're susceptible to the same ironic reference that accords the Atari logo, shorty-short NBA uniforms, and other such references for Generation X.

And, admittedly, for some people they said more than words can express about this city: big, bigger, best -- with no apologies. A decade and a half before Donald Trump entered the real estate scene, they were the brash points on the skyline that residents and tourists couldn't miss.

A good visual essay about the towers can be seen in Keith Meyers portfolio and the special Twin Towers presentation they're showing of his work at the New York Times site. Meyers's photographs show the World Trade Center -- at least the two most visible elements of this seven-building complex -- from many of the perspectives New Yorkers and New Jersey residents experienced these architectural icons and, now, memories.

Labels: history

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