All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
the Yale School of Architecture, and co-author of the ingenious and politically adroit proposal for the 2012 Olympics, Garvin has articulated a framework that is both wise and canny. Clearly Garvin has been listening carefully, and his recommendations parallel those emerging from the broader community of interests. The importance of the memorial is foregrounded, infrastructure and transportation are emphasized, mixed use is invoked, pedestrianism encouraged, open space celebrated, and environmentalism tithed.
The principles are sound and should attract wide support, but they skirt the more controversial aspects of any plan that must eventually emerge. The two major issues concern who decides the fate of the site and what actually is to be done at Ground Zero. While the report, and the new LMDC appointments, go a long way toward reassuring the public that decisions will not be reached behind closed doors, Garvin avoids taking a definitive position on the future of the site itself, listing, but not locating, uses and calling for considerable work out of sight underground. At this stage, however, the reticence is appropriate: there is still plenty of time to get it right.
The closest the principles come to a translatable declaration of design intent is in their call for the restoration of “all or a portion of” the street grid obliterated by the construction of the World Trade Center. But the plan specifically mentions only two streets that cross the site—Greenwich Street, running north/south, and Fulton Street, running east/west—not the twelve blocks that originally stood there. Of course, an open space or memorial scheme for the site (or for that matter a commercial, mixed-use development) could establish connections across it without restoring the grid as such. The question therefore remains whether there will be a city block scheme for the site—defining a series of clear development parcels—or some other approach.
Today, the day after the release of the LMDC’s principles, lease-holder Silverstein revealed his own plans for the first site to be put into play, that of the former 7 WTC (which collapsed after the Twin Towers with, miraculously, no loss of life). The 7 WTC site is pivotal both because it holds an electric substation that must be replaced expeditiously and because the destroyed building had eliminated Greenwich Street, which virtually everyone now agrees should be unblocked. In the diagram of the scheme just published by Silverstein’s architect, David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the missing street block has been restored, with the result that the footprint of the new building is considerably smaller than that of the original. Although the new tower will be higher than its forty-story predecessor, there is nonetheless a net reduction of 300,000 square feet of space.
This begs the question of what will be done with the leftover development rights, and rumors are flying that Silverstein is trying to renegotiate the terms of his lease with the Port Authority to reflect the diminished carrying capacity of the site. It has also been suggested that this may simply be the beginning of a much more protracted negotiation, to escape any potential financial liability from the consequences of the “official” plan. Indeed, rumors are also circulating that SOM is preparing studies for the entire World Trade Center site on Silverstein’s behalf as part of his strategic negotiation for a new lease.
SOM has been the ubiquitous mover downtown. Marilyn Taylor, chairman of the firm, has emerged as a key player in the New York New Visions report, and is also leading a planning study of lower Manhattan’s east side funded by Carl Weisbrod’s Downtown Alliance, while Childs is designing 7 WTC and doing planning studies for Silverstein. Am I overreacting to the hydra of an interlocking architect/developer directorate and the fact that all the commissions doled out thus far have gone to one firm? There is a huge potential conflict between business and citizenship here, and SOM needs to lay its cards on the table in terms of its own desires and interests in Ground Zero.
The real wild card in all of this, though, is the memorial. In recent weeks the idea that the entire site be dedicated to such a memorial seems to have quietly slipped off the table. Most vocal among the supporters of such a plan have been the tragedy’s bereaved survivors, although this is not a uniform position among them. This community has been disappointed at being excluded from representation on the LMDC and having only been offered a role on the memorial subcommittee. Advocates (myself included) for leaving most of this sacral site open as a civic memorial space seem to be increasingly marginalized. I get the impression that the “cooler heads” in power regard any such scheme as the victory of sentiment over reason (i.e. money) and that the dispassionate, “rational” position is for a mix of economic, cultural, and memorial activities on the site.
2002
9
Thinking Inside the Box
Admittedly, I went to the July 20 “Listening to the City” meeting at the Javits Center with visions of myself as that woman in the legendary Macintosh commercial, running through an auditorium of passive plebs to hurl her hammer at the monster screen on which Big Brother was proclaiming what a fine and orderly place the Orwellian world was. The setup seemed to confirm my worst fears for the event: 5,000 people arbitrarily assigned to 500 tables, watching speakers and images on giant video screens, each participant equipped with a remote-control keypad for “voting,” each table with a volunteer “facilitator” (ours a German from Toronto) and a laptop on which to communicate with a team of compilers who would determine opinion trends in the room.
No more reassuring was the parade of the usual white men—from the Port Authority, the LMDC, the city government, and the Regional Plan Association—who extolled the importance of the process and presented the famous six schemes compiled by the LMDC and its consultants. The working portion of the event was conducted by Carolyn Lukensmeyer, a professional facilitator—who, for me, combined the more annoying aspects of Oprah and Kim Il Sung. Indeed, as the meeting wore on, I felt increasingly like a delegate to a 1950s Soviet Party Congress: the Central Committee has carefully selected this list of identical candidates for your consideration, you may now vote. (In this case, though, it was for the six schemes for street grid, office, shopping, hotel, memorial, and transit complexes all of precisely the same area). My own strained ability to participate in well-behaved Nielson-family fashion finally evaporated when Lukensmeyer (“give yourselves a nice round of applause”) embellished her script with a pep talk on how the meeting was democratic as all get-out because, “in democracy, the people have a chance to speak!” Seizing upon this right, I rose to my feet to shout, “Buuuulllllshiiiit! Democracy means the people have the power to choose!”
This tiny act of insurrection went almost completely unnoticed. Inaudible over the amplified pronouncements being broadcast from the central stage, invisible in the vast hall and crowd, my outburst attracted a smattering of applause from nearby tables and not the slightest notice from anyone else. Not the first time for me, but telling nonetheless. The charade of “electronic democracy” was burst by the asymmetries of power in that room, the careful control of both agenda and process from above. With most planning, decision-making belongs to the powerful, reacting belongs to the people. At the Javits Center, original ideas were excluded because they—naturally—lacked a constituency: all the opinions that we wrote on our computers were vetted to see if enough people shared them to have them played back to the audience. Creativity was thus foreclosed by stifling the new or the unusual and by total control of what could be discussed. There was not a single mention among the alleged “choices,” for example, of a scheme that would preserve the entire site as a memorial. Nevertheless, something constructive did happen at the meeting and in its aftermath. This had nothing to do with changing the underlying institutional structures—the virtually unaccountable quasi-governmental agencies that are running the process—but rather in the clarity of the audience response to the uninspiring and profoundly mediocre goods on offer. Emerging from the self-congratulatory and coercive process was a genuine act of protest: the audience consistently exercised the one planning power left in the hands of citizens: the power to say no. Given the opportunity to vote scheme-by-scheme, the crowd offered a pox on all houses.
Power had certainly anticipated this. In the week preceding the meeting, the six “alternative” schemes were released to the media by architects Beyer Blinder Belle (BBB) and were met with a fusillade of opprobrium that rained on them from every direction. Even John Whitehead, chairman and patriarch of the LMDC, mumbled with embarrassment at the press conference about this being “only a beginning.” Likewise, the mayor (who has