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21 May 2002. Thanks to Michael Sorkin.
Excerpts from After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York, Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin, editors, Routledge, New York, 2002. BN: 0-415-93479-6 (hardback).
Introduction
Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin
THEIR ABSENCE IS INDELIBLE: the Twin 'Towers were landmarks, buildings you could not lose sight of no matter where you were. They told you which way to face when you wanted to walk downtown, were your first view of the city when driving in from New Jersey, and anchored the skyline when you were flying out of JFK. As you rode the D train over the East River into Manhattan after dark, they were fluorescent chessboards against the black night sky. Sometimes sinister, sometimes beautiful, sometimes just banal, they were icons of New York City -- the best-known buildings in the world, the Everest of our urban Himalayas.
When we saw the smoke and flames streaming from the towers in the hour before they fell, none of us imagined the collapse to come. And no matter how often we saw the media replays, it remained hard to believe these buildings were mortal, let alone the instrument of the death of thousands. However numbed we were by the compulsive repetition, we still couldn't get enough of it, couldn't stop staring at the plume of smoke that marked the void for weeks.
Suddenly, New York's gorgeous mosaic was tiled in tombstone mass murder. The third-generation Irish, Italian, and Jewish stockbrokers, the women who had worked their way up to executive assistants and vice presidents, the Indian and Pakistani computer experts, the Caribbean security guards, and the Mexican cooks: of 50,000 who worked in the World Trade Center, nearly 3,000 died there. And they remain incrediblv present-in moving daily obituaries in the New York Times, in the missing posters that stiill cover so many walls, in the lists of the fallen outside our firehouses.
Forced into a citizenship of common loss, the city banded together soberly, spontaneously, generously, and with moving and unaccustomed civility. We lit candles in our doorways at dusk. We gathered in Union Square, turning it into a shrine and memorial, layered with photos, handwritten messages, school chlldren's drawings, expressions of sympathy and sorrow from flight attendants who had been spared by the luck of the draw. New York was ready for its close-up in those early days, and the rest of the country responded movingly. One night, a girl called one of us from a small town in Oregon. "Just dialed your number because I wanted to tell someone in New York how sorry we are."
But the mist of emotion also concealed both the dimensions of the loss and the gradual worsening of old problems. It is estimated that 95,000 jobs were lost as the result of the tragedy, but we had also lost 75,000 jobs in the previous year. City finances are teetering at the brink of fiscal meltdown, and the mayor has prepared us for a new round of cutbacks that we can ill afford. Our picture of the city as a place of tolerance and freedom, where poor people can get an education and rise in the world, is more and more at risk.
New York, the country, and the world are in the midst of an economic recession. A Republican president who got little support from New York City voters is fighting a new kind of war, and hands are daily wrung about the difficulty of extracting promised aid from Washington. A Republican governor who is mounting a reelection campaign has set up his own pipelines to Wall Street and is counting on the imminent adoption of a rebuilding plan with his name on it. And a new Republican mayor, whose career has been made exclusively in the financial community, must cope with radically diminished resources and raised expectations. All this occurs amid a heightened sense of global risk. We already have new deputy police commissioners in charge of intelligence and counterterrorism, drafted from the CIA.
What, then, should we rebuild? Should the site be left as a memorial as many -- including numerous survivors of the victims -- urge? Oklahoma City and Berlin have been wracked by prolonged conflict over the shape and meaning of such memorials. Do we want a garrison city, barricaded against future attacks? Lower Manhattan hasn't been one since the threat of a British invasion subsided in the early nineteenth century. Do we want another downtown corporate financial center? Wall Street has been propped up by public subsidies and urban renewal plans for years, including, most recently, a huge -- if suddenly shaky -- tax giveaway to the New York Stock Exchange to build a new headquarters across the street from its old one. The office market itself has dramatically softened, suggesting that new space downtown is unlikely to be produced by simple supply and demand.
Since the fifties, companies in Lower Manhattan have been moving their headquarters to cheaper, greener pastures in the suburbs and setting up back offices far away, from Brooklyn to Bangalore. The computer revolution of the eighties, with its opportunities for radical decentralization, accelerated the trend. And with the advent of electronic trading in the nineties, all financial markets have had the potential to "dematerialize," leaving Lower Manhattan as the historic cradle of New York and a cultural center but eviscerating its old logics of concentration. Clearly, new styles of density must be introduced, new kinds of mix. Most important, new voices must be heard.
Unfortunately, the public agency that holds the power to make decisions about the site, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), is cast in the old Port Authority mold. A committee of the powerful with only one representative from the local residential community, it's chaired by a Republican deal-maker and former director of Goldman Sachs (itself about to move its entire equity trading department to a new billion-dollar complex in New Jersey). This Robert Moses-style authority has been given huge powers of legal circumvention and freedom from democratic oversight. On the bright side, this reversion to cronyism and the rule of money has been offset by the formation of numerous new civic associations bent on studying the rebuilding issue and producing schemes for renewal. None, however, has any real authority. Though the LMDC declared an initial "listening" period, it has held no public meetings. What it actually hears remains to be seen.
Anyone who is seriously listening, however, will hear a loud cacophony. Every issue past our initial grief has aroused conflict. Control over the World Trade Center site by firefighters or the police, the lack of insurance companies willing to pay for injuries sustained in clearing the site, and the inability or unwillingness to protect both workers and residents from environmental damage provoked the earliest expressions of conflict. Then there is the thorny issue of the memorial. How much of the WTC site will be dedicated to "unproductive" use? What will be the final design? Who are the "stakeholders," officeholders, and financial authorities with the power to decide?
Not unexpectedly, there has been a rapid and unseemly return to business as usual by many. Encouraged by the media, architects and planners trotted after the ambulance, ready to try to get the biggest job of their careers, joined by politicians and developers eager to thump their chests and proclaim the importance of rebuilding immediately. Everywhere the bromide is retailed that to rebuild something bigger, taller, and better than ever is the only way to respond to the terrorists. Few seem to suggest that our "victory" can lie only in a consequence that is positive for all of us, not in reflexive machismo.
More recently, we have seen ugly conflicts over political correctness and moral worth. A memorial statue of the three firefighters who, Iwo Jima-like, raised the American flag at the smoldering site, was redesigned to honor the city's ethnic diversity, even though these firefighters were all white, like most of the Fire Department. The quick unveiling of a federal government program for compensating victims' families with emergency funds also became grotesque. Though government officials tried to achieve a rough sense of equity by reducing the amount of compensation to reflect payments from other sources -- a schema that reduced payments to more affluent families -- those affected complained bitterly. We were then caught up in the spectacle of public calculations of actuarial worth, in which the potential earning power of stockbrokers from New Jersey was weighed against that of restaurant workers from Queens, reducing the victims to accounting abstractions.
We cannot reclaim the World Trade Center site without respectfully -addressing its many ghosts. Although world trade in one fom or another has always shaped this part of the city, the purveyors of its merchandise and the public spaces of its markets and entrepots have changed dramatically over the years. The earlier ghosts of this place are also victims of transformations that, if they have not always been cataclysmic, have often been violent. From the 1920 bombing of the Morgan Bank to the displacement of the largely Arab community that once thrived on the Lower West Side, to the destruction of an intimate architectural texture by megascale construction, this part of the city has been contested space. Though the destruction of the Twin Towers has reformulated the terms of conflict for the foreseeable present, it does not change this history.
The World Trade Center was the eye of a needle through which global capital flowed, the seat of an empire. However anonymous they appeared, the Twin Towers were never benign, never just architecture. Recovering this site for the living city is, therefore, inescapably political. Political, to be sure, because New York now takes a place in the long line of cities that have been damaged or nearly destroyed by terrorist and military attacks stretching, through the recent past, from Hiroshima and Berlin to Sarajevo and Kabul. Political because of Wall Street's role as an epicenter of world capitalism. Political because of Manhattan's site at the nexus of finance and real estate development -- the city's most important industry. Political because of the power-brokering that will determine Downtown's future development. Political because of the growing clash between hallowed ground and buildable space.
Our intention, as a group of urbanists who live and work in New York City, is to use September 11, 2001, as an opportunity to speculate broadly about the future of the city we all love. The shadow of the towers demands that we both reconsider the past and think hard about the future. This book seeks to make a collective statement of purpose and of hope. We want to speak up for the task of history, the responsibility of architecture, and the needs of the living city, the whole city. We do not want our critical faculties to be subverted by our sorrow; we do not want the rebuilding of what was to take the place of building what should be.
Above all, we want to open a discussion wider than we have seen so far. We freely admit we do not know what lies ahead. By filling these pages with questions, however, we widen the door through which unexpected answers might come. (pp. vii-xi)
The Center Cannot Hold
Michael Sorkin
IN HIS FAREWELL TO OFFICE, Rudy Giuliani, standing in St. Paul's Chapel, adjacent to the World Trade Center site, declared, "I really believe we shouldn't think about this site out there, right behind us, right here, as a site for economic development. We should think about a soaring, monumental, beautiful memorial that just draws millions of people here who just want to see it. We have to be able to create something here that enshrines this forever and that allows people to build on it and grow from it. And it's not going to happen if we just think about it in a very narrow way."
Giuliani's speech reminded me of Eisenhower's leave-taking from the presidency, in which he warned the nation against the growing anti-democratic power of the "military-industrial complex." In both cases, the cautionary appeals resonated because of their sources, one from a military man an architect of the Cold War, the other from a mayor whose leadership favored planning by the "market."
Giuliani's heartfelt call for restraint ran counter to the business-as-usual approach that has dominated official thinking since the tragedy. This has included obscene ambulance-chasing on the part of the architectural community and robust talk about responding to the terror by rapid rebuilding, bigger than ever. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, empowered to decide the future of the site, is headed up by a patriarchal ex-director of Goldman Sachs whose credibility seems untainted by the spectacle of his own firm immigrating over the river to Jersey. With the exception of a single community representative, the board is comprised of the usual business crowd. Their initial consensus seems to favor the construction of a very large amount of office space on the cleared site of the fallen towers, with the memorial simply a modest component. And rumors grind on about the working drawings already in CAD at SOM.
Fortunately, the competition for authority over the site is both structural and complex. The Port Authority, Larry Silverstein (the ninety-nine-year leaseholder), the Development Corporation, the federal, State, and city governments, survivor groups, the local community, the business improvement district, the Battery Park City Authority, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and myriad other civic and private interests are jostling to be heard and influential. If nothing else, this fog buys time for contention and for the serious consideration of alternatives.
What is clear is that despite the currently soft market, some of the 15 million square feet of lost space needs to replaced sooner rather than later and Downtown's dysfunctions repaired to allow the city's economy to reestablish jobs and networks lost in the attack. And the eventual need is not simply for replacement space: the "Group of 35" -- a business-heavy organization chaired by Charles Schumer and Robert Rubin -- has predicted (in a report about the future of the city's commercial space) that an additional 60 million square feet of office space will be required by 2020.
The question is where to put it. Some will clearly go to Lower Manhattan. The relationships of propinquity that form the social and spatial substrate of commerce and culture downtown must be quickly reestablished by the restoration of infrastructure and the addition of new space. Railroading the restoration of the status quo by looking at the site as no more than its footprint, however, guarantees that we learn nothing from the tragedy and let the opportunity for better thinking slip away.
My studio is downtown, not far from the Western Union building at 60 Hudson Street, known to architects as the home of the New York City Building Department. Since September 11, this building has been the subject of unusual security, surrounded by concrete barriers and a half-dozen police cars. It appears to be the only site outside the confines of Ground Zero to enjoy this level of fresh protection, and the reason seems to be the building's long-standing role as the nexus both for telecommunications cables coming into New York City and for trunk lines to the nation and the world, a logical next target for terror, according to some scenarios.
Ironically, a system at the core of urban disaggregation depends on the joining of huge dispersed networks on a single site. The currently dominant pattern of our urbanism -- enabled by the kinds of instantaneous artificial proximity that the electronic network of phones, faxes, e-mails, and other global systems allow -- is the rapid growth of the "edge city," a sprawling realm that has become the antithesis of a traditional sense of place, the location to which security-conscious firms are now increasingly impelled to retreat.
Of course, this "nonplace urban realm" is the result of more than new communications technology. The suburbs were fertilized by massive government intervention in highway construction, by radical tax policy, by changes in the national culture of desire, by racism, by cheap, unencumbered land, and by an earlier fear of terror. The prospect of nuclear annihilation that made urban concentrations particularly vulnerable was on the minds of many planners during the Cold War, both in the United States and abroad. The massive deurbanization in Maoist China, for example, was the direct result of nuclear anxiety. The dispersal facilitated by the interstates -- our erstwhile "National Defense Highway" -- was likewise more than simply good for General Motors: both the company and the United States were playing at the same stratego-urban games.
Whatever the causes, however, the effects of this pattern of urbanization were in many ways antithetical to the presumptions behind the space of Lower Manhattan and its kith. Here, concentration has long been considered crucially advantageous. The possibility of conducting economic affairs face-to-face, the collective housing of related bureaucracies and businesses (the famous Finance Insurance Real Estate [FIRE] sectors that make up the majority of business downtown), the dense life of the streets, the convenience of having everything at hand, are the foundation for the viability of the main Financial district for the planet. Its characteristic form -- superimposition of skyscrapers on the medieval street pattern left by the Dutch -- has given Downtown its indelible shape.
[September 2001 photo added by Cryptome. From MapQuest.]
A Plan For Lower ManhattanGround Zero Ground Zero is a sacred place, no more suitable for building than Gettysburg or Babi Yar. This proposal suggests that a memorial be begun as a berm surrounding the site. providing protection for site work and a platform for public viewing. Eventually, this berm would become permanent and within it a shallow green crater -- filled with earth from every country -- would be an Elysian Field in perpetual memory of the fallen. At the very least such a memorial might serve as a place-holder for an international competition to determine the future of the site. West Street West Street is an intimidating barrier, dividing Battery Park City from the life of the island, forcing pedestrians onto bridges. Rebuilding West Street underground from Harrison Street south would take through traffic off local streets, permitting a green seam to stitch the fabric of Lower Manhattan back together. Transport The proposal replaces a portion of the yacht harbor at the World Financial Center with a covered ferry terminal linked to a rebuilt Winter Garden. This, in turn, would be connected to the PATH and subways to create a continuous intermodal transit hub and shopping center beneath the site. This space might take the form of a hypostyle hall with 3,000 columns-one for each victim. Greenfill Lower Manhattan is an ideal place for walkers, and this plan proposes a substantial reclamation of street space for pedestrian and "slo-mo" circulation. Ground Zero becomes a point of dissemination for this new network, which is meant as a model for the recovery of the public realm from the car. In particular, the plan proposes initial appropriations along Broadway, Greenwich Street, Chambers Street, Fulton Street, John Street, Liberty Street, and Vesey Street. Hydrologic Fill The dead zone created by the squared-off configuration of the north end of the Battery Park City landfill is redressed by additional fill which smoothes, aerates, and cleanses the flow of the Hudson. The fill also provides additional recreational space in an area of New York poorly provisioned with it. New Buildings Although this scheme is predicated on disaggregation, the construction of replacement office space on sites scattered around the city, there are nonetheless a number of building opportunities throughout Lower Manhattan, a number of which are indicated. In addition to sites on terro firmo, the East Side of the island also provides many opportunities for pier-based construction and the revival of an active commercial waterfront. This plan suggests office space, housing, and marine activities either as low-rise or as skinny towers on new and reconstructed piers along the southern rim of the island. Downtown Campus There is a concentration of academic institutions, including Borough of Manhattan Community College, St. John's University, Stuyvesant High School, and several intermediate and elementary schools that form the core of a potential downtown campuss. The suppression of West Street offers the opportunity to create a series of synergistic quads, linking this collection of schools into a continuous place and providing the community with additional green and athletic space. The Lawn Burying the Battery Tunnel approach and demolishing the large municipal parking structure creates an opportunity for a dramatic new civic space, extending from Rector Street to Battery Park and offering sites for development along its edges. |
Any changes reconstruction brings must deepen this formal singularity, expand the possibilities of exchange, and broaden the mix of uses supported. While it is now a bromide to apologize before suggesting that the tragedy can be turned to advantage, to have positive consequences, we must find a way to make things better. Life downtown is going to be refounded, and the imperative is to do it well. Perhaps we can reply to the terror by showing that evil acts can have unintended positive consequences.
In fact, the enormous disruption in the life of the city has already had a number of constructive effects. Here in Tribeca, not far from Ground Zero, traffic is dramatically reduced on local streets, the polluted sewer of Canal Street is suddenly tractable, and deep civility abides many months later. The emergency carpooling and limited access instituted as the result of the disaster are equally positive and important contributions to a sustainable urban ecology.
The radical act of the terrorists opens a space for us to think radically as well, to examine alternatives for the future of all of New York City. It is no coincidence that we have constructed a skyline in the image of a bar graph. This is not simply an abstraction but a multiplication, an utterly simple means of multiplying wealth: where land is scarce, make more. Lots more. There is a fantasy of Manhattan as driven simply by a pure and perpetual increase in density. But while our dynamism is surely a product of critical mass, not all arguments for concentration are the same. Viewed from the perspective of the city as a whole, the hyperconcentration of the World Trade Center was not necessarily optimal by any standard other than profit, and even that proved elusive.
Density has a downside in overcrowding and strained services, but this is not necessarily the result of the hyperscale of any particular building. More critical than specific effects on the ground are the consequences for densities elsewhere. While the anxiety over corporate and population flight to the suburbs comes from a general fear of both economic and social loss, the all-eggs-in-one-basket approach slights other areas of the city themselves in need of jobs, construction, ard greater concentration. Manhattan's gain has been the other boroughs' loss: the rise of the island's office towers historically marks the decline of industrial employment throughout the city and has obliged the respiratory pattern of one-directional commuting that marks its life. A new form of producing wealth with new spatial requirements has over the century completely supplanted its predecessor.
With thousands of jobs already relocated out of the city, a solution to the "practical" problems of reconstruction can and must engage possibilities well beyond the confines of the downtown site. While the billions that will be available for new building -- from insurance, from federal aid, from city coffers, from developers -- are certainly needed to restore health to the enterprises formerly in the World Trade Center, it seems reasonable to question -- given the probable level of this investment -- whether such massive expenditure should be focused exclusively here rather than throughout the city at additional sites of need and opportunity, places development could transform.
The majority of New York City's population and geography does not lie in Manhattan: the island comprises only 8 percent of the city's land area and 19 percent of its inhabitants. Moreover, according to the 2000 census, the residential growth of the island since 1990 -- slightly over 3 percent -- lags far behind the explosive enlargement of Staten Island (17 percent) and Queens (nearly 15 percent), and the dramatic increases in the Bronx (10.7 percent) and Brooklyn (7.2 percent). Manhattan, however, remains the city's economic engine, producing up to 67 percent of its jobs and 46 percent of its retail sales.
The effect of these imbalances on the ground has fundamentally reshaped the city. The great infusions of capital and the artificial fortunes of the last decade have propelled the price of real estate in much of Manhattan to the stratosphere, accelerating the flight of the middle class and the poor and making Manhattan increasingly monochrome. We continue to revere our island as a place of thick, urbane interaction and cling to the fantasy of the great mixing engine of difference, of a place with many quarters housing many kinds of people. Increasingly, however, the differences in Manhattan's neighborhoods are merely physical. This uneven development and accelerated metamorphosis have had dramatic effects, distorting the character of our urbanity decisively.
Here in Tribeca, we are at the end of a familiar cycle in which a neighborhood moves from a mix of warehouses, manufacturing, offices, and housing, to an "artististic" neighborhood, and now to the climax form of gentrification, an extreme-high-end residential quartier. The corollary is that the jobs and people formerly employed here have either been eliminated or moved elsewhere: to the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx, to low-wage environments offshore, to the suburbs, or to the new bohemias of Williamsburg or Long Island City. We have scrupulously preserved the architectural character of Tribeca but at the expense of its human character.
With the exception of Chinatown, Manhattan south of 110th Street has become a faded mosaic of former ethnic enclaves and cultural variety. Increasingly, the city's ethnic and cultural quarters are being solidified outside the borough, in Flushing, Greenpoint, Dumbo (Down Underneath Manhattan Bridge), or Atlantic Avenue. Although the city remains a beacon for immigrants -- both from abroad and at home -- the sites of intake and expression are not what they were, preserved to death. Manhattan is ceasing to be a place to get a start and becoming inhospitable to striving, less and less like New York.
But big changes can also suggest big opportunities for burgeoning neighborhoods struggling to find form or merely to keep up. Not all disaggregation leads to sprawl. Better, perhaps, to call it reaggregation, but it is also a notion that can be useful in cultivating character and encouraging development within more traditional, compact cities like New York, itself the central place for an enormous region. The point is not to make New York more like Phoenix or Los Angeles, but to make the city as a whole more like New York.
Because of its dynamic population and superb movement infrastructure, New York City can become a model of a new kind of polycentric metropolis, with Manhattan remaining its centro di tutti centri, its concentrated vitality unsapped. In fact, Manhattan is itself already polycentric: the disaggregation represented by, for example, the easy movement of financial and legal services firms from Downtown to Midtown in recent years suggests that there is a certain fluidity to the idea of proximity within the city, that convenient movement and strong local character can substitute for immediate adjacency within an overall context of density.
Reinforcing New York's special polycentricity would return the city to something of its pre-twentieth-century character by restoring a network of autonomous, comprehensible places. Such a "village" structure -- the origin of the great city of variegated neighborhoods -- is again made possible by the technology behind the ephemeral and flexible nets and flows of the twenty-first century. Because it is aspatial, this malleability need not simply lead to generic sprawl but can fit within -- and reinforce -- preexisting infrastructures of neighborhood difference.
Cultivating this "natural" polycentricity would multiply opportunities for more self-sufficient neighborhoods where people walk to work, to school, to recreation, and to culture. Such places would also satisfy many of the needs that impel people to seek the densities and economies of the suburbs and edge cities. By regenerating local character, the energy of intracity reaggregation could reinforce the expressive singularity of each of these neighborhoods to which its energies were applied -- the Asian flavor of Flushing, the Latin-American atmosphere of the Bronx Hub, the African cultures of Harlem.
This would be an advance on the wing-and-a-prayer style of current planning, in which good intentions are simultaneously frustrated by imprecise plans and the absence of economic drivers to set them in motion before changing times render them irrelevant. By joining physical planning to direct investment and to zoning and economic incentives, we can redistribute uses to a set of centers outside Manhattan where Land and transit connections are available and economical, places like Flushing, Jamaica, Queens Plaza, Sunnyside, the Bronx Hub, St. George, and downtown Brooklyn, among others. These sites -- also identified in the report of the Group of 35 -- are not mysterious either in their needs or their suitability.
Planning comprehensively could help assure the mixed-use character of these places by including residential construction matched to the numbers of new workplaces, a pattern that has already begun downtown, where substantial office space has actually been eliminated by conversion to residential use. Indeed, in the last ten years, forty office buildings have been converted to residential use downtown, part of an 18 percent population growth in the area below Canal Street. The sense of locality grows from a well-finessed mix would be further reinforccd by the decentralization of cultural growth (the City Opera. the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Met, and the Jets are all seeking space) and by encouraging the development of new cultural, health care, educational, and commercial institutions to enhance the variety and life of these neighborhood centers.
It is critical, however, that these centers be envisioned and planned semiautononmous and not simply as ancillary. Downtown Brooklyn is already one of the largest "central places" in America but continues to be thought of as a back office for Manhattan. The key is zoning for sustainability and difference, not simply for a series of mini-Manhattans. Although the skyscraper is a preeminent symbol of twentieth-century technology and of the culture of the corporation, other paradigms must now emerge as values change. The economic driver that has impelled these heights will be usefully moderated in smaller centers that foreground strong environmental values and in which land prices are restrainedly moderate.
Lower Manhattan is the commercial district with the highest public transportation usage in the Country; 80 percent of those who come to work there -- 350,000 people a day -- arrive on mass transit. A comprehensive reexamination and reinforcement of this pattern are crucial to sustaining the city but must be approached noncentrifugally to facilitate movement not simply in and out of Manhattan but between the developing centers of lived life, reinforcing the repatterning. Our waterways, in particular, offer a tremendous opportunity for creating such links with great economy. In addition, the citys large areas of public greenspace and municipally owned property can be used to begin to create a third transport net -- for pedestrians, bikers, and nonaggressive zero-emissions vehicles -- to supplement the street grid and the subway.
Business as usual in New York City is more than the compulsion to repeat patterns of the past: our talent is creating the new. In the case of downwwn Manhattan, however, it is also important to recognize that this is an area of the city that is near completion: its project of build-out and of formal invention is almost done. The construction of the World Trade Center, the isolation of Battery Park City by an overwide highway, the nasty scale of many newer high-rises, the abandonment of the piers, the elimination of manufacturing and small-scale commercial activity, and the elevation of the West Side Highway are all assaults on a satisfying paradigm of great scale contrasts, rich architectural textures, and pedestrian primacy that lies at the core of what's best about Downtown. Restoring this is the task at hand, and it cannot be accomplished in Lower Manhattan alone. (pp. 197-207.)
MICHAEL SORKIN is the principal of the Michael Sorkin Studio in New York City and is the Director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College of New York. Recent projects include master-planning in Hamburg and Schwerin, Germany, planning for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, campus planning at the University of Chicago, and studies of the Manhattan waterfront and Arverne, Queens.
His books include Variations on a Theme Park, Exquisite Corpse,
Local Code, Wiggle, Some Assembly Required, Other
Plans, and The Next Jerusalem.
SHARON ZUKIN is Broeklundian Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the City University Graduate Center in New York. Her books include Loft Living, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World, and The Cultures of Cities as well as Beyond Marx and Tito and the edited volumes Structures of Capital (with Paul DiMaggio) and Industrial Policy. She has written extensively about culture and economic change in cities, especially in New York, and is now writing a book about shopping and cultures of consumption. Landscapes of Power won the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
