Wall Street, that narrow ghetto of passions, where the hoarse futures traders, elderly messengers, and young runners rub elbows, argue the headlines, and grab a quick hot dog before diving back into the fray, the World Financial Center has the abstract ambience of a new conference center. Some eerie social selection seems to have weeded out the colorful Wall Street characters, the old-timers, street vendors, shoeshine men, errand boys, loiterers, not to mention drifters or lowlifes, and left only men and women in dark suits and gray flannel decorously passing each other in cool, neutral hallways.
Many of the people who work in the World Financial Center are commuters from the tri-state area. What the center gives them is a work environment that quarantines them from the city: they can arrive on trains or commuter buses, take the elevator to their desks, do all errands within the connected buildings, and never have to interact with the ungainly streets of New York. The sadness of Battery Park City is that it may never feel part of the city; its smugness is that it may not want to be.
New Yorkers who work elsewhere have little reason to travel to the World Financial Center for shopping, since most of its retail outlets are branches of ubiquitous stores. There is, of course, the Winter Garden, the World Financial Center's dramatic indoor public space, with its sixteen palm trees and frequent free performances. At first I was swept away by the improbably giddy grandeur of the place: its ribbed, vaulted glass roof, its immense staircase ideal for royal balls. On subsequent visits I felt hemmed in by the retail outlets and food courts that made it seem less a true public space than a leftover from mall shopping. The celebrated palm trees, meant to suggest columns, are forbidding and severe, thanks to their spiky, plasticlike bark—not a tree you want to get close to. I would have preferred a real winter garden, lush, verdant, and steamy.
The Winter Garden has recently been restored and reopened (it had tobe closed, after taking a heavy blow from a pedestrian bridge shoved into its midsection on September 11, 2001). One feels guilty picking on Battery Park City after all it has gone through since September 11. Before that grim event, the complex was on a roll, full of new construction projects, its desirability as an address unquestioned. Then came the attack on the World Trade Center: residents living in nearby Battery Park City had to be evacuated; many could not return to their apartments for half a year or more; and once they were back, they were forced to deal with ashes, inoperative telephones, and damaged property, worry about toxic air, and bear witness to the solemn excavation at Ground Zero and the uncanny absence of the Twin Towers.
3 THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
T HE WORLD TRADE CENTER HAD THIS FASCINATING OPACITY : TWO STEEL - GRAY SLABS STOPPING THOUGHT. THE MORE YOU LOOKED AT IT, THE LESS IT GAVE YOU back. The Twin Towers came out of the minimalist aesthetic of late-1960s Donald Judd sculptures: their only decorative adornments were those elongated aluminum Y's, provoking you by their tight-lipped abstraction, like the filigreed arches on the windows of mosques, or like a series of why s. Were the towers clones derived from the DNA of some Platonic ideal? Were they emblematic of containerization, which had destroyed the Port of New York—the container being that standard, infinitely replicable rectangle, everywhere the same height, length, and depth? Shining like aluminum altars, 1,350 feet tall, the Twin Towers were our Stonehenge. Their architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was asked why he made two of them,side by side, instead of one gigantic structure, and he is said to have replied (the story may be apocryphal, but it's a good one anyhow) that double the height would have destroyed human scale.
I never found them offensive or overbearing, but neither did I love them; they didn't invite dislike, they were well-mannered
Many of the people who work in the World Financial Center are commuters from the tri-state area. What the center gives them is a work environment that quarantines them from the city: they can arrive on trains or commuter buses, take the elevator to their desks, do all errands within the connected buildings, and never have to interact with the ungainly streets of New York. The sadness of Battery Park City is that it may never feel part of the city; its smugness is that it may not want to be.
New Yorkers who work elsewhere have little reason to travel to the World Financial Center for shopping, since most of its retail outlets are branches of ubiquitous stores. There is, of course, the Winter Garden, the World Financial Center's dramatic indoor public space, with its sixteen palm trees and frequent free performances. At first I was swept away by the improbably giddy grandeur of the place: its ribbed, vaulted glass roof, its immense staircase ideal for royal balls. On subsequent visits I felt hemmed in by the retail outlets and food courts that made it seem less a true public space than a leftover from mall shopping. The celebrated palm trees, meant to suggest columns, are forbidding and severe, thanks to their spiky, plasticlike bark—not a tree you want to get close to. I would have preferred a real winter garden, lush, verdant, and steamy.
The Winter Garden has recently been restored and reopened (it had tobe closed, after taking a heavy blow from a pedestrian bridge shoved into its midsection on September 11, 2001). One feels guilty picking on Battery Park City after all it has gone through since September 11. Before that grim event, the complex was on a roll, full of new construction projects, its desirability as an address unquestioned. Then came the attack on the World Trade Center: residents living in nearby Battery Park City had to be evacuated; many could not return to their apartments for half a year or more; and once they were back, they were forced to deal with ashes, inoperative telephones, and damaged property, worry about toxic air, and bear witness to the solemn excavation at Ground Zero and the uncanny absence of the Twin Towers.
3 THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
T HE WORLD TRADE CENTER HAD THIS FASCINATING OPACITY : TWO STEEL - GRAY SLABS STOPPING THOUGHT. THE MORE YOU LOOKED AT IT, THE LESS IT GAVE YOU back. The Twin Towers came out of the minimalist aesthetic of late-1960s Donald Judd sculptures: their only decorative adornments were those elongated aluminum Y's, provoking you by their tight-lipped abstraction, like the filigreed arches on the windows of mosques, or like a series of why s. Were the towers clones derived from the DNA of some Platonic ideal? Were they emblematic of containerization, which had destroyed the Port of New York—the container being that standard, infinitely replicable rectangle, everywhere the same height, length, and depth? Shining like aluminum altars, 1,350 feet tall, the Twin Towers were our Stonehenge. Their architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was asked why he made two of them,side by side, instead of one gigantic structure, and he is said to have replied (the story may be apocryphal, but it's a good one anyhow) that double the height would have destroyed human scale.
I never found them offensive or overbearing, but neither did I love them; they didn't invite dislike, they were well-mannered
Similar Books
