A traumatic disaster of the size and horror of the World Trade Center was never going to end when the last piece of wreckage was cleared away and the last body that could be found had been found. Since the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers, raw nerves have been touched repeatedly.
Perhaps the most spectacular howl of pain came from the city’s firemen, when they were told that their manual effort to find bodies was being scaled down and that machinery was being brought in instead. It led to an ugly confrontation between protesting firemen and police, sent in by the then Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. One cause of the firefighters’ anger was the fact that still buried in the wreckage of the lower floors were the bodies of their friends and colleagues, who had been organizing a mass rescue when the towers collapsed.
One reason why the firemen’s individual efforts were being stopped was cost. New York may be the center of the world’s largest financial markets, but in years past, the New York City authorities had teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. For all his brave words in the hours after the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks, Giuliani was not about to run up further massive overtime bills for his searching firemen, just because they were looking for dead colleagues. Sentiment in politics, in US or elsewhere, is like dawn mist, compellingly beautiful and impressive at the time but quick to evaporate as the heat rises. It is money which now lies at the heart of another raw nerve that has been hit. New York has just held a consultative meeting with 5,000 attendees, most of them relatives of some of the 3,000 who died in the twin towers. The purpose was to gather views on what should be done with the site. This being America, the gathering was billed as the world’s biggest ever municipal meeting. What this initial consultative exercise revealed was that it could also be the start of the world’s biggest ever row.
The owners of the World Trade Center site, the New York Port Authority want to build up to 11 million square feet of office space and 600,000 square feet of retail, around an elaborate memorial. For many New Yorkers, not just those who lost loved ones in the attack, the fate of the Twin Tower site transcends money. It may be one of the truly prime office locations in the world, but that does not mean that it should be rebuilt.
After the consultative meeting, one attendee said that absolutely the only thing that should go on the site would be some sort of memorial and exhibition. It was pointed out that so far, no less than ten million people had come from all over the world to view the place, when there was in effect nothing there. How many more would come when there was.
Draft prospectuses for the six proposed schemes are believed to point out to potential retailers, the immense opportunities offered from the flow of tourists. There are massive commercial pressures on the site owners and potential developers to maximize returns and as soon as possible. It seemed clear to most people who came away from the consultative meeting that any compromise would be one that favored money over memorials.
New York is however missing a trick here. Perhaps the greatest demonstration of New Yorkers’ feelings of outrage would be if the city of money gave up a fortune to remember its dead.
