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"Building skyscrapers is the nearest peacetime equivalent of war."
- Col. William H. Starrett, Skyscrapers & the Men Who Build Them, 1928.
"Who knows when some slight shock, disturbing the delicate balance between the social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?"
- Richard Wright, Native Son
Q) What surprised you most in researching this book?
A) The degree to which the modern city acts as a stage for the reenactment of primal social conflict. In what I call New York's "World Trade Center Moment," this conflict played out along the lines of a struggle between the city's organic, self-inventing, self-regulating economic energies, and the master plans and profit-motives of a handful of very powerful men - among them David and Nelson Rockefeller - at that time New York's biggest banker and the NY State's governor.
At bottom the story of the building of the WTC is a tale of how New York's power-brokers hijacked a public agency, the Port Authority, to build a massive real estate speculation. Their goal was to use the trade center as leverage to expand Lower Manhattan's financial district - in which they were heavily invested - while driving up property values throughout the whole area. It is hard to imagine a more blatant instance of entrenched power and wealth circumventing - and in fact, subverting - the democratic process. So the WTC can also be looked at as a monument to the abuse of public trust.
Q) In your book you draw a parallel between the mindsets of master-builders and terrorists that is sure to arouse some controversy. Could you expand on this?
A) From the late 1940s through the '70s, the urban renewal movement, operating under the banner of "slum clearance," flattened American cities and displaced populations at a rate comparable to that of the devastation caused by World War II in Europe. The result is a city engineered and built for finance, not for people.
In mid-century New York, David Rockefeller and Robert Moses concurred that most of Lower Manhattan was hopelessly outmoded and simply had to be leveled. In their view, neighborhoods like Chinatown, Little Italy, SoHo, TriBeCa and the South Street Seaport represented just so much urban blight.
In 1958, David Rockefeller offered a Billion Dollar Plan for the renewal of Lower Manhattan. He believed above all in the rightness of what he called "catalytic bigness." Had Rockefeller and Moses succeeded one hundred percent, there would be nothing but highways and slab highrises from Washington Square Park down to the Battery today.
Both master-builders and terrorists consider everyday life at street level to be absolutely trivial. The former carry out make their plans the rarefied air of executive boardrooms; while the latter carry out their schemes, quite literally, underground.
Both master-builders and bombers adhere to singleminded cataclysmic visions - either the creation of a bright, corporate future; or a return to the "fundamental" values of the past. Both visions are abstract projections of an ideal world which has nothing to do with the here-and-now.
To them, people are insubstantial - the plan is what is real. When you think like this, whether you are a futurist or a fundamentalist, it becomes possible - even desirable - to push aside whomever and whatever gets in your way. You can justify anything without ever falling prey to doubt, or guilt. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213