THE most brilliant political gambit in the past week took place in full public view on Tuesday, when the six designs for the World Trade Center site were released.
Did I call them designs? They weren’t really designs at all. Rather, they were scapegoats in design form. And they served their purpose brilliantly. Everybody with a bone to pick or an ax to grind went after the designs with a vengeance. They’ve been torn to shreds. Nobody has a good word to say about them.
The buildings are too big. The memorial is too small. The memorial is in the wrong place. There’s too much retail space. They’re clunky. There’s not enough beauty. A critic at another newspaper even suggested the designs are failures because they don’t take into account just how much America is hated by the rest of the world.
Sounds like a big failure? Actually, the proceeding was an enormous success.
The Port Authority and the Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corporation urban planners responsible for the six designs knew perfectly well that whatever they came up with at first would be deemed an outrage, a monstrosity, a work of evil.
So rather than offer a solitary design to absorb the rage, disappointment and hatred of those viewing it, planner Alexander Garvin and the architectural firm of Beyer Blinder Belle offered up six designs to absorb the blows.
Garvin & Co. know that the various constituent groups vying for control of the site have wildly conflicting interests, and nothing could have satisfied all of them. Indeed, such groups get their power in large measure from standing in opposition. If a constituent group acts like an immovable object, it might be able to force others to compromise.
To take the most poignant example, the families of the 9/11 victims – or at least their self-appointed leaders – are committed to the proposition that nothing should be built on the “footprints” where the two mammoth buildings stood. That’s “sacred ground,” they say, and four of the six designs keep the footprints unfilled as a result. They’re far uglier, by common consensus, than the two designs that use some of the footprints.
Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, we leave the victims’ families and come to the no-growth crowd. The no-growthers exists to oppose any kind of new construction in the city, even if it’s only meant to replace what went before. This view has hardened into something approaching a religious doctrine, which makes arguing with it almost impossible.
The no-growthers are made especially livid by commercial development – even in a place where there has been little but commercial property for a century or more. They’re repelled by the fact that the Port Authority is insisting that every square foot of space it leased out before 9/11 be rebuilt.
Then there are the wacko utopians, who seem to think that Osama bin Laden cleared out a nice chunk of space in which to accomplish all sorts of lovely things, and who are especially angered by the amount of retail space in the designs.
Nobody’s happy. And there’s no question that this insistence has led the planners to create tall, fat buildings that seem bereft of delicacy and understatement.
But I suspect this is something the planners and the powers-that-be consciously anticipated. Since they knew their first designs wouldn’t survive, they used their initial designs to establish a negotiating position. Since they have offered a somewhat extreme set of initial proposals, they can now comfortably negotiate backward.
The resulting compromise will feature large buildings, but not so large. There will be retail, but it won’t be quite so dominant. And as memorial designs themselves become a subject of debate, I suspect the sacred nature of the “footprints” will, too.
Let’s face it: If the planners and architects had come up with a design to rival St. Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel, the institutionalized opposition in New York City would have objected to it simply as a matter of course.
It’s sad, but true: By offering up mediocrity to begin with, Alexander Garvin and his colleagues can conclude this process with a beautiful, viable and meaningful replacement for the nightmarish hole at Ground Zero.
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