Can the early 1900s canyons of Lower Manhattan serve 21st-century commerce?
Debating the Future of the World’s Financial Capital
Architectural Record , November 2001
Even as the 16 acres over which the World Trade Center once stood still smoldered at the tip of Manhattan, ideas for rebuilding the site poured out in public forums and flooded the desks of officials and op-ed pages. They tended to fall into four categories: make a defiant gesture (“build ‘em back bigger!”); rebuild the Center largely as it was as fast as possible (the pragmatic approach intended to stem the short-term losses to businesses and the city); don’t build anything (but instead create a serene monument to the victims); make a more modest, affirmative gesture (suggestions included a museum of world culture or an international anti-terrorism center).
Ad hoc commissions and committees began forming for the purpose of guiding the reconstruction even as thousands of victims remained unaccounted for and final removal of the wreckage seemed months away. Although this could be seen as architectural ambulance chasing, New York practitioners waded immediately into the emerging fray, since they are all too well acquainted with the currency of ego and influence that steers endeavors that are the proper purview of architects into the hands of others more skilled at working the levers of power.
Who can rebuild?
In early October, for example, Larry Silverstein, whose Silverstein Properties led a consortium that leased Towers 1 and 2 only last July, pledged to rebuild on the site, describing four towers of 50 to 55 stories and about 2.5 million square feet each. This idea is “very preliminary,” according to his spokesman, Steve Solomon. Silvestein has brought the architectural firms of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) and Cooper Robertson “on board” to develop design concepts.
It is unclear whether Silverstein has a clear right to rebuild, however. The sheer number of interests involved in the World Trade Center’s reconstruction could chew up and spit out any vision, whether grand or not. The land under the Center is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is controlled by the respective state governors. The blast damaged subways owned by the New York Transit Authority, which happens to part of a state agency. Since reconstruction funds will be contributed by the city, state, and federal governments, each has demanded an important voice in what is built. The views of the families of the dead, especially the hundreds of police and firefighters who lost their lives attempting to rescue victims of the disaster, cannot be denied.
Can any form of greatness come of this? Alex Washburn thinks so, but only if people recognize the paralyzing dynamic that can arise in such a situation and confront it head-on. (An architect and partner in W Architecture, he learned this lesson firsthand when he united the competing agendas of three layers of government and two states to achieve agreement on reconstructing New York’s Pennsylvania Station [“Form Follows Process,” March 2001, page 127]. “There are distinct political reactions, business reactions, and design reactions,” he explains. “The most powerful people in each field are here in New York, and their efforts will be brilliant and forceful, and behind all of them are billions of dollars to actually accomplish something. But there is not yet a mechanism to integrate those fields and reach some kind of understanding. And yet the project will freeze if it is at cross purposes.” To develop a consensus vision he hopes to help organize workshops akin to those of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, which exposes political figures to the problem-solving skills of designers and other technical experts.
Is density too risky?
Developing a clear vision for the future of Lower Manhattan may prove a daunting task. The news looked only bad at first, as people balked at entering skyscrapers whether or not they were near Ground Zero. Overnight, dispersal and redundancy became the new real-estate Zeitgeist. But within weeks, this sensibility began to change, as it became clear that fewer surrounding buildings sustained fundamental structural damage than had been feared, and companies began to reckon with what moving away from the historic fulcrum of finance really meant. Many firms are returning as both an act of defiance and because fewer business relationships and commuter patterns will be disrupted. “In the short term, it’s a devastating blow to the city and downtown’s economy,” said Carl Weisbrod, President of the Alliance for Downtown New York, a business-improvement district. “The building blocks–the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, the Depository Trust, the Federal Reserve, the New York Mercantile Exchange–are all back in business and committed to lower Manhattan. In the long term, I have no doubt that New York and Lower Manhattan will emerge bigger, stronger, and better than ever.”
But the Trade Center disaster adds to a long list of problems that have stifled growth and have long gone unaddressed by local officials. Traffic congestion, poor access to airports and commuter-rail transportation; and lack of quality trading space make the financial district less appealing than it should be.
Over the long term, such everyday hassles atop terror-generated fear may make it hard for downtown firms to hire the best staff, which may further propel the urge to disperse into suburbs and beyond.
And yet for many, the promise made by the Stock Exchange’s chairman, Richard A. Grasso, to get the floor up and running–and the smooth resumption of trading days after the disaster, even as smoke still billowed from the Trade Center ruins–represented a turning point. “Grasso has done a fabulous job,” said SOM’s David Childs by cell phone. (The firm, two blocks from Ground Zero, temporary lost telephone, data lines, and air conditioning.) “And he has said the Exchange must build.” (The firm is designing NYSE’s long-planned expansion.) Added architect Hani Rashid, “The impact of Grasso’s speech said to me how important the locus is, the notion of gathering and people–in other words how important the city is,”
Rashid’s sentiments may prove to be minority ones. Most observers agree that it is too early to say how well New York will recover, and how far the disaster’s effects will ripple. Two-thirds of lower Manhattan business owners and many of the lives lost were of workers and rescuers who did not live in New York City, according to Kathryn Wilde, of the New York City Partnership, a business advocacy group. Obituaries filled suburban newspapers. “This is a regional economic issue,” Wylde added.
Does downtown matter?
Could the disaster trigger a shift in the nation’s financial-services center of gravity? “The forces of decentralization were there well before the buildings became symbolic targets,” says Carol Willis, author of Form Follows Finance, and head of the Skyscraper Museum, whose temporary home in Lower Manhattan was commandeered for relief efforts. Indeed the received wisdom prior to the disaster was that capital had left behind such defining artifacts as skyscrapers and trading floors and had become a digitized abstraction, best moved through wires to computer-connected market makers, who could locate themselves unconstrained by traditional urban enticements such as closeness to markets and supply of transportation or labor force.
Rashid has made his own contribution to the trend by designing a “virtual” counterpart to the real Stock Exchange. Yet he argues for a hybridization of the real and the virtual. “Rather than build another world’s highest skyscraper, the tragedy strikes me as an opportunity to build a new urban center linked to information technologies,” he says. “People need to meet to discuss important issues–and cities of the future are already responding to the hybrid potential.”
That hoary reason for downtown–to encourage interaction–may not seem enough when too many people congregated in one place can seem a security risk. But we need to put the utility of a place like Wall Street into perspective, argues Michael Gallis, an urban strategist based in Charlotte, N. C. who at the time of the attack was studying urban-growth patterns in New Jersey. [Full disclosure: the author has performed consulting services for Gallis.] Regionalization of the office market has its place, he says, but, “We do need places like lower Manhattan as region-level hubs. Manhattan has additional cultural, social, economic, and institutional dimensions that allow it to function interactively at a global level. It’s why the attack has seemed so paralyzing not just to New York but to the world.”
Rapid reconstruction of lost space may restore the vitality of downtown and the size of the American economy may assure the New York region’s role as the world’s center of finance. But if capital is as mobile as experts have long told us it is, such an outcome is by no means guaranteed. That direr scenario may better reflect the national implications of the disaster, and the rationale behind t he call by local officials for a whopping $54-billion in Federal aid. Understanding he potential future of finance as a “downtown” kind of business may require a much deeper analysis than is contemplated by most redevelopment scenarios so far proposed.
While electronic competitors call NYSE’s trading floor a “single point of failure,” susceptible to attack, the well-documented vulnerabilities of all-electronic commerce seem to have been forgotten. No one has really yet taken the time to wonder what kinds of physical spaces might augment electronic ones. At which points in the vastly complex dealmaking, banking, and brokerage businesses are person-to-person interactions useful–and what form can they take compared to those they take now? What combination of technology and human skill is needed to understand fast-breaking business developments? It seems inconceivable to contemplate such abstract notions while the grim demolition and recovery of human remains continues, but such urban soul searching may be necessary to create a genuinely vital future for lower Manhattan and the nation’s financial business.