How to comprehend the disaster of cities destroyed? It begins with the rush of analogies: the 9/11 attack, Baghdad, Dresden, the Chicago fire, Johnstown, Pompeii, the San Francisco quake. We assemble fragments and screen them on our own neighborhoods, imagining the high-water mark on our own streets, grappling with what would be lost here, speculating about the frayed ties and deepened bonds that a flood would produce. How would we deal—personally and collectively—with the lost commerce; the failure of public services such as power, water, and sewage; the unleashed misery; the greed?
Living through 9/11 shapes my ability to assimilate the horror. Four years later, Ground Zero remains unreconstructed and controversial, a magnet for bad behavior. Only recently, ground was “broken” for the new transportation center designed by Santiago Calatrava. Just a few weeks ago, the city coughed up an enormous package of tax breaks to induce Goldman, Sachs to build its new headquarters near the site. Architects and developers preen. The memorial is un-started and its features still contested, caught in arguments that continue to bring out the worst in people, focused now on how much free expression is to be permitted in the shadow of the “Freedom Tower,” itself distilled to an imaginatively shriveled, heavily fortified symbol of triumphalist paranoia and real estate go-go.
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