David Smiley, an architect and professor of urban history, politics, and planning at Columbia University, reflects on his personal and professional experiences surrounding the events of September 11, 2001.
This interview is part of an oral history project undertaken by Alex Bower-Leet in affiliation with the University of Kentucky.
Life Before 9/11
I am an architect, but I teach mostly urban history, urban politics, and urban planning at Columbia University.
Before 9/11, life had its usual complexities. It’s not like it was a golden age or anything. Life was complex and for me personally, me and my wife just had our first child before 9/11, a few months before and so quite literally we were just getting used to our new life. Our baby was three months old and you know I was teaching, I was doing research about the history of city planning. And I can’t say anything other than like life was life, you know. But because of 9/11, we see the world as a before and after kind of world, when in fact, you know, there had been an attempt to take out some columns in the garage at the World Trade Center. And we all thought that was crazy and amazing, but it didn’t actually occupy much of our thought. It was just a kind of freak event, so we thought. And I don’t know what else to say. I guess you could say life was normal, whatever normal happens to mean for different people, but we were happy as can be because we had a new baby.
Beginnings In Architecture
I thought I was going to do archaeology. I started doing surveying for archaeological sites, which means I was the person who made the maps. and recorded all of the information and even laid out how the digging would take place. And I was just out of college, and it seemed like a great thing to do, and I was interested in archaeology. Someone suggested that I should think about doing architecture since it was a slightly different career than being an archaeologist. More in the world than an academic archaeologist who would spend time in libraries, although it turned out I like libraries. And so I got into architecture through surveying and learning how to make maps. Then I decided to do that. I did some construction when I was young also, and so there was kind of an easy fit between all of those things. I decided to go to architecture school, and the train has kept on going. I used to be a practicing architect, and then after a few years of that, I decided I wanted to go back to school, and I got a PhD in architectural history. And so I found myself kind of spending more time in the library, obviously, and reading and writing, and became interested in how cities change, how cities grow, how cities are managed, who makes decisions in cities, kind of transportation and open space and ecology, the ways in which everything but the buildings, all the life around the buildings, but also urban politics, especially about urban decision making and zoning and kind of how people and institutions shape cities. Cities don’t shape themselves. We often talk about cities like a city has a personality, but it’s not my kind of approach to things. I think the city is a very complex place, and New York City is pretty common the most, but it’s actually– most cities are complex in one way or the other. So that’s how it kind of became what moved from the dirt into the city.
Response to 9/11
Well, it [the day] started out pretty early because my baby was just three months old. We still hadn’t even figured out what was what. So we were kind of in a wonderful moment, but sleepy moment. And it was a typical morning. It was a nice day. And in this particular case, in our case, my mother would come in. She would come in each week to help take care of our kid and she would come in in the morning and my wife and I would be able to work. I would sometimes work, you know, teach, and my wife would do her work at home. But my mother loved to hang out with us and with our new baby. And we got a phone call from her. She was on the bus coming from New Jersey and she said, something’s wrong, something’s not right. The traffic is just completely stopped. I could see all the different highways around us. I think they were coming up the New Jersey Turnpike on the bus. And she said, It’s just frozen here, what’s going on? And so I said, well, gosh, I don’t know, that sounds a bit much. I guess there’s always traffic, but no, she said, this is special, some people are acting odd. And so we turned on the TV. And every channel showed images of at that point, just one plane had hit the tower, and there was a fire. And we were completely like, oh, oh, my. Oh, this is just, oh, my God. It was absolutely a kind of shocking thing to launch. Nobody had any idea, like, is this a war? Is this a bomb? Is this a super fire? And then somebody said, no, a plane flew into the building. And it’s just like, whoa. But I said this could be a war. We don’t know what’s going on. I’m going to go to the grocery store across the street and get some, you know, diapers and whatever, because we have to think about the little Leah, the baby. So she went down the stairs and you could see a lot of smoke. And my wife came back about 20 minutes later and she said, on the street in the grocery store, nobody knew what was happening.
It was a calm morning still out on the street. Somehow the news hadn’t spread to the people who were outside at that moment, which was really freaky. I mean, we were just shocked that it hadn’t gotten massively circulated yet. But so she got all the different diapers and extra food and stuff for us. Toilet paper was a big, big item. And we were just in shock and I called, I think we spoke again to my mother and they said they were turning everybody around if they could. I mean, you’re on the highway and a crowded bus and a crowded situation, but I think they were trying to get everyone to turn around. And then it was clear. And during that time, the second plane hit. And that was even more strange and surreal and horrifying. And it was clear that there was an attack and we just couldn’t believe it was going on. And we just wondered, what could this be? What could be happening? And so I said, well, I’m going to go back downstairs to the grocery store and get some more stuff, whatever we might need. So in the space of, let’s say, 45 minutes or so, it was all over. Everybody knew. And people were just in the grocery store. I remember people were just like emptying shelves, taking whatever they could and, you know, just anything because already the water, all the water was gone. The canned soups were gone. I mean, people were just buying anything they could. So I don’t even remember what I got, people were freaked out. And by then it was pretty clear that it had been some kind of two planes that collided. You know, even then it was like, okay, that’s not an accident. That’s intentional, the planes hitting the World Trade Center.
And so then, people started calling each other. Did you hear? Did you hear? The cell phones weren’t even working in some cases. I can’t remember. Because I did manage to speak. I had a small firm at the time and to the guy and the firm, a little teeny office pretty far south about on the west side of Lower Manhattan, not on the World Trade Center side. And they said, David, David, something’s happening. They called me and I said, just get out, lock the door. And they were from Brooklyn. I said, just start walking across, go home, leave, leave Manhattan quickly, because it was clear that this was going to be a huge, huge event of whatever type it was. That was kind of a freaky thing because they were scared. They didn’t really know what was going on. And so all of a sudden it was like, okay, lower Manhattan is going to be a problem, so just go home. And so it wasn’t until like an hour or two later, I don’t remember the exact time between the hit and the collapse. And I think I had been in touch with one friend who lived a block away, she was running to go get her child from a school that’s like four blocks away from the World Trade Center. Because at that point, I don’t remember the chronology well enough, whether the buildings were on fire and people were being told to evacuate as quickly as possible from the neighborhood. Because I had friends who lived down that way, and there were a couple of schools that are reasonably close. And then the collapse was just you know, the newscasters were just in shock and as was everyone.
And so on that day it was just more like what’s going on? What could be happening? And we really were terrified. And so because at that pretty soon on, they didn’t actually say terrorists or something like that, but it was more like the bridges and tunnels were going to get closed. So get out now or you will be kind of locked in, so to speak. I think my memory is pretty fuzzy on the chronology there. But the TVs were just showing it, not, you know, kind of cameras on, trying to talk about it. And then the collapse was, like I say,, you just couldn’t believe it. It was like, how could this possibly be happening? How could this possibly be happening? And some of us knew a little bit about the building and the construction of the buildings. But we didn’t think that– when the newscasters started saying that the planes acted as missiles, and that the buildings could fall. And then they did. And I think we were just kind of awestruck and silenced really into like, what can you say? This is absolutely absurd.. And the next few days, as more information was circulated, we were thinking, Oh, my God, this is gonna be World War 6.
It was already clear it was going to be a day that would somehow have global reverberations. I mean, schools were closed until it was clear. And again, I’m not sure the timeline, but it was first, you couldn’t get below 14th Street. And I think that was, they kept moving it north and then south where it was the boundary where one could go. And they, I think they sealed it at 14th and then eventually they sealed it at Canal Street. And I didn’t try to go down there. I had some friends who lived not far. And they were just told to stay inside. There’s nowhere to go unless somebody uptown or you should just close your doors. I had a friend who lives on White Street and they were just, the police were saying, stay inside. You’re safer inside than because of the debris and the kind of smoke. And they were telling people to mask up. And so our friends did that. I had a couple of other friends live there and they just literally got their car two days later when they could get to their car and they just drove back to that. They were both from Texas and they just kept driving home and they never came back. And I think a lot of I don’t know what a lot is, but people just kind of couldn’t believe it. Other people who lived in Brooklyn had a different problem, if I recall, because the wind was sending debris that way. And so a lot of people in Brooklyn were also staying indoors, wearing masks, more so than uptown because of the way the wind was working or typically works. Yeah, that’s kind of the immediate story. I
Response to 9/11
We know historically that buildings fall down. We’ve been in enough wars to know that you can bomb buildings and they collapse. But I don’t know when it’s set in, but the point that America could be bombed was something that never occurred to any of us. There has been urban violence in our history and neighborhoods being burned. But there was some kind of the idea that it was a building that was attacked, like with a missile, essentially. And then immediately everyone started saying, like, how did this happen in this way to these particular buildings? And engineers and architects were asking, well, should that have happened? Or how did that happen? How come it happened so quickly? And also, if they fell rather– They didn’t topple over so much as collapse onto themselves because of the particular construction. And then, I’m certainly not a specialist, but for several years after that, people were trying to figure out what was the sequence of events of the building itself. The world transcended construction in particular that made it fall a certain way? And was there something wrong with the building construction that made them fall quickly and in a particular way?
And I think in some ways the buildings were amazing, but part of what was so amazing about them was that there was the core of elevators, and then there was the exterior skin, which was also structural. And there were no interior columns. That was the great advancement of the World Trade Center, that there were no interior columns. And some people say that that’s why the collapse was so kind of quick. Other people say, like, if it lasted another hour, yes, a lot more people would have survived. And so I think to this day, engineering and building standards have a bit more kind of built in standards for stability, especially for fire, for the protection of columns and structures. from heat and fire. On the other hand, when you’re talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of gallons of fuel, who knows exactly how that would have affected, but I guess you could say every minute, you know, could have meant another person surviving. I think that’s a story that will remain a kind of part of the narrative of how we need to think about buildings differently because we have a new perception of what is possible with weapons.
On the other hand, it didn’t stop building construction for very long. I mean, New York City, in some ways, kind of had its trauma, but at the same time, it became a kind of perversely patriotic duty to rebuild and keep on going and be who we are. And then there’s another piece of the story is the rebuilding process itself, which is a whole, something that I followed very carefully and we in the architecture school of Columbia where some of us were more involved with that than others. And then the city had its own process and the state had its own process. The history of the World Trade Center is a history of the problem of downtown Lower Manhattan trying to revitalize itself. And the Port Authority, which was the driver, to build more office space, even though some of the landowners down in Lower Manhattan did not want the Port Authority building, they wanted private builders. Because obviously, if the Port Authority builds it, they don’t get any profit from it. But the Port Authority was able to, through politics of the governor’s office and the state legislature and cooperative mayors, that basically said only the Port Authority could build big enough to make a dent and to change the history of Lower Manhattan.
Because Lower Manhattan starting in the 1950s and early 60s, or they were worried that midtown Manhattan would overtake it in importance. And so to build as much as they built, which is essentially, I don’t know the exact numbers of the equivalent of many, many blocks of office building, to build it in one site, in two towers, was incredibly dramatic, kind of flooded the marketplace of office space. And I thought it was the proper gesture that lower Manhattan needed to give it a kind of leg up on midtown Manhattan. Turned out not to be quite the case because there was a kind of a recession when the buildings were finished and the buildings were instead of being a kind of a clearinghouse and office space for all these companies around the world, they couldn’t, could barely make a dent in renting the space. And so the state said, we will make these state office buildings for now. And so a lot of state offices and the governor had an office there, but also huge, and the Port Authority itself had space there. It became a kind of public office building.
At first the World Trade Center was very disliked because it was too big. It wasn’t built by the private marketplace. It wasn’t built by developers. And everybody thought they were ugly. It wasn’t until a decade or two that people began to kind of adopt them as this kind of unmistakable marker of New York. And when the economy shifted in the 1980s, the public offices started moving out and private firms started moving in. And it became a very important address in the financial industry. I have friends who worked for banks and loan companies and other investment companies in the World Trade Center, in the upper stories of the World Trade Center, especially, because that eventually became very valuable. I think, in fact, I had my 21st birthday party at Windows on the World. My grandfather really, like, really splurged. And it was amazing. And so it became much more used, much more part of the landscape, even romanticized as being kind of the marker of New York. And so at any rate, the Port Authority eventually wanted to get out of the business of owning that building. They were going to own the land, but lease the buildings, which is a typical practice in New York City. You can have the building owner who actually leases the land from another owner. And so the Port Authority wanted to just get a rent check for the land. And it was only six weeks before 9/11 that they finally worked out a deal with Larry Silverstein’s company. And so when the buildings came down, Larry Silverstein was like, what am I going to do? Because he didn’t know anything about them other than, you know, the basics of buying a building. And so that made the activities of the agencies, public agencies and all the city and state offices and the federal government, doesn’t remind you, had other attacks on that day as well. But in this case, they had no idea, you know, the kind of search and rescue was kind of automatic.
But what to do with the space became a kind of mind bender. We’re still cleaning up and people are already wondering what will happen here? What should happen here? How do we decide what should happen here? And so I would say, I think by the following summer, there were already a lot of meetings and a lot of discussions, a lot of debates among civic organizations, among government organizations and the newspapers, among architects. I mean, there were all these proposals floating about. You know, should we build a building at all? Was the question. But when it really came down to it, and this is a hot point of discussion is, well, this is still private property. The buildings were leased and owned by someone. And he was, by law, entitled to make the choice as to how to proceed. If it had been a state-owned building, that would have been a different process. But even then, it wasn’t his decision alone to make. And so there were huge conferences about what the people want. And I went to some of those meetings, and I think it was pretty clear to some of us that the only thing that was going to satisfy both the government and the private sector was to replace the same amount of square footage of office space. And don’t forget, there was a huge mall underneath. And so it became a very simple thing. It’s like 10 million square feet of office, 600,000 square feet of mall, and that’s for the requirements. And even at some of these discussion sessions, 1,000 people at the Javits Center have a huge meeting with tables and primitive touchscreens for entering your answers and facilitators organizing each table. But it was pretty clear that there wasn’t going to be a lot of choice because the premise, by my reckoning and others like me, was that the premise was wrong.
We don’t want to replace all of that square footage of office space. We just don’t need it. So 10 million six, we call that. We yell 10 million six. 10 million offices, 600,000 of commercial, it’s like, no, forget it. But we were just noisy and didn’t get anywhere because it was clear that that was going to be the requirement. And many people proposed outside of these kinds of public feedback events, which were really not feedback related at all and you can quote me on that. It was basically a confirmation that the people in charge were doing due diligence by talking to the public. But there was no, in my opinion, there was never any question that they were going to build back exactly the square footage, if not more, than was lost and that seemed like a business. It was a business decision that didn’t really account for some much more dramatic change. There was a competition run by the state, and they were going to pick several master plans. Meanwhile, the New York Times did its own version of Lower Manhattan, lots of architectural and urban organizations did their own versions of master plans for the site. And some of the master plans were for all of Lower Manhattan or everything south of the World Trade Center, really trying to re-vision not just the World Trade Center site, but to see what else could happen. And if you were to look back at some of the proposals, some of them were like a second Broadway running where the World Trade Center had been and go all the way down to the battery. And there were a lot of different proposals about rerouting cars, to build office buildings in a much smaller, spread out way. But there were three proposals, master plan proposals, mind you, and the requirement was to do something with the actual footprints of the World Trade Center. And there are also some other competitions, among many, many other architects that had hundreds of proposals of what to do.
But the one that was run by the state of New York was one by Daniel Libeskind, you may recall, which some of us were horrified by, if only because it was confirmed that the square footage was not going to change. And Libeskind has a kind of architectural and urban vocabulary that some of us see and did see as overly melodramatic and not particularly appropriate. But his master plan laid out a bunch of buildings around the site. And there were two other master plans, and another one that a lot of people liked was to actually build these empty steel towers at the World Trade Center that would actually have no function. And that was much more symbolic and then around them would be cultural buildings, no office space. So obviously that was not going to go anywhere, but it was picked as one of the three, although not the final one. I can’t remember what the third proposal was. It was Liebeskind. The proposal of the two towers, empty towers, was by Fred Schwartz and Rafael Vignoli and a few others. There was a third one. I should know it, but I can’t remember. But the Liebeskind plan is what became a kind of footprint for the location of a bunch of buildings, including the one now, One World Trade Center. Now, the architecture you see had nothing to do with his plan. His was a master plan. So the building designs that you see were not by Libeskind at all. And then there’s the kind of the huge porcupine building, we call it, by Calatrava, which is basically kind of the top of the transit center, which I think is just a hideous thing. But it’s actually a huge mall, for the most part, inside. And so, and while these are going on, there are architectural competitions for different kinds of buildings. I mean, it was, in some ways, very fruitful in the architectural and urban communities because there was so much discussion of possibility and alternatives, more culture, less business, more memorial. So the whole memorial became a second thing. But in fact, the memorial could only take place after the master plan was selected. And so in some ways, the memorial took a backseat to commerce.
Now, the memorial may, you may love it. Some people do. It’s an elegant, very, very beautiful thing. But it was almost like, it was only kind of agreed upon after the footprint of where the other buildings or office buildings would go. Meanwhile, the cleanup was going on. It took several years to really clean it up. And people were studying where the ash went, you know, what communities were affected a year, two years later by the flow, the wind direction. And so it was still a very kind of a project that kind of lived on through almost like where are the ashes? You know, how far did they go? So that became a kind of a problem from day one. All throughout all this is like how to figure out the effects on people’s lives, you know, not the first responders and such, but the people who were running away nearby, the people who lived on the other side of the East River or New York City Bay. But meanwhile, most people were getting back to their lives. I think a lot of people kind of figured, okay, they’re going to do something. And, you know, most of us don’t have much to say about it other than getting back to their work and such. So being part of the architectural community in New York,, it was years long where we all were weighing in and talking. And I taught a class for a couple of years about Lower Manhattan, invited speakers and basically tried to look at it as it was happening, the rebuilding plans and what kinds of interests were there.
But even after two or three years, it was like, okay, I guess, I can teach it again in 10 years and see what has happened. But it was really a long term because we were teaching about cities as I do, things happen quick and some things happen over a very long term. And so we went, I took students to a few of these meetings and we studied different architects who were proposing things. But after a while it was like, okay, we have other issues, you know, Europe is continuing to grow and change in different ways in different places. Things that were a couple of last bits and pieces here were those different buildings. It took them a few years to make them say it to decide if they were safe to enter and decide if they were, they could be rehabilitated or not. I mean, there were engineers going crawling around these buildings, and they weren’t quite sure if the buildings would stand up. There were no other collapses to the best of my knowledge, but one or two buildings, they decided, would come down because it would be too expensive to fix them. There was a Greek Orthodox Church that was leveled and that actually was rebuilt in very similar form, I think also by– it was done by Calatraba as well. That’s still there. And then strangely enough, after a while, it became– sadly, just another real estate project in New York. Who’s the developers? You know, what kinds of buildings? You know, they have incredible amounts of security. How long would it take? How many, how close, when would they open Lower Manhattan? When would the cultural center open? I think one of the cultural buildings just opened last year or two years ago. Not because of any construction, but because of the complexity and the cost that he was going to pay for it, which turned out to be one of the harder problems for nonprofit-making office buildings. Cultural buildings need to have patrons and state monies and such, and it took a long time for them to get financed.
So I think what ended up happening was it just became another piece of a complex real estate puzzle for most New Yorkers, New Yorkers interested in development. The World Trade Center just became this other thing. I mean, there’s still some New Yorkers, I think, who were directly affected. You know, they’re still living with that. I mean, I had one friend who actually passed away when the building collapsed and I’m still friends with his family. But even they are like we move on, they’re building more office buildings. So it’s in some ways a deeply unique and tragic experience, but it was funneled through New York’s style of moving on and rebuilding, even though there are great passions about the political, social, and surveillance issues that have taken shape since 9/11. The kind of security state in which we now find ourselves actually was born on 9/11. And the Department of Homeland Security was born essentially out of 9/11 when it was, we can no longer think of ourselves as somehow exempt from many of the world’s conflicts. Now, that was never the case really, but in a kind of popular way and in a state actions or in the ways in which the state country works, a lot of surveillance and policing and safeguards airport security, all of those things were born of 9/11.
As it happened, I think the story is that some of the hijackers came in through very small airports all around the country. And those small airports got incredibly high security very quickly. So there was a whole kind of securitization of a lot of policies, and it changed. And as you know, anybody who went to the airport before 9/11 knows that airports became the kind of the center of this fear, legitimate and we’re not. But yeah, that’s why some of us think we call it a post-9/11 world. But in many ways, that’s what I think it is possible to say, even though you could also argue that much of the rest of the world has lived in a violent, lived with violence much longer than we have.
The Greek Orthodox Church, I think, opened maybe a year ago. And it’s still quite small. It’s very small. But it became one of those things where it was not very well attended. It was kind of before 9/11, it was just like, yeah, there it is, can’t do much about it. But it was rebuilt quite beautifully in some ways. I mean, the stone is beautiful. It’s got that kind of white marble that Calatrava loves to use. I think it was him. And then the Performing Arts Center, it literally just opened. And, to be honest, I think they shouldn’t have bothered, but who am I? Yes, it’s amazing, architecturally and in engineering terms, it’s fantastic. You know, and eventually, I guess I would say, I hope it does become part of people’s lives. But New York, like just a few other cities, sees itself as a global tourist destination and it will get used.
.Yes, you have to have a lot of money to live down there, which is true for Manhattan and Brooklyn has been changing like that for decades. But yeah, that’s why I don’t go to lower Manhattan very often because it’s just more of a financial center and the people who can afford to live there. Some people like it very much because there’s a lot of really the density of not the World Trade Center area itself, but the rest of lower Manhattan is still built out like the Dutch map, you know, it’s very, very small streets and such. There is an allure to that. But I think that the strongest presence of the World Trade Center now is the open space of the memorial areas and the trees. And I think the only thing that bothers me is that, like, you’re 10 steps away from your office. It’s like there’s part of me that would like to see more separation between commerce and memorial, but maybe New York has never been very good at that.
It’s like in European cities that were bombed in World War II, they built back, didn’t create vast open spaces. But there are other countries that did, I guess. I’m thinking of some European cities that tried to build them back the way they were,, which is even also strange. Lower Manhattan because it’s such an economic driver of the world economy, that there seems to be no hesitancy to keep rebuilding and changing. and keeping up with the tech changes and the economic changes. And the competition between Midtown and Lower Manhattan still exists, even though remote work has made all of it a little bit suspicious. But I don’t know. It’s only been 25 years, so that’s not a very long time, really.
Lower Manhattan grew at first because of trading with the Indians for furs. So it became a kind of commercial hub, which, you know, the Dutch were trading roots all over the world. But my history, my sense of my knowledge of the history of early Lower Manhattan is not that great. But it remained a very important trading post first. Eventually, there was also the production from the mills upriver would go to Manhattan and then be shipped elsewhere. So it was a very busy trading port. There was some slave trading, but most of it was outlawed pretty early on, way before other cities, obviously, in the South. But it became one of the very few cities in the world that had a stock market, the idea that to grow, you needed people willing to invest and to grow in different ways. And so it had a very early stock market, which literally took place in one of the streets. I don’t remember which. So it’s been a growing hub.
And then with industry and the port, it became an incredible central place for global shipping. So it always seems to manage to be at the center of things. When you look at world politics, you have to understand that it’s an economic machine that New York managed to capture much of the commerce and the much of the activities for. And that’s not always something that is invested wisely. It had a large group of people who saw it as invasive and intrusive, economically speaking. And eventually, it became the symbol of America and what’s why the World Trade Center was the key target. There was a plane headed for the White House. There was a plane that headed for the Pentagon. So the attack itself was after all of the Central American Empire, the money, the government, the military, it wanted to literally kind of, they wanted to take America apart at all levels. You know, if that plane to the White House or to the Capitol had been, had been hit, it would be a very, even a different, a much different conversation. And the Pentagon, it turned out, was more symbolic because the Pentagon is too big and it’s horizontal, even though many were killed.
As I mentioned before, I think that many people describe that as the kind of end of innocence of America, even though America has committed far greater errors and crimes. But this was the time where it demonstrably affected us, even though America was not fearful of invading other places. So I have to take a kind of a dual view of the different ways in which America is seen and how it acts. And I don’t want to get into the contemporary situation. But as I mentioned, the security state, though it existed before 9/11, was in a ramp up because of 9/11. And we’re living with that, as are most places, because just because New York doesn’t mean every other city in the world could thereby be expected not also to have to protect itself. So it really did change our perceptions of security and safety and what is normal for countries to do and how to respond. So it becomes deeply kind of raises the awareness of what do countries do? What are the actions of countries and people who disagree with their policies? And it raised to a whole new level the possibilities that social change can be created by horrendous acts before and after 9/11.
Yes, absolutely. I don’t know the dimensions, but I don’t even know how they made calculations previously, but obviously it was insufficient. But there had to be some calculus somewhere along the line that said the stairs in the World Trade Center will be X feet wide. I wonder how they decided that. I mean, there are people who work on this their whole lives, and I’m sure it dramatically changed. The thing that I find the most noticeable is that for large office buildings, I don’t go to them at all. I mean, I have no, I’m not in that business. I’m not in business, but you can’t get through the lobby.
There’s still some buildings around in the city where the lobbies are actually really social places. And now it’s, they’re highly secured and you can’t get passed without the ID. So there’s an office building lobby used to be a kind of glamorous place. And they still are. They’re still, the new buildings have these massive spaces, but they’re not, they don’t quite have that sense of grandeur or even, I would say, publicness. that now everything is like there’s 10 guys standing around. If you hang around for more than 5 minutes and you don’t look the part, you know, the lobbies themselves became less public, even though technically they were never public.
I think this, you know, only sadly from movies and TV, we get the sense that to be a guard in one of these lobbies, you have to act like everybody’s out to get you. Unfortunately, what the training is, I assume. I’m just speculating. I really don’t know.
And so when I go up to visit someone or to go to a meeting, a rare meeting in somebody’s eye office space, or their conference room, I just want to look out the window. You know, it’s like, I think it’s for these people, it’s a daily thing. It’s not that exciting. But for me, when I get above the 20 or 30th floor, I’m just always thrilled. And I wonder how long it took some people to be able to go up that high again. Some people, I think, really were traumatized by the being so far up. And I think the real estate industry was very worried that people wouldn’t want to rent in tall buildings anymore, but that didn’t turn out to be true because they’re building them taller than ever.
How to Honor 9/11
There are so many ways, different ways to frame and think about the whole, the event itself, the historical context for the event, the political context. And I can’t separate them out very well, or I can’t just talk about one. When the weather is nice and I go outside and it’s a beautiful, clear day and there’s no clouds in the sky, I get a shiver. Because I think one of the early, one of their first programs to look back on 9/11, the narrator says, It was a cloudless day. And I remember that. From that media person who actually wrote that script and said it was a cloudless day, that stuck with me. And to this day, I’m still scared of a cloud. I don’t get scared, but I get a brief shiver when it’s a cloudless day. And especially if I see a plane go by, it’s like it takes me back instantly. Because the actual horror of the event took place on a normal day.
On the other hand, I would say the world has been a very unequal and political place since forever. And America has been a big player in that. So I’m not patriotic enough for some people’s taste because I’m willing to recognize that the actions of a country are not always noble, even though we may love our country. And there are a lot of people who, I think, don’t see it that way. So I’m a little uncomfortable with heroism because I always wonder about the social or the life, the lives of many people who suffer. America has always been looked to as a place of opportunity. My family came here on boats to New York. And it was a place of opportunity and it was a place of great possibility. But that coexists with America as a land of blocked opportunities for other people. I don’t know if this will make it to the World Trade Center archives, but I cannot unsee that as well. And I think many innocent people died. But many innocent people have died in a lot of places for wrong reasons, for reasons that are not pretty, meaning they died because of you hear of a fire in a factory in a small country making zippers for some American manufacturer. And I wonder about how we should see ourselves as connected to the world rather than just separated from the world and how we can try to contribute to the lives of others.
And I don’t think that’s the attitude that for the past few years has actually been very popular at all. I wonder how the next generations are interpreting this. I wonder how you work with kids in schools. I wonder how teenagers view this.Who is learning what from the 9/11 experience. I don’t. I don’t really know. You could say there are many other horrifying events that we haven’t learned from. So this may end up being another one, but hopefully it can have some kind of– exert some kind of pressure on us to understand our actions and to take responsibility for our actions.


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