Waiting

The human capac­ity for remem­brance is both a bless­ing and a curse. Eight years ago, tragic events unfolded out­side my office win­dow. And eight years later, the mem­ory still exerts a dull pain on my soul.

But this year is also a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Kubler-Ross no longer applies as most of us have cycled through all the stages by now. But, with the pas­sage of time, it is pos­si­ble to start get­ting an his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive and draw par­al­lels to other times. Doing so might remind of us of Georges Santayana’s edict:

Those who do not study his­tory are con­demned to repeat it.

Cruel month

Sep­tem­ber does not seem kind on New York. While most of us will spend time remem­ber the events that, for my gen­er­a­tion, marked the end of inno­cence and forced us to grow up, there have been other dis­as­ters both past and recent that have befallen Gotham.

A few gen­er­a­tions ago, on Sep­tem­ber 16, 1920, one of the dead­liest acts of ter­ror­ism on Amer­i­can soil tar­geted Wall Street: 38 peo­ple died and 400 were injured on that day, thanks in part to the poor tim­ing of the per­pe­tra­tors, who det­o­nated their explo­sives shortly before the lunch hour. In the next 24 hours, in an act of defi­ance to the ter­ror­ists of the time, the bod­ies were removed, the street was cleaned up, and the stock mar­ket reopened the next day, kick­ing off an era of con­tin­ued spec­u­la­tion known as the roar­ing twen­ties, a run that would end a bit over 9 years later.

The crash of 1929, which is often seen as the start of the great depres­sion, did not actu­ally hap­pen in Sep­tem­ber but it is inter­est­ing to note that the begin­ning of the decline started in Sep­tem­ber with the stock mar­ket reach­ing its peak on Sep­tem­ber 3rd, 1929, fol­lowed by a 17% decline for that month. In other words, the spec­u­la­tive bub­ble brought on by increas­ingly com­plex finan­cial instru­ments (mar­gin posi­tions came of age in the 1920s) for the time and spec­u­la­tion in the real estate mar­ket (the 1920s also marked the age of the sky­scrap­ers, with such tow­ers as the 40 Wall Street and the Chrysler build­ing ris­ing above the city).

Last year, in the first weeks of Sep­tem­ber, a bub­ble brought together by increas­ingly com­plex finan­cial instru­ments (Credit Default Swaps) and increas­ing spec­u­la­tion around the real estate mar­ket, sim­i­larly brought the world econ­omy to the brink of finan­cial dis­as­ter. In those short weeks, the US gov­ern­ment had to bail out Fan­nie Mae, Fred­die Mac and AIG; Lehman Broth­ers went under, even­tu­ally bought out in bank­ruptcy court by Barclay’s. Wachovia, Mer­ryl Lynch, and Wash­ing­ton Mutual all ended up being gob­bled up by other banks; Gold­man Sachs and Mor­gan Stan­ley changed their legal sta­tus to allow them bet­ter gov­ern­ment pro­tec­tion; Sim­i­lar eco­nomic activ­ity quickly spread to the rest of the world, almost push­ing some coun­tries to go bank­rupt (eg. Iceland).

The still on-going eco­nomic destruc­tion aris­ing out of that cat­a­strophic month will con­tinue to have a toll not nec­es­sar­ily cal­cu­lated in human lives lost on a sin­gle day, as we did on 9/11, but it is very pos­si­ble that the toll it will take on all our lives (and poten­tially on some lives lost) will be a strong and as long.

Par­al­lels?

After the tow­ers fell, on 9/11, and after the world had man­aged to crip­ple his oper­a­tion, Osama Bin Laden swore to bring the US to its knees eco­nom­i­cally. And yet, it was the reck­less­ness of our own peo­ple that almost became the tool of our own demise.

To say that 9/11 scarred us is to ignore a deeper, and some­what more uncom­fort­able truth: much like the ter­ror­ist attack of 1920, the attack of 2001 did not stop us from becom­ing agents of our own finan­cial demise. And while many of us will still grieve today and remem­ber the friends and fam­ily mem­bers we have lost, the rest of the nation will look to this as an aber­ra­tion, ask­ing peo­ple why they have not moved on yet.

The answer, sadly, is that we, New York­ers, we, the sur­vivors of 9/11, we, the ones who lived through those hor­ri­ble events and can still tell their tales, have yet to receive what we were promised. Sure, one will point to the fact that there is, finally, after 8 long years, a foun­da­tion for new build­ings at ground zero, the truth is that there is still a hole in our sky­line and a hole in our hearts.

We may or may not have liked the tow­ers before 9/11 but we are still miss­ing them. And so, as a sign of heal­ing, the nation had promised us that it would never for­get and that it would build new tow­ers, maybe even higher and more mag­nif­i­cent, as a defi­ant sign that Amer­ica does not give, Amer­ica does not give-up and that ter­ror­ists may tear down our build­ings but they could not tear down our opti­mism nor could they destroy our abil­ity at turn­ing adver­sity into tri­umph. The new tow­ers ris­ing above ground zero were sup­posed to be our phoenix, ris­ing ever more beau­ti­fully out of the hor­rors of that day.

8 long years later, we are still waiting.

Scrap­ing the sky

In the olden days, things were dif­fer­ent: 90 per­cent the New York sub­way sys­tem was built, using pri­vate funds, in 4 years; the Wool­worth Tower: 3 years; the Chrysler Build­ing and 40 Wall Street: 2 years; and let’s not the city icon, which was built after the wall street crash.

Between its exca­va­tion start­ing on Jan­u­ary 22, 1930 and rib­bon cut­ting cer­e­mony on May 1, 1931, the iconic Empire State Build­ing was built in a mere 13 months, help­ing lift the spir­its of New York­ers as it showed that finan­cial crashes may dev­as­tate us but that we, New York­ers, we, sym­bols of Amer­i­can power, can still build amaz­ing thing amaz­ingly quickly. In a way, the Empire State helped lift the spirit of an ear­lier gen­er­a­tion when it needed it most and that is what I would have liked to see hap­pen at ground zero.

Sure, many peo­ple will say that the rules are dif­fer­ent now, that work­ers’ pro­tec­tion and union pow­ers slows things down. The argu­ment might hold water if it weren’t for what hap­pened over the rest of New York: The Time-Warner cen­ter was built in under 3 years. Same for the New York Times build­ing; The Bank of Amer­ica tower: 5 years, injur­ing more peo­ple in the process than were injured dur­ing the Empire State Building’s construction.

3 major sky­scrap­ers since 9/11/2001, none of which is at ground zero. So why can’t we get a sin­gle tower over ground zero?

In 1931, a shin­ning bea­con of hope rose above the city when the city needed it most. After eight years, WE are still wait­ing for ours.

In Memo­riam

Car­los Dominguez, Mark Ellis, Melissa Vin­cent, Michael DiPasquale, Cyn­thia Giugliano, Jeremy Glick, David Hal­der­man, Steve Wein­berg, Ger­ard Jean Bap­tiste, Tom McCann, David Vera.