I hate Pataki

Every morning, I look at all the local headlines and opinion pieces in the five New York dailies. I also check local blogs (like Curbed and Gothamist) and weekly papers and magazines. I chose 10-20 of them (which is actually about how many there are that relate to urban planning, preservation, or public art--the issues the organization deals with) and circulate links to them around the office. It's great fun--I try to do it in 30-40 minutes--and, as a result, I have as good an idea what's in the papers as anyone.

Before I started doing that, I had to follow the World Trade Center site redevelopment effort, both by reading the papers and going to meetings. At the meetings, I learned about the Freedom Center and was initially very wary. I worried that it was a mushy concept that just didn't make much sense, throwing the word "freedom" around constantly (like Bush does) renders it meaningless, and that it would be a right-wing propoganda mouthpiece. Although it didn't make me feel better about my middle concern, the founders' presentations allayed my first and, especially, last fear. If nothing else, they're very sincere--they want to be legitimately fair and balanced in telling a generally uplifting story. (And I mean "legitimately" both as a dig at Fox News and to signify that they're not going to make excuses for atrocities. That is, none of your activity #2, which is a hilarious tactic. Let me know how it works out.)

So I've been following the Post's incredibly loud, vicious, and misleading campaign to get rid of the Freedom Center. It's founded on the idea that the Freedom Center will inevitably be a bastion of the far left and "blame America-ism," that it's a Trojan Horse for those dastardly academics to have their crazy ivory tower views foisted on America, and that it will disrespect those killed in 9/11. In the campaign's early stages, the Post, whose idea of what should be done is to rebuild the Twin Towers--great nostalgic, thoughtless idea, lousy realistic or forward-thinking idea--and other critics (Debra Burlingame!) either entirely ignored or seemed not to understand that there would be a huge memorial accompanied by a 50,000-square-foot memorial museum dealing only with the World Trade Center and 9/11. That is, the Freedom Center was never intended as the interpretive portion of the memorial; rather, it was intended to complement the memorial. At long last, even the Daily News, which was writing similar editorials for a long time, caught on.

There are legitimate cases to be made against the Freedom Center. You make them both--insipidness (which I agree with) and "anything that deviates from remembrance of the dead and memorialization of our terrible loss strikes me as incredibly risky, not to say presumptuous." Both can also be argued against. The memorial mission statement says, "May the lives remembered, the deeds recognized, and the spirit reawakened be eternal beacons, which reaffirm respect for life, strengthen our resolve to preserve freedom, and inspire an end to hatred, ignorance and intolerance." It also says, "The memorial is to ... Evoke the historical significance and worldwide impact of September 11, 2001." As its founders point out, the Freedom Center, in the memorial quadrant of the site, assuredly does not clash with those statements. (They might be misguided. They were also the subject of a public process; this isn't the case of some decisions being handed down from on high in secret.)

I'm still struggling with 9/11. To me, it was a direct attack on New York City that was meant as a bizarre, despicable indirect attack on the United States. (My view and its expression are subject to change.) I think it was a last gasp attempt to fend off a culture and society that's a lot healthier. This means that it was a reaction to U.S. actions and, more broadly, Western actions. In no way does this make it right, justified, or anything else that would signify it was acceptable. But this was only its indirect attack. The people 9/11 killed were just regular people. The buildings, symbolic or not, were an essential part of New York City. The memorial must focus on these things. Anything else, like you say, is "incredibly risky," though potentially worthwhile.

Frankly, I don't understand why the Freedom Center has to be on the World Trade Center site. It makes sense there, but it makes sense elsewhere, too. The Post chose not to concentrate on this legitimate argument. Instead, it went nuts and failed to engage with the elephant in the room: What does 9/11 mean to the country and to the world? It's a vital question that the Post gives extremely short shrift. And Pataki gave into these people.

We're getting into dangerous territory now, where people want to ensure that the memorial neither freezes the past as a graveyard nor forgets why it's there. Everyone needs to push and pull--it's democratic. This is a big win for the Post's faction, and it's due to Pataki's inability to predict consequences of guidelines he helped create and a plan he unilaterally selected. The Post doesn't like any part of Pataki's plan, except for the idea of keeping building off the footprints. Motivated by rage, unthinking, it'll want the whole thing undone. Pataki's failure of leadership, his failure of vision, his motivation by crass short-term politic goals (be the governor who rebuilt Lower Manhattan, then be president--a pipe dream if ever I heard of one) have all led to this point. If he encounters the slightest resistence, he'll yield. I don't believe he's ever made a principled decision in his life.

I think we've been moving too fast at the World Trade Center site. We don't understand. Decisions haven't been made because they're right, but because they were expedient. (Yeats is back.) If we understood what 9/11 means, maybe we could make expedient decisions.

Sometimes it's worthwhile to plunge ahead blindly. You can learn a lot by doing that. But we're not plunging. We're taking baby steps in one direction, then scurrying back into another. We're not getting anywhere doing this. Maybe it's time to take a breather and wait for someone other than Pataki to come up with a plan.