The World Trade Centre not only dominated the skyscape of New York, but towered over the American imagination. Darryl Pinckney, who watched it being built, mourns the loss of a landmark
No one I know loved the World Trade Centre, or recalled their first visits to it, in the way that they remember being taken by grandparents up to the observation floor of the Empire State Building. I don’t know of any city poets who sang the praises of the two towers in the way that an earlier generation put the Empire State Building into the city’s literature. When the World Trade Centre was being built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I minded that the Empire State Building would no longer be the tallest building in the world.
The World Trade Centre was up and running by the time I was a student uptown in Morningside Heights at Columbia University in the mid Seventies, but the tip of Manhattan was not a place my friends and I went for off-campus fun. Back then, it was a district of city government, federal court houses and Wall Street; a district where parents or brothers-in-law worked, not a place for students. In 1975, after graduation, my parents took my girlfriend and me to the World Trade Centre’s restaurant, Windows on the World. I remember the wind and the concrete barriers and the statistics a guide rattled off about where we were, high, high above the ground. I remember the view of sky and bay, and a waiter saying something about the building being constructed to sway. Then there was the pleasant escape up the Westside Highway, back to the normal city life of delis and midtown hotels.
In 1976, some friends slept on the sidewalks one night to make sure they had a good place in the long line of excited hopefuls waiting to be cast as extras in the Kong-falls-to-earth scene of the remake of King Kong, starring Jessica Lange. Local television and newspapers were full of pictures of the giant, inflated Kong lying flat in the street, then hoisted and clutching the sides of one of the towers. There were publicity stunts and jokes about what Kong ought to do while up there. But by that time the impulse of many New Yorkers to be suspicious of change had been conquered. The twin towers of the World Trade Centre were a fact, an engineering feat, a dramatic feature of the skyline, the gates to Manhattan. The World Trade Centre came into its own as a symbol of New York during the power blackout of 1977. They were monolithic silhouettes against the summer night, sharing the fate of all buildings.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, out-of-town visitors were a reason to go to Trinity Church and the World Trade Centre, those points of interest below Canal Street and Chinatown. But the area around Wall Street was largely deserted at night. I never went there, and knew no one who worked there, but wherever you were on your night out in lower Manhattan Greenwich Village, SoHo, Brooklyn Heights they were there, the eye swept down this or that avenue and came to the emphatic, aggressive, soaring concrete prongs. Then came the real estate and junk bond booms of the 1980s, and downtown began to change loft conversions, new towers, the reclaiming of Battery Park, the reawakening of the riverfront. The World Trade Centre had become part of the skyline and also part of a neighbourhood.
The destruction of the World Trade Centre obliterated a neighbourhood, a small city, and millions looked on helplessly. People in the State Office building up in Harlem, on West 125th Street, which only last month had a party to welcome Bill Clinton, had a clear view of the north tower smoking against the sunny morning. As they watched, a second hijacked jet roared straight down along Manhattan and then banked. A friend who phoned me from his publishing office in Tribeca said as smoke rose and firemen and policemen were rushing in that fatal direction, that although it was superficial of him to be thinking that the World Trade Centre wouldn’t be there when I next landed in New York, he couldn’t help it. In an instant, the postcards on sale had become out of date. A landmark was gone. The next morning, people were in the streets, as if to confirm that the gaping hole, the sudden trough in the spires of steel and glass, was still there.
Film had conditioned people to accept that skyscrapers were vulnerable as targets, but the car bomb in the garage that blew through five floors of the World Trade Centre in 1993 convinced many of its structural impregnability. But that was the basement, and firemen back then warned that when a big fire breaks out in a building on a floor higher than the 10th floor, it is extremely difficult to deal with. The disaster is firstly a story of scale, and maybe the size of the World Trade Centre, its proud location, had, unconsciously, been its protection, as if prestige were a shield. Certainly, fewer US citizens ever thought of the Pentagon, the largest building in the world, as being open to attack. US Americans may feel a greater loss of security in realising that the Pentagon can be hit, but then the Pentagon, hunkered down on the Virginia bank of the Potomac, has long been an object of hatred, unlike the World Trade Centre.
It is somewhat like Lockerbie: the grief is so personal it will take some time to find out that you knew someone after all, or know someone who knew someone among the thousands in and around the towers. In Loss Within Loss, Edmund White talks about the long-term effects of the Aids epidemic on gay culture. For one thing, Greenwich Village went from being a gay neighbourhood to being a straight one, simply because somebody new had to move into the apartments left vacant. The sad process took 10 years or so. But on Tuesday, in a stroke, a perhaps equivalent population was subtracted from the city and the metropolitan area. The worst is yet to come.