rainy New York

Through reasonably skillful umbrella use and quick jumps onto the subway at strategic moments, I managed to walk around a very rainy New York for about 4 hours without getting too wet. I was just making up for lifelong New York deprivation, that’s all. It’s a form of malnutrition.

Walking through Times Square with the umbrella and all the neon, I half-expected a Harrison Ford voiceover to say: “It was supposed to be just a week of lectures on ontology…”, followed by a cut to some replicant woman or street urchin approaching me.

At one point I jumped onto the E train to go down to the World Trade Center site, which I last saw in July 2001 while the Towers were still standing. They’ll be opening the memorial on September 12, and the Freedom Tower is 70-some stories already, which I hadn’t realized until reading this morning’s newspaper.

My impression of the site was exactly what the breakfast newspaper (the Financial Times) said it would be. One of the problems with the old site was that the World Trade Center didn’t really feel integrated into New York, or at least that’s what it felt like to me. The Towers were obviously a big part of the skyline, but when you were standing in that area, it felt like you may as well have been on the moon, concerning your distance from the rest of the city.

Now, just as the newspaper said, it feels like the area will be better integrated into the city as a whole, and that seems to be the deliberate plan behind it. Part of the issue is that the population of the area has doubled from what it was the day before 9/11. I believe the figure is now something like 50,000 residents, so they’re planning a lot more street-level shopping than was ever there before.

As for the Freedom Tower, I wasn’t crazy about Libeskind’s original design, nor am I aesthetically taken with it now, nor do I agree with the Financial Times that the final product will be sufficiently “iconic” to mark such an important spot (some of the other proposals were far more dramatic and memorable).

That said, it’s a very good feeling to see a building that tall in the area again. It will be the tallest building in the country when completed.

And the Financial Times was right about one other thing: the American public is strangely unaware of how far along the reconstruction of the area is (I was quite astonished, myself). I suppose that’s because it’s etched into all of our minds as a smoking crater, and it’s hard to get that out of one’s mind. But I think it will be very good for everyone once there’s something that can be visited a few days from now (pools of water marking the outlines of the former Towers, along with a lot of trees and other landscaping), though apparently the rest of the surrounding construction will take another five years to complete.