January 21, 2007

Dear Governor Spitzer,

The inspiring messages you sent the public in your Inaugural Address and State-of-the-State speech will soon be superseded by the message you send regarding the World Trade Center. You have promised to soon decide the fate of the “Freedom Tower,” but it will just as surely determine your own future, because the high road and the low road lead to very different places.

If you choose the high road, respecting the expressed will of the people in rebuilding the Twin Towers, then your allusion to President Theodore Roosevelt in your Inaugural Address was fitting, because you will be putting the public good above all the powerful interests arrayed against it at Ground Zero. If you choose the high road, then you will be walking in the footsteps of Governor Dewitt Clinton, who, you reminded us, “ignored the warnings of the skeptics and cynics and built an Erie Canal that so many had said was wasteful, impractical, and impossible.”

If instead you choose the low road, and take a stand with those who have selfishly frustrated the people’s desire to see the Twin Towers rise again, then we can expect your term to be one of soaring rhetoric, but the same old political expediency and disappointing results. Politicians love to wear “TR” as a talisman, but the comparison is almost always unflattering and in reality a jinx – because there is no true effort to live up to his measure. We hope that you will be the exception.

If you decide that wrong-headed momentum and ill-advised agreements are reason enough to commit us to a future of mediocrity and diminished expectations by choosing to build the “Freedom Tower” – or, even worse, if you listen to the bean-counters and scale it back even further – then the message you send will be that we as a people have lost faith in the future; that we are not equal to the challenges before us; that the sky is no longer the limit because the city has lost its nerve.

But if you recognize that there is merit in the compelling case for rebuilding the Twin Towers, and show respect for the good sense of the people, then the message instead will be that we are full of faith in the future; that we are equal to any challenge and the sky is still the limit – that New York is still New York.

Partisans try to sell the public the “you can’t please everyone” line and insist that changing direction now would anger as many as it pleases. We think that is baloney. But the truth would not be difficult to establish. Simply tell people we can still go in either direction, that it’s still possible to build new Twin Towers, that it might take a little longer (but with Trump in charge it wouldn’t) and ask which skyline they would prefer. That would settle it once and for all, if the polling were straightforward and untainted.

The underlying arrogance, deception, and contempt that spawned the current plan make it illegitimate. We do not believe that the misappropriation of so much of our time and money can be justified by squandering more. If there were sound reasons for overruling the popular will, then they should have been discussed and examined openly. Instead, arbitrary ground rules badly distorted the process.

Prominent among them was the esoteric “imperative” to restore the street grid. The much-maligned-by-the-ideologues, much-appreciated-by-the-people “superblock” was designed so that pedestrians could enjoy themselves away from the perils of street traffic. If there is a good case for reverting to the pre-WTC street grid, it was never made. Instead, it was imposed on the public by fiat; in consequence, the “Freedom Tower” would require twenty-stories of tomb-like concrete at street-level to secure it.

Minoru Yamasaki intended the open space of the superblock and the symmetry of twin towers to bring a powerful tranquility to the jagged clutter and chaos of the city – and anyone who approached New York from the sky or looked across the Hudson at the Towers viscerally knew how well he succeeded.

When Mr. Yamasaki was asked why he hadn’t built one 220-story tower, he nonchalantly remarked that he didn’t want “to lose the human scale.” Perhaps he had his tongue in cheek, but his Twin Towers, right up to their last moments, were preeminent symbols of an indomitable spirit that believes that greatness and grandeur ARE the human scale. That’s what New York has always been about. Excelsior! Not that we are better than others, but that we can all be better than most of us dream.

We must not abandon the Twin Towers. We need our goal posts back. They inspired greatness and those who saw banality where others saw breathtaking beauty were simply exposing their own spiritual meagerness. In a message to The Twin Towers Alliance last September, Mr. Philippe Petit, the legendary aerialist who once danced between the Towers said: “I continue to think your efforts are commendable and worthwhile” and he reiterated the promise he made in his book to repeat his walk when they again “twin-tickle the sky.” Isn’t it ludicrous to try to imagine him walking a tightrope between the hodge-podge of second-rate buildings now planned?

Governor Spitzer, if you were disfigured in a hateful assault and the doctors told you that they could either give you your own face back or design a new one, what would you tell them? The only possible way to rebuild the World Trade Center is to rebuild the World Trade Center – better, stronger, and taller. Anything else would be an affront and a painful reminder that the will of the people was thwarted, for reasons that don’t stand up. Do you want to be the one who let it happen?

Instead, you could tap into the unity that was so inspirational in the weeks and even months after 9/11. What other issue in this fractured age transcends politics the way this does, or even comes close? We are astonished by the range of the people who support rebuilding and the common ground it represents. It might even be that joining together to rebuild the Towers would be the herald of a new spirit in this land.

We are not trying to derail a project that has the heart of the people. We are trying to prevent something that never has been and never will be popular from being forced down the public’s throat. The mistakes of the past can be blamed on our collective post-traumatic stress, but a failure to correct them now, while we still can, would be looked back upon as a wanton and terrible blunder.

You promised that “No matter how great the challenge – no matter how impossible the odds – our destiny will never be a path to follow, but always a trail to blaze.” This is likely to be the best chance you will ever get to prove you mean that. Remember the Erie Canal.

On behalf of the thousands who have signed our petition, the thousands more who would if only they knew of its existence, and the millions who share our belief, we fervently hope that you will find in this viewpoint an epiphany – because the people long to see their face again in the skyline of New York.

Sincerely,

Margaret Donovan and Richard Hughes
For The Twin Towers Alliance

 

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