Karl Klockars

I read somewhere that this was going to be the last year that they were going to have ceremonies for 9/11 down in the Pit, where the Twin Towers used to stand.  That they were going to really start building on the site and finally, we’d have something to fill the skyline in NYC where the World Trade Center used to stand.  And still, getting close to a decade later, no one is happy about what is going to be stuck in its place.

Well, why should we be?  It’s kind of a poetic justice – plenty of people didn’t like the WTC when it stood.  It was bland, it was ugly, it was a blight on the city, it was just two big sticks poking up out of the ground, it lacked grace – all these things and more, and still we sure as hell wish they were all still there to be ridiculed.  So, my question is:  Why can’t we just put them back?

(Side note:  Once again am I breaking the cardinal rule of online writing – “One must always write within moments of the event being written about actually happening.  Writing more than a day after anything is death.  Immediacy is king.”  But I’ve slept no more than 4 hours at a stretch and have been working at 4am for a week.  That leaves you unable to think about anything other than lunch and napping when you’re free from the shackles of employment.  So cut a guy some slack, huh?)

(Second side note.  No one cares when or why I work, or write, or even breathe.  Or that I’ve been absent for a week.  I’m just putting this in here to remind me what I do from time to time.  Back to the show.)

There are only two real options, so far as I can tell.  Option 1:  Leave it as a big, empty spot in the heart of New York.  There can’t be anyone still waiting to pick back up and go to work just because the WTC is there.  Everyone who didn’t close up shop immediately has found different loft spaces or fancier offices in the wake of 9/11, so there’s no big rush to get back.  Plus, there’s the obvious:  It’s a graveyard.  A graveyard on some of the most expensive real estate per square foot in the world.  A graveyard whose tragedy has left its scars across the world.  Doesn’t that count for something?

It looks like 5 guys standing around saying, "Well, this sucks."

Now, to many, the idea of tons of new, fresh office space in Manhattan being worth billions is paramount over the deaths of 2k+ people.  (These people are heartless bastards, but they so often win in this world o’ ours.)  So this leaves us with Option 2:  Put something else in there.  But, the question arises, what?  Well, that’s what people have been spending so much time over the past few years trying to figure out.  But the answer has been obvious from the very beginning.

One of the best things (and sometimes the worst) is the defiance that we have come to know as a hallmark of being “American,” whatever that is.  Almost all of us have got a streak of cowboy running through us somewhere.  So it shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise to think that we should just stick the towers right back up there – not without improvements, and not without security additions, but two more towers, right back where they were.

When a bully comes along and kicks your toys all over the sandbox, the way you answer that is by getting your Tonka trucks back and putting them in the line just how you had ‘em.  No one gets to come into our sandbox and mess with our stuff.  So when you let the big kid know that he’s not going to screw around with our playtime, you send a message.  It doesn’t say: come do it again.  It says – you can’t affect me.  You can’t hurt us like you want to.  You don’t get to have that kind of power over us.

All the attempts to put meaning into a building are great – the Freedom Tower that is going up on the site looks nice and shiny, but it’s an empty feel-good kind of “I’m okay you’re okay here’s a new building let’s kinda pretend there weren’t two here a decade ago” move.  Dimensions are the same or similar to the WTC towers.  Observation decks and platforms will be at the same height as the two buildings.  It’ll be 1776 feet total, not that having the year of our independence related to this is meaningful at all.  Why not add a few more feet and make it 2001 feet tall?  (Except to numerologists.  For what that’s worth.)

None of this matters, because we should put two buildings on the same spots, at the same heights and of the same dimensions as the old buildings.  Shine them up, make them a little flashier and up to date – not carbon copies, laws no.  But something to say that this is our sandbox.  No one can come in here and mess up our sandcastles.

We’ve kicked back at those that did it (and more, because we’re a spastic tempermental child who seems to lash out when we get hit) and now it’s time to organize our toys again.  Perhaps bringing back the visual symbols of that day would serve to remind us of all the other things that those bullies in the sandbox helped to take away from us in the ensuing years.  Wikipedia quotes owner Larry Silverstein as saying “By 2012 we should have a completely rebuilt
World Trade Center more magnificent, more spectacular than it ever was.”  I don’t want it more spectacular.  I want it back.  Maybe with a nicer bow tied around it, but back, in defiance.

Every September 11th, the History and Discovery Channels are going to trot out the same old documentaries about how the towers were built, the process of the construction, interviews with the builders and administrators and so on.  I’d like to see a coda tacked onto all of them.  “In the wake of the September 11th attacks, there was much discussion about what to do with the site of the Twin Towers.  In the end, after an aborted effort at a so-called Freedom Tower, it was decided that the best statement that any building could send to the world is this:  We are still here.“