Forgetting 9/11

The Rising: The Twenty-Year Battle to Rebuild the World Trade Center, Larry Silverstein, Knopf, 368 pages

Larry Silverstein never much liked the Twin Towers. Sure, the real estate developer concedes, Minoru Yamasaki’s skyscrapers defined New York City’s skyline for nearly three decades, but only because they were “looming monoliths” whose ugliness was inescapable. Anyway, Silverstein adds, the Port Authority had built them wildly over budget—$900 million wasted on a pair of buildings that, by the time he secured their leasehold in 2001, were in a sorry state.

Silverstein remembers inspecting his new property in July of that year with “unyielding objectivity” and sighing that the World Trade Center was below his standard for Lower Manhattan. Entering the Twin Towers felt like leaving New York for a vast maze of lobbies on lobbies and elevators which ascended to nowhere. The entire complex turned him off. Silverstein openly admits that he was not free from a feeling of guilt in the WTC mess. After all, he built and managed the nearby Tower Seven, a cheaply made “shoebox” that earned ridicule from nearly everyone who saw it, including his own wife. Upon entering the vestibule after the building’s completion in 1987, she glanced at the impersonal red marble walls and declared, “It looks like a mausoleum.”

When the World Trade Center actually did become a mausoleum on September 11, 2001, Silverstein, like everyone else in the United States, was devastated. Were it not for an urgent call from his dermatologist early that morning, he would have been dead. He was supposed to be on the top floors of the North Tower, taking meetings at Windows on the World. He got lucky. Others didn’t. Silverstein Properties lost four people on 9/11 and, of course, the buildings themselves, which when they came screaming down brought with them the end to a whole way of life. Silverstein’s memories of the day are hazy: He was not himself, not in control, not the confident builder who had just secured dominion over the two tallest skyscrapers in New York. “I was absolutely staggered,” he recalls. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing with my own eyes.”

But his bewilderment did not last more than a day. On September 12, when the rest of the country was lolling in that somnambulatory unity that comes with collective grief, Silverstein had already put the past behind him. Where others saw only tragedy, he saw opportunity. From a developer’s point of view, the original World Trade Center was a difficult sell. It wasn’t just that the buildings were looming monoliths; people will still rent offices in ugly buildings. The problem had more to do with the plaza between them, which effectively gated the complex off from the rest of the city—maybe a draw for tenants in the seedy 1970s, but certainly not at the turn of this century. 

Now that Mohammed Atta and Co. had cleared all that away, Silverstein understood that he had a chance to redo a part of lower Manhattan, and this time get it right. He said as much to George Pataki the morning after when the governor asked him if he was considering rebuilding the Twin Towers. No, Silverstein said, he had in mind something more ambitious: four towers, two and half million square feet each, sixty, seventy, eighty stories—something big, glitzy. 

Later, and after more reflection, he articulated his goal more clearly. Something had to be done to honor the victims of the terrorist attack—their vaporized remains, after all, had been pummeled into the ground where the towers once stood—but the World Trade Center site could not remain a cemetery. Rudy Guiliani had suggested during his final days as mayor that the 16-acre plot should never be built upon, that it should be treated just like the beaches of Normandy: “a beautiful memorial that just draws millions of people here who just want to see it.” 

The idea was popular, understandably, with those who had lost family and friends in the attack. But Silverstein shot it down. Osama bin Laden, he reasoned, had destroyed this massive commercial center because it was a symbol of American strength; in the aftermath of that destruction, real American strength would not be found through perpetual mourning, but instead through resolutely sweeping all that grief away, once and for all, and building a new commercial center, better than the one before. 

The proposal promised a double win for Silverstein: it allowed him to claim a patriotic motivation for his project, and, since he was the leaseholder on the site, it made good business sense. “I wanted tenants to return to a site that had been targeted on two earlier occasions by terrorists, to a neighborhood whose air had turned toxic in the days after the Twin Towers collapsed,” he explains. “And I also wanted them to pay top dollar for the offices they would be leasing.”

The struggle to achieve that vision is the subject of Silverstein’s memoir, The Rising: The Twenty-Year Battle to Rebuild the World Trade Center, the most interesting book published on the September 11 attacks since the Bush presidency. Silverstein manages to make a simple story of the most complicated real estate deals in American history: the transfer of care over the Twin Towers from a public owner, the Port Authority, to a private leaseholder, Silverstein Properties. And, more impressively, Silverstein presents his story about rebuilding on Ground Zero in the practical, unadorned style of a commercial developer—totally free of the gauzy patriotism that so often obscures explanations about how 9/11 transformed Lower Manhattan. In a meeting with a victims group early in the process, Silverstein explains that he believes “the future of New York was not about grieving or sentimentality.” Instead, he counters, it is “about restoring the beating commercial heart of downtown Manhattan.” This attitude pervades the whole book, and, as anyone who has visited New York in the last decade knows, his vision has become reality.

That story aside, The Rising is also a fascinating study on how age affects perception, especially with regard to how we choose to remember, or rather, not to remember, 9/11. Silverstein is 93 years old and has been in the real estate business since 1957, when he bought his first building. He has dealt with nearly every personality who has passed through New York in the last fifty years. In rebuilding the World Trade Center, he placed himself at the center of an ensemble cast whose state, local, and federal players included Rudy Guiliani, Michael Bloomberg, George Pataki, Eliot Spitzer, David Paterson, Andrew Cuomo, Chris Christie, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and many others—bankers, lawyers, functionaries at the Port Authority, all the unseen lever-pullers in New York who keep the place running. It truly was a battle to get the project done. 

In writing about it all, a younger old man—someone in his 70s—might have opted for simply settling scores. And while Silverstein does indulge himself a little, he is old enough to know that his grievances don’t actually count. He may call Pataki “self-aggrandizing,” Paterson “second-rate,” and Chris Ward, his one-time adversary at the Port Authority, “fatuous,” but he thanks them all in the book’s acknowledgements anyway. For Silverstein, it doesn’t matter that they butted heads and had fallings out over the course of a massive construction project; the work they were engaged in was much bigger and much more important than a series of little squabbles. They were reinventing New York.

“One of the things about being in your nineties is that you realize there is no point in trying to fool yourself,” Silverstein confesses. “You have to look at what you have accomplished with a hard, unstinting gaze. There is no longer any reason not to come to terms with the life you have lived.” I suspect it was the terrorist attacks that made Silverstein start thinking in those terms. He was 70 then and left alive only by blind chance. Every moment he has lived after the attacks has been a sort of afterlife, totally unearned. 

Ever since the morning of September 12, Silverstein says, the phrase a better version of New York has been running through his head, influencing his every decision. It was what drove him to be meticulous in his reconstruction of Tower Seven. The memory of the first version was shameful; the new one had to erase it: “It had to look right. It had to feel right. Hell, it had to be magnificent.” Silverstein was well aware that, for better or for worse, he would be remembered—if at all—as the guy who rebuilt the World Trade Center. “I had begun to understand that if I was going to do something, I had better do it right,” he admits, adding, “I didn’t want to be known as the villain who plunked down a few sterile buildings in Lower Manhattan that had all the character of cardboard boxes.”

And so, for the same reason, he was particular even about the parts of the project in which he was not directly involved. Silverstein played a large part in picking the design that would eventually be used for One World Trade, overruling some of the more fanciful proposals that dazzled the grandees at the Port Authority. And he was critical of the decision—later rescinded—to christen the building “Freedom Tower,” a name he argued connected the building too closely with the unpleasantness of September 11. (“How many tenants would want offices in a skyscraper that was tacitly advertising itself as a target to a new generation of terrorists?”) 

Silverstein’s reasons for the special care he took with the project are bigger than just an obsession with shoring up his personal legacy. He still believes, as George W. Bush said a month after the attacks, that the most effective way to show strength in a hostile world is to defy threats with commerce, to continue to conduct business in the American way, to buy, to sell, to build; always bigger and better. 

“What rose up from the ashes needed to bring back to life a part of Manhattan that had been destroyed,” Silverstein says of his early resolution to rebuild. “It had to be a spectacular complex that would attract tourists and help revitalize a dispirited neighborhood.” 

And accomplishing it required a certain forgetfulness about 9/11. Not of the historical fact, of course, but of the passions and deep emotions so many people felt after the attacks. Those feelings are appropriate to a cemetery, but not to the new World Trade Center, which, as Silverstein rightly points out is, less than 25 years later, now a place where New Yorkers of all ages come to work, live, and play.

Even the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, whose design Silverstein reviewed before the project began, has been put to that use. These days, it is more a place for respite than for mourning. That was always the idea, to wind down the tragedy into gentle oblivion. Silverstein explains that he immediately supported the memorial’s design because, while it visibly honored the dead, it also met the needs of the living. It was designed in the character of a public park, and Silverstein recognized that the new memorial plaza would double as “a sanctuary” for those who worked in the five skyscrapers surrounding it. One day, many years after the memory of 9/11 had long faded from the national consciousness, the shady benches near those two giant waterfalls surging endlessly into the deep foundations of the Twin Towers might be little more than a nice place for a quick lunch break. “Lulled by the soft sound of cascading water,” Silverstein writes contemplatively, “it would provide an oasis of tranquility and for reflection amidst the downtown hustle and bustle.” That day is fast approaching, if it has not arrived already.

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