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Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York's World Trade Center

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Jeannette Latoria
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« on: January 25, 2009, 03:40:01 am »

Pair Bonded (2001)
Two authors look at the creation of the World Trade Center and how it forever changed the Manhattan skyline.
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Credits
Writer: Eric Darton; Publisher: Basic

B-By Troy Patterson Troy Patterson
 Troy Patterson is a critic for EW. He lives in Brooklyn.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, readers searching for insight have elevated a number of related books to the best-seller list, among them Simon Reeve's The New Jackals (an investigation of Ramzi Yousef, convicted of bombing the World Trade Center in 1993) and Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William J. Broad (a report on the weaponry of anthrax and smallpox).

There's also been a run on two studies about the World Trade Center itself, Angus Kress Gillespie's Twin Towers and Eric Darton's Divided We Stand. The first is a tribute, the second an inquiry. Each explains exactly what the Manhattan skyline has lost.

Both of these books detail the dealing, scheming, and spinning that preceded construction and provide sketches of all the principals: David Rockefeller, founder of the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association, who circulated plans for the WTC as early as 1958; David's brother Nelson, the governor of New York during the organizational phase; Austin Tobin, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the public corporation whose involvement in the project was a practical necessity (Darton writes of the PA's ''potential to leverage immense amounts of cash while sidestepping voter approval''); and the architect Minoru Yamasaki, whose design philosophy extended from a belief in ''beauty through structure and technology.''

While Darton converts the facts into an elaborate and highly skeptical tale of urban planning and real estate speculation, Gillespie presents the project, without nuance, as a heroic quest, going so far as to label one bureaucrat's sales pitch to prospective tenants ''a brave show in the American tradition of ballyhoo.'' As it happens, ballyhoo is among this author's prime preoccupations. Gillespie repeatedly mistakes popular affection for the WTC for evidence of its architectural merit. This adherence to Barnumism pays off exactly once, in the dropping of the delicious factoid that the concept for the complex's size sprang from the mind of a marketeer: ''In 1960...the public relations expert Lee K. Jaffe wrote a memo to the study group which said in part: 'Incidentally, if you're going to build a great project, you should build the world's tallest building.'''

At its best, Twin Towers is a nuts-and-bolts affair, offering precise accounts of the site's excavation, the conception of the pioneering elevator system, and the design of the towers' exoskeletal structure. The author's side notes on construction prove fascinating. The flip side of this eye for minutiae is a tendency to dwell on the tedious -- numbing paragraphs on, say, liquor license hearings. Further, Gillespie has the prose style of an android and a high tolerance for banality. On page 170, we are taught that ''a skyscraper is by definition a tall building. The term suggests that the building will 'scrape the sky.'''

Compare this non-statement with a bit from the introductory chapter of Divided We Stand, where Darton writes that skyscrapers ''serve as containers for our interior lives: shelters, habitations, and silos of dreams. And each embodies in its particular form the social imagination that gave it license.'' Stretching impressionistic criticism to its limit -- and, occasionally, past it -- he makes good on that promise to discover the twin towers' symbolic value, toggling between the lyrical and the polemical. This analysis is woven through a volume that finds room to deliver a short history of lower Manhattan's tall buildings, to eulogize Radio Row (the district demolished in 1966 to make room for the towers), to include the author's boyhood memories of Manhattan, and to make zoning laws seem interesting.

Darton's is the complicated view of a New Yorker who loved the World Trade Center but didn't much like it. ''Yamasaki had accomplished an unwitting Claes Oldenburg parody of the modern skyscraper,'' he writes, while also holding in mind the ghost presences of its utopian ancestors. Among them was Die Stadtkrone, the unbuilt scheme of German designer Bruno Taut. He envisioned a city ''organized around a single crowning structure embodying the collective secular and sacred needs of the entire community.'' To use the phrase of one of Taut's admirers, the twin towers served as a ''we-symbol'' -- a beacon, a cohering sculpture, a dominating set of dream silos storing the limitless fantasy of New York itself.Towers: B- Divided: B+



Posted Oct 12, 2001

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,254079,00.html
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