High and mighty?
By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist | July 19, 2006
NEW YORK is building a 1,776-foot Freedom Tower. Chicago is planning the 2,000-foot Fordham Spire. Donald Trump is building a 92-story building in Chicago. Here in Boston, Mayor Tom Menino wants a 1,000-foot tower.
In New York, the Freedom Tower is meant to replace the twin towers of the World Trade Center that were destroyed by airborne terrorists nearly five years ago. New York Governor George Pataki wrote in a March guest column in the New York Post that the tower would ``reclaim our skyline with a soaring symbol to New York's resilience." He said, ``When steel rises to the sky, it will call us to embrace a tremendous future filled with limitless potential. Most of all, it will symbolize our steadfast commitment to our most cherished value, freedom."
In Chicago, skyscrapers are undergoing their biggest boom in three decades. In praising the prospect of the Fordham Spire a year ago, Mayor Richard Daley brushed off suggestions that the city was building new targets for terrorists. He said if construction was stopped on such fears, ``why don't we just close this country up and just say we've given up? We'll never give up."
Here in Boston, Menino said in February that a four-digit skyscraper would be ``a stunning statement of our belief in Boston's bright future." He said it would ``symbolize the full scope of this city's greatness."
Similar to America's insistence on driving sport utility vehicles after 9/11 -- that is, until gasoline prices began chipping away at the cachet of driving a dinosaur -- it seems that our leaders and city planners have done little internal searching after 9/11 about what gives a city its soul. Terrorists knock our tallest buildings down, and we plan to stick even taller ones back up in brazen machismo. Greatness remains shallowly equated with the brawn of brick and steel.
To be sure, terrorists hardly need skyscrapers to inflict horrible damage, as exemplified by the Madrid and India train bombings. But in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, many architects urged caution about how much ego should be poured into iconic towers. Eric Darton, author of a history of the World Trade Center, told National Public Radio that he hoped whatever replaced the twin towers would have an architecture that would build bridges between people.
``There is something about highly vertical structures, particularly used as office spaces and as residential spaces, that tend to distance us not only from the earth, but from one another," Darton said. ``I'm not suggesting we not build vertically there. I'm just suggesting that we be very aware of that, and horizontal structures to be more connective."
The reality, of course, is that most towers merely accentuate the disconnect between big business and ultra-wealthy condo dwellers and the rest of us. Three years ago, in a speech to the National Press Club, Menino seemed to understand that. Talking about his role as the ``urban mechanic," he talked about having ``created hundreds of acres of parkland, thousands of new housing units, and . . . millions of square feet of research and development space on the drawing board. But human development, one person, one block, one neighborhood at a time, is what makes a real difference in people's lives. That's what shows people that government can work, and it does work at the local level."
What no mayor or government has yet to adequately explain is how a 1,000-foot or 2,000-foot tower makes a city any greater than delivering the above. Daley says the Fordham Spire will be a ``great symbol." Menino says his tower will ``symbolize" Boston's ``greatness." Pataki says the Freedom Tower is a ``symbol" of New York's resilience and America's freedom. Distinctive skylines are an alluring part of a city's identity, but when cities like New York, Chicago, and Boston still struggle mightily with providing basic public education, healthcare, and police protection, and remain choked with traffic jams and even crumbling tunnels, what exactly do their leaders mean when they say a single building inhabited by the entitled makes them great?
At a time when America has chosen to go it alone in the world and Americans consume resources as if we are the only people who matter, this upward thrust of monuments to wealth and consumption is ill-timed and unseemly. Pataki went so far as to say that the Freedom Tower, with its homage to 1776, would recall ``a legacy that our enemies seek daily to destroy, here and around the world." Putting such ego into a building may only make it an even bigger bull's-eye.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is
jackson@globe.com.
