Pharaonic Folly of the NYNJ Port Authority

Watching from my office window, I see the PATH terminal at the WTC site finally rising above the ground.  It will be spectacular, but I agree with Michael Kimmelman of the NYTimes who wrote:

… we waste unconscionable amounts of public money on architectural follies like the much-delayed World Trade Center PATH station, which is projected, even after ground zero is fully developed, to serve only perhaps 60,000 riders and whose exploding cost is already approaching $4 billion, a scandal still waiting to dawn on New Yorkers.

Meanwhile infrastructural crises that affect millions of people a day drag on, among them our abysmal airports; noisy, erratic subways; lack of high-speed rail; and Penn Station. No other great city in the world would abide a station [Penn Station @ 34th Street] like it.

Calatrava White Elephant?

I am a civil engineer, so I cannot help but be thrilled at the sight of the Calatrava PATH terminal taking shape (the elliptical foundation in the middle of the photo) beneath my window at World Trade Center site – it will be amazing!  And the memorial park itself is pretty nice too – I visited it for the first time last week.

Of course, the base of the Freedom Tower looks disturbingly like Godzilla’s foot stamping on Bambi, but no matter.  They’ll fancy it up…a bit.

In the end, as I gaze down at the massive construction site, with more people and money moving in and out of it than some entire countries no doubt, I wonder about that PATH building:  let’s forget the money-losing tower for now.  What is it for?  Penn Station handles more than seven times the number of passengers, and this terminal will do nothing to increase capacity.  It will simply look fantastic.  Is it worth $3.5 billion, and counting?  That would buy a lot of nitty-gritty upgrades for the cars and tracks that actually move people around the city.

I have to conclude that it’s a colossal waste of money, what used to be known in architectural circles as a ‘folly’.  All those bridge and train tolls gonna rise…$3.5 billion and counting.  We will pay for the megalomania of the PA NYNJ directors.  From the Wiki article:

A large transit station was not part of the 2003 Memory Foundations master plan for the site by Daniel Libeskind, which called for a smaller station along the lines of the original subterranean station that existed beneath the World Trade Center. Libeskind’s design called for the space to be left open, forming a “Wedge of Light” so that sun rays around the autumnal equinox would hit the World Trade Center footprints each September.

In early 2004, the Port Authority, which owns the land, modified the Libeskind plan to include a world-class transportation station downtown that was intended to rival Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal.

For a little perspective, consider that Grand Central, completed in 1913 for $80 million, $1.9 billion today, has 44 platforms, on two levels, and 67 tracks.  It was built with private money, and marked a tremendous advance in the design of complicated rail terminals, besides being a Beaux Arts monument.  The PATH terminal will have, uh…four tracks?

If I go back to using the PATH, I will go from Hoboken, left and center, to NYC, at the right, in the photos below.

Pollack Paranoia

Three Days of the Condor (1975) is a conspiracy thriller by Sydney Pollack about a renegade CIA section.  There were a lot of movies then about that sort of thing:  Watergate; JFK’s assassination; Vietnam – any nutty theory seemed to have some traction.  Unlike The Parallax View of 1974 by Pakula, which is darker and takes itself much, much more seriously, I thoroughly enjoyed this film, while I found the Pakula number predictable and pretentious.  I guess I like Redford more than Beatty too.  (I still want to know how they filmed that scene on the Seattle Space Needle at the start of Parallax though!)

Redford plays Joe Turner, a CIA researcher who returns from a lunchtime errand with the office’s sandwiches to find everyone murdered.  Why would  anyone rub out a bunch of nerdy intelligence analysts?  He may be an egghead bookworm, but he’s also Redford, so he can fight and think on his feet like James Bond:  not quite believable.

He forces Cathy (Faye Dunaway) to shelter him, she falls for him, of course, and they sleep together.  The next day, she’s feeling a bit skittish.  He tells her, “You don’t have to help me.“  She replies, “Oh no, you can count on me, the old spy fucker…“  He’s annoyed.  A funny bit; part of what makes this thriller a little quirky.

The film is shot in New York City, and it’s a real treat to see the locations.  It’s NYC in the 70s, the NYC I remember, even when I’m walking around the spic-and-span streets of today near Central Park – The NYC of humungus cars lumbering down potholed streets, garbage on the sidewalk, and grime.  Several of the shots of CIA headquarters in NYC are in the World Trade Center, a deliciously sick irony, given the fate of those structures and the CIA ineptitude that helped bring it on.  Here, the Hoboken train station take on a noir/Casablanca atmosphere as Turner walks away from Cathy, maybe to his death.

Cliff Robertson (sporting a massive, windblown rug) plays Higgins, the CIA guy trying to get Turner:  is he on Joe’s side, or does he put The Company first?  Here he stares at a primitive version of Google Maps trying to locate Joe from a phone call, but Joe was too clever to be tracked.

Joe finds the CIA guy who rubbed out his friends so that a secret rogue CIA plan to invade the Middle East wouldn’t be uncovered.  Turner realizes it was all about oil.  Sounds familiar.  The 1973 oil crisis was a recent memory.

John Houseman is the old CIA hand who craves “the clarity” of yesteryear.  Max von Sydow is  Joubert the hired murderer who has found clarity in “the precision” of his work.  He doesn’t have to worry about which side pays.  He has found peace.  He and Joe have a little man to man outside of the renegade’s house.  Joe seems cool with the fact that Mr. Death (yep, Max has a lot of experience with The Grim Reaper) knocked off his colleagues:  he’s a bit overwhelmed by it all, and asks for a lift to the train station.  This was another of the enjoyable, unpredictable elements in this film.

Joe is not quite through with The Company.  He meets Higgins again, who tries to justify the whole dirty business, although, of course, that renegade went too far.  They have a little debate about democratic accountability with Turner taking the high road, “ask the people what they want,” and Higgins telling him that when they are out of gas, hungry and cold, they will just want the ‘authorities’ to get it done, and not ask why.  He has a point, doesn’t he?

The moral ambiguity of the ending, the unresolved romance, the unknown future of Joe Turner is what makes this movie really fun.  Joe tells Higgins that the New York Times now has the whole story.  He thinks that will protect him:  he doesn’t quite trust Higgins to be gentle with him, despite Higgins’ show of concern for his welfare.  After all, Joubert told him not to trust anyone.  Higgins is aghast – another Pentagon Papers debacle – but as Joe walks away, he calls to him.  How far can you walk?  “How do you know they’ll print it?“  “They’ll print it,” shouts Joe, but he doesn’t seem totally convinced.

Sydney Pollack turns up at the end of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick’s final work, and a terrible disappointment to me.  He gives the low down to Tom Cruise who cannot fathom the corrupt orgy he’s witnessed.  Pollack tells him that the high and mighty, the secret governing class, they do things you wouldn’t believe, if you only knew.  Yeah, yeah, I read the papers, we know.  It’s a pretty silly denouement.

Oops…what if they don’t print it?

9/11

I am very happy that the tenth anniversary of our humiliating victimization by a band of fanatical terrorists falls on a Sunday.  That means I don’t have to fight the crowds of visitors and dignitaries, security personnel, and media hordes to get to my cubicle where I toil for my salary. Other than that, the only observation I have is that the ‘remembrance’ often strikes me as morbid and a bit ghoulish.  Certainly, there are individuals who have tremendous losses to mourn, and I wish them the best, but that’s an individual drama and anguish.  I’m not sure that the articles, TV comments, speechifying and whatnot support and nurture that.

How admirably short and direct was Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  Perhaps we will be lucky, and receive the same.

Batting 500

I thought he would never be captured or killed – I was wrong.  Oh, well, I was right about those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The reasons for my relative sang froid regarding this event are illustrated by this quote from the journalistic blusterer, Ross Douthat:

They can strike us, they can wound us, they can kill us. They can goad us into tactical errors and strategic blunders. But they are not, and never will be, an existential threat.

This was not clear immediately after 9/11.

As with his fellow windbag, Thomas Friedman, as well as many, many, politicians and talking-head wannabee pundits, he takes far too long to learn his lessons.  The sense of those two sentences that are in bold was very evident to me in 2001, and to John Kerry in 2004, and to the writer of an op-ed piece that I recall from the NYTimes shortly after 9/11 (citations, please, if anyone can find it![Here it is.]) that stated that Osama bin Laden’s was a form of ‘politics’ doomed for the dustbin.  Yes, there were plenty of reasonable people who understood what was what, but the hysteria of people like Ross and his fellow scribblers, not to mention GWB, made it hard to understand what they were saying.

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Victim is Hero

Make a note in the George Orwell, 1984 collection of historical amnesiac incidents…or is it?

The NYTimes had an article a few days ago about the quotation that is to be prominently inscribed in stone at the 9/11 memorial taking shape below my office window:  “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.”  As the writer showed, the text is grotesquely inappropriate, being a line taken out of context that celebrates the memory of two soldiers brutally killed in an ambush.  The Aeneid was not a pastoral!  The line sounds lofty and noble, but do we want to memorialize the deaths of thousands of innocent civilian victims of an atrocity with a line celebrating ancient warrior values? The author of the OpEd piece thinks it is a bit of intellectual laziness, typical of the Internet age, when people snatch quotations off of websites without doing the reading necessary to understand them fully.  Well, nobody reads the classics anymore, so who cares?

As I wrote in my probably-never-to-be-published letter to the Times (but you loyal readers, can get the scoop here!) I suspect something else may be at work here.  We want to remember the victims, but not as victims. That’s too painful:  it reminds us of how unprepared we were, and how vulnerable we can be.  Better to remember them as the first casualties in a heroic war against terror.

This fits with the current overuse of the word “hero” in our popular culture.  Heroes are supposed to be people who choose to face death and danger, but now everyone who dies is a hero.   Rush into a burning building and die trying to save a child – you are a hero.  Killed by a falling timber as you rush in a panic out of a burning building, you’re a hero too!  People terrified by death who just couldn’t escape:  they don’t exist.  We all know what we are doing, and we are all heroes.  So nobody is a hero in the end…

Folly at NYC Ground Zero

In 18th century landscape architecture, a folly is a whimsical, usually ornamental building often in a rather outlandish style set in a garden.  The British were particularly fond of them.

In an earlier post, I remarked on a different sort of folly related to the rebuilding of the WTC site.  Today, the business columnist in the NYTimes, Joe Nocera, has an excellent analysis of the absurdity underlying the Freedom Tower now rising at the site.  All this in a town and country that prides itself on hard-headed economic analysis in the context of the free market.   I wonder how the local Tea Party members will feel if they have to pay more to cross the bridges in order to foot the bill for this folly.

A view of the behemoth rising outside my office window:

Trophy Mosque

At lunch, yesterday, I wandered by this building in downtown Manhattan.  There was a cluster of people in front, including a couple holding signs defending the rights of American citizens to build a mosque and community center if they want to.  I asked why they were protesting there and was told that this was the building where the mosque was to be built.  Clueless to time and space as usual, I had not even noticed what street I was on.

A stocky white woman was ranting to a lithe black man with a video camera about how this project is an offensive “trophy mosque.”   She compared it to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the oldest Islamic building in the world, which she said was built as a commemoration of Moslem conquests in that region.  Wikipedia makes no mention of this, saying it was built as a shrine for pilgrims to the site that is holy to Christians, Moslems, and Jews, and was not even planned as a place of regular worship.

It’s hard to imagine the local community boards and zoning reviews allowing a structure as eye-catching as the golden dome to be built on Park Place in Manhattan, but I guess that’s what people in the No-Mosque crowd fear.  The ranting lady conveyed with winks, nods, sarcasm and other broad rhetorical devices her absolute dismissal of the notion that the backers of the project are anything but evil agents of a foreign power – nation? religion? terrorist group?  Obviously they are not what they pretend to be – Americans who want to build a cultural center near where many of them work and live. 

It wasn’t too long ago that Jews were subject to this same sort of vile bigotry in America.  Being Jews, they must be loyal to a foreign entity.  Before the state of Israel existed, it was supposed to be some sort of international cabal of cannibals and bankers.  And Catholics too were treated the same way.  After all, they are not true Americans since their allegiance is actually to the pope.  JFK was rumored to be under the pontiff’s thumb.  A fifth-column of popery in DC!

Sacred ground

I was glad to hear the arguments of Obama and Bloomberg regarding the mosque and community center planned for downtown NYC.  At first, I thought it was a bad idea although I didn’t think it should be stopped in any way.  I thought it was bad because I thought it was part of the WTC redevelopment plan, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would be so silly as to include an Islamic community center as part of the memorial. 

Well, I was totally wrong!  It has nothing to do with the memorial.  It’s an independent organization that has existed for years, as have several mosques already in the downtown area, and they were looking to expand and provide more services.  Full steam ahead, I say.  The opponents appear to be emotional bigots – it’s really that simple.  Muslim = terrorism, that’s the equation.

One letter in the NYTimes today says that it’s stupid to talk of  ”abstract principles” like religious freedom in this case.  People are “scarred” by the events of 9/11.  I guess we should just burn the US Constitution then.  Who needs the Bill of Rights?

Another writer said that it’s as if the Germans wanted to build a cultural center across the street from the Auschwitz death camp.  Of course, Auschwitz isn’t located in the densely built downtown district of a major city – it’s pretty much out in the country, and to build a center there would make no sense…except as a provocation. 

Lots of people talk about the horror, the insult, the indignity of a Muslim house of worship in such “close proximity” to the sacred earth of the WTC site.  Meanwhile, the area is thronged with gawking tourists, vendors peddling memorabilia, the most famous discount department store in the world, Century 21, does a brisk business right across the street!!  Can’t they move their emporium somewhere else?  Then we can start banging on Brooks Brothers’ doors.  Let’s turn the whole area into a somber and quiet memorial to that day of horror…oops, forgot about the hi-rise office towers currently going up on the site…