Deconstructing the New World Trade Center

Truth be told, I didn't like the memorial fountains much. They weren't to my taste. I could understand why people liked them, and they were indeed stirring to behold, but I found them dismal and downright depressing. The water simply cascaded down a giant sink hole. Lives down the drain, the drain of the slurry bathtub into the river?  Such a ghastly image.

Where was the rebirth, the meaning of the lives, the resurrection? In the new solitary tower? I found it to be gallant in appearance but only mildly interesting as a structure. For its all height it looked shrunken and ordinary against the skyline from Jersey City. It had none of offensive effrontery of the old twins, which came straight up out of the ground.

"I see two giant pumps, pumps of money," said Rick one day, half mockingly and half lovingly. He said in a voice imitating some Port Authority Bigwig like Robert Moses or some Jersey Governor, in the patois he acquired from growing up in the mountains up in Ringwood as the adopted son of cop.

The new tower looked like an shiny ornament---tasteful yet uncompelling.  It wasn't even the most interesting new structure in lower Manhattan, which is this building in nearby Tribeca.

I knew that the new tower and the fountains were what people wanted and somehow needed. They weren't for me, I knew. Just like the memorial museum.

But I didn't have anything against the new tower and the memorial either. I wanted not to become attached to any of the new. I wanted an excuse to stay disengaged from it, because I wanted to keep the aliveness of the version I knew, that existed only in my memory, to which I could retreat in my mind at will. The Oculus was perfect that way, because the old and new clashed so completely, and occupied different in my mind, and because Oculus was compact and accessible to my enfeebled ability to accept new things about the City, after having stuffed so many things about into me.

In that way, the underwhelmingness of the new tower was yet another relief from a burden, the burden of having to love the new, and make it a part of the things I loved about New York. So in fact it seems it was a complete success for me after all.