It's Not Easy to See Without Looking Too Far

A New York story about the World Trade Centers, a forced fascination, and a coming to terms.

Nov 24, 2023

Some days, it’s hard to go to work in New York. September 11, a few weeks back, was one of them.

Twenty two years is a long time. And the new World Trade Center is populated largely by younger workers, for whom it holds fewer nightmarish resonances. I know a few people who work there, and they were told they could work from home that day.

It’s no longer the Freedom Tower, a tacit admission that freedom isn’t what we’re all about anymore, especially after 9/11. The name was quietly laid to rest in 2009 by which point the government’s wholesale-lying license seems to have been transferred to the commercial interests with the most server farms. They went on to debase it further, to where even google had to renounce its “don’t be evil” stance by 2018.

On my way to work

I passed ground zero on my way to work this most recent September 11th. On the West Side Highway walking paths, news anchors waited in well-framed shots, paper napkins tucked to protect shirts and blouses from makeup and crumbs. People crowded the walkways and wandered into the bike paths. They crossed the highway to and from the site itself. Mourners, tourists, commuters, rubberneckers and ghouls - I didn’t bother trying to sort them.

I wasn’t early for work. But I didn’t hurry. One lesson I learned from 9/11 is don’t be early to the office.

When it happened

In New York City, the new World Trade Center is visible from roughly as many places as it’s not. We all have a relationship to it, and to its parents. About six months before the attacks, my job took me to a weekday brunch at Windows on the World. The place was nice, with linen tablecloths and silver buffet tubs. I remember nabbing stationary and continental breakfast, and thinking that it sure did offer a comprehensive view of Jersey. The place was well staffed.

On the morning of the attacks, I left my office in midtown and walked down 5th Avenue toward a pillar of yellow-brown smoke dust teller than the towers had been. I mustered by City Hall with some like-minded folks, hopped on a commandeered MTA bus through the zero-visibility soup to the West Side Highway. There I joined a search-and-rescue crew and waited for the go-ahead to apply my newly learned first aid skills from the improvised authority. As thousands of more qualified rescue personnel poured in, I loaded boxes of medical supplies and cases of bottled water onto fire trucks until one or two in the morning.

How do you like the new one?

When they finished the new World Trade Center no one was especially impressed or enthused. The old one wasn’t so special—it looked more like a logo embroidered on a golf shirt than an edifice of note. And the new one, with its crown of thorns and its look-how-tall-I-am radio tower, is even less distinguished.

Like everyone with a memory of the attacks, I had zero interest in visiting that once-and-future abattoir in the sky. The whole stack of glass looked to me like a geopolitical pinata, and still does. The idea of having people go there or else lose their livelihoods seems unnecessarily on-the-nose when it comes to the cruel indifference of wage labor. It’s like spiking the football in people’s faces.

Like everyone with a memory of the attacks, the World Trade Center kept popping up in my thoughts - thoughts that were supposed to be about other things. In one novel, a group of feckless real estate and tourism impresarios pay to have the World Trade Center destroyed by airliner once again. And a later novel took place in the Tower of Babel.

Working on the Babel novel, I decided I should go visit the top of the new tower.

Let’s go see the new one

At the time, it cost $32 to go to the top. But that’s about what it cost to see 3-D superheroes talk a lot of rot over a soda and Sno-Caps in Union Square. Like a rube, I paid upward of fifty dollars to dodge the lines. There were no lines. And it costs more now.

Once there, I scurried down into the basement of the new WTC with a deepening awareness of the quarter mile of steel, concrete and glass above me. I wended down an empty tens-a-barrier maze through the airport-like security and into some AV presentation about the steel-working humps who built the thing. It had the effect of being just tedious enough to salve the nerves.

The logic of a slaughterhouse says you ought to keep the animals calm.

From there, I walked through a cave of fake stone designed to remind the visitor of the exceedingly firm stuff that Manhattan Schist is, and to draw your attention away from the many more likely reasons that you may be buried alive in a heap of mixed-use real estate. The cave is also dark and a little narrow, probably to weed out the panic-attack types.

That delivered me to probably the most widely lauded part of the whole experience. It’s basically an elevator with floor-to-ceiling flat-screen TVs on its walls. The TVs show New York from its days as a low-rent primordial swamp through its era as a hip hunting ground for the Lenape, its port career for the Dutch, English, and Americans. They left a few recent parts out, but you get the idea. As you near the top, girders of the new tower clang into place around you.

At the tippy top

The elevator is impressively fast, leaving you off at 1,242 feet, or a mere 110 feet lower than the Willis Tower Observation Deck in Chicago. A little wobbly in the legs, I followed my fellow rubberneckers from Bangalore, Bologna and Sheboygan down a flight of stairs to a selfie-stick pit where someone in uniform repeated a spiel about renting an augmented-reality iPad to tell CitiCorp Center from the MetLife Building. Mostly people got them for their bored kids.

After being corralled past the dining options, I went down another flight of stairs. There was supposed to be a porthole where you could look all the way down to street level. But it was just more TVs, this time in the floor.

The marketing mantra of the Observation Deck is “See Forever,” just the kind of pablum needed to dodge both memory, meaning and history in favor of something akin to the cheap thrill of an IMAX movie.

Tri-state views and bad-death blues

I did a slow meander around the Observation Deck. Midtown and Lower East Side, to Wall Street and Brooklyn, to the Harbor, Coney, the Rockaways and Sandy Hook, to Jersey, Jersey, more Jersey, then the Hudson, George Washington Bridge, midtown, uptown and the Bronx, all the way up to the Marriott of (I think) Stamford in the far, far distance. I did one circuit, then another, a little faster.

Seeing forever didn’t quell my agitation. It was hard not to think about flames and smoke, hard not to imagine the feeling of being hopelessly far from the street below, and then to feel all the dimensions of the room you’re in give way at once - and for what? To hold down a job, to look out over the Hudson? It wasn’t a good death. I watched the passenger jets bank northeast out of Newark, or cross midtown on their way into LaGuardia, as if my vigilance would do anything.

Tourists ambled past, clustered for shots with the sprawl of midtown behind them, or else collected images in their iPads to save them the trouble of looking. “See Forever,” indeed. “It’s easy to see without looking too far that not much is really sacred,” as Bob Dylan said, would be better tagline. I needed a drink.

Common, sustaining humanity?

I sidled up to the bar among what seemed to me by then the sort of people who would not only dance on my grave, but line up and pay for the privilege. The whole thing boggled my mind in a bad way. I ordered a Manhattan—eighteen bucks then, and more now.

I sipped and tried to figure out what I was feeling, and what I thought. Maybe my mind’s been warped by America. “Go big or go home” is something we say here, even in New York, loud and with a straight face. The clean cut lads in Murray Hill say it about their golf clubs, the nervous gents checking the Metro-North schedule say it about their mortgages, the small businessmen in Queens say it about car speakers, the young women with British accents say it to oligarchs when selling condominiums overlooking the High Line, even McDonalds says it.

After the attacks, that same big-going optimism led us to a few wars that didn’t work out like we’d hoped. And it led the people who decide these things to decide to build something really big on the site of an awful tragedy. They say it’s the tallest building—well, not in the world, but in the Western Hemisphere—well, yeah, if you count the radio tower—well, yeah you shouldn’t, really, but… We all know a lie when we hear it.

Sure, people had money invested. But if there was ever a time to consider a minor jubilee (more on jubilees in January), to forgive some leases in the name of a common, sustaining humanity, a time when there was a shared spiritual need for an aesthetic gesture to reflect on what we all want our civilization to be about and to respect the dead, it was 9/11. They could have made it a park, or as Exemplary New Yorker Timothy Speed Levitch suggested at the time, could have created a small fenced meadow where buffalo grazed. But, as the last 20 years have shown, both rudimentary aesthetics and common, sustaining humanity are in terrifyingly short supply in New York real estate.

My point is that, with our blood up, and all kinds of trumpets blowing in our ears, we neither went big, nor did we go home. Rather, we counted the federal funds, guesstimated the rents, and hoisted up a tallish glass barn.

The resulting structure is a monument to no one caring about anything much beyond making a buck. It’s a weak, grafty real-estate scheme that forces a few thousand of hard-working schmucks to paint a target on their backs five days a week to get ahead. At best, the new tower is the kind of unimpressive compromise that allows a mercantile, democratic society to muddle through the best and worst of times without painting the streets entirely red in its own blood.

Pricey drinks on top of one world

I had more than one drink while the sun sank over the New Jersey Turnpike and its tributaries. This wasn’t the “Never Forget” crowd. Kids scanned the skyline with their rented iPads, bored, running out the clock until they could go back to the hotel and look at their own iPads. The adults in the restaurant remembered, in some way. But they didn’t care, and that was a kind of amnesia.

Some Brits sat next to me at the bar. A pair of them were visiting from outside of London, and the others lived in Jersey City. We talked about Jersey City and about September 11. We had a candid and sincere chat. Along with the drinks, it brought me back from my internal jeremiad. I paid my bill. Feeling magnanimous and a little sorry for the waitstaff who worked so far from the earth every day, I threw a tip on top of the 18% that they’d already tacked on for the out-of-towners.

Once more around the mulberry bush

By then, Broadway shows and tired children had thinned the crowd on the observation deck. The sun kept sinking, blotting out Jersey. I went around the deck one more time, mostly to get my money’s worth.

I looked uptown through the Village, Chelsea and Midtown. I recognized the buildings where I’d worked, where I’d pursued this and that, gotten into or out of trouble. The view showed my adult life back to myself. The stifling pressure of my own intransigence lifted. I felt less ripped off for a moment, and something revealed itself.

There’s a theory in physics, or at least a notion, and maybe not the most popular one. Some physicist noticed that the electrons, unlike other subatomic particles, are all eerily identical. And he said maybe that’s because there’s only one electron, and it exists outside of time, and runs through everything instantaneously, keeping all the atoms tied together, like a short order cook refilling every one’s coffee and keeping the bacon from burning throughout the whole universe.

And looking out at all those places, from the jetty tip of Breezy Point to the West Side Pier with the Lincoln Tunnel air vent, to the Hell’s Gate railroad bridge, all these places I’d been, I had a sense of being that electron, with my life running in a majestic course all at once and forever in this city.

So yeah, maybe it was worth the money.

Note: An earlier version of this piece appeared in JMWW