1 World Trade Center—previously, and still informally, known as the Freedom Tower—is a building that has since its conception been tied to the Fourth of July holiday. Even as its design has changed radically, its planned height, a thousand seven-hundred and seventy-six feet, has been philosophically fixed since Daniel Libeskind proposed it as part of the scheme that, in 2003, won the competition for a master plan for the site. It’s almost there. In May, it reached a thousand two hundred and seventy-one feet, which made it taller than the Empire State Building, the tallest thing in New York. It is big and grand and shiny enough now to be seen from miles away, and to inspire two new July 4th questions: When it’s done, will we be able to watch the fireworks show from the top? And how will the starbursts and light show over the Hudson look reflected on its façade?
Ten, or even five years ago, those questions might have sounded heartless, or even cruel. Billowing explosions and bombs bursting in the air once inhabited by the towers—should that really lead one to wonder, like a tourist or a rubbernecker, where to get the best view? That one can ask now is not simply a matter of time passing, of distance, or of forgetting. The opposite is actually the case. Part of the genius of our national anthem—which, however justified the complaints are about how hard it is to sing, is an excellent song—is that the rockets neither blind the narrator with fear, nor do they leave him dazzled by the power of the British or in a vengeful frenzy. And neither, crucially, do they rob him of a sense of wonder. He sees both the threat and what the light is cast on. The tower can be proof that our city is still here.
This Fourth of July is a good moment to consider that achievement, and not only because it is the first one we have celebrated with 1 World Trade Center as the tallest building in town. Last week, one of its companion towers, 4 World Trade Center, topped out, making it the first in the complex to do so. This Sunday, the Times reported on the restaurant-and-retail passage behind the new Goldman Sachs building, near Ground Zero. Danny Meyer, who has three restaurants there, including Blue Smoke,
pointed out how the blue illuminated barbecue sign was positioned so it could be visible from all floors of the new World Trade Center rising down the street.
Blue neon, red glare; meanwhile, also last week, a third major tenant got set to sign on for the tower: the General Services Agency, for five floors that may be used by various government offices. In this case, that should be less indicative of the character of the building than of its diversity: the other tenants are a Chinese real-estate company and Condé Nast, whose magazines include—proudly—The New Yorker. With a mix like that, the building could live up to both its names, with strands of worldliness and freedom. And it looks great. We have, it turns out, built something beautiful, this after years of lawsuits and squabbles among developers, leaseholders, stakeholders, insurers, and politicians during which it seemed like we might build nothing at all.
That background suggests another sense in which July 4th is a good day to think about the tower. Like the Declaration of Independence, 1 World Trade Center is a collaborative project whose authors struggled, up to the last minute, to find the consensus and support they needed. Paul Goldberger, in a piece last September about the transformation of Ground Zero, wrote:
The plan has been followed, more or less, as construction has stumbled forward over the past decade, but, after winning the competition for the master plan, Libeskind never managed to get a commission to design even a single building himself. His rough ideas for the layout were accepted, and then politics and horse-trading took over.
There is something to be said for politics, of course. Libeskind’s original design had a hanging garden, which would have been lovely; it also had a jagged spire that David Childs, the main architect (though not the only one) who took over, once said looked like a bayonet.
Whether Libeskind or Childs and Guy Nordenson, the structural engineer who worked with him—or, for that matter, Ray Kelly, the police commissioner, who all but filibustered for design changes to make the building more secure—was really the Thomas Jefferson or John Adams of the operation is a question for architectural historians, and is not necessarily the most important one. A group effort yielded something fine and workable. It is fitting and mortifying to remember that the last piece of the puzzle, both in terms of getting the colonies to sign off on the Declaration and in getting this thing to be built all these years later, was the stubbornness of local New York power brokers and politicians. But in the end we New Yorkers always come through.
There are still plenty of controversies and fights about the uses of what was Ground Zero. Some have to do with the commemoration of those who died there. One hopes that the vibrant life of the site will be a tribute to them, and perhaps provide some comfort for their families. Others involve potentially unfulfilled promises. For one thing, an international body called the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat still has to certify that the building is truly a thousand seven hundred and seventy-six feet tall. (A late design change could cause problems, since it may get the spire reclassified as an antenna.) A Florida Congressman may be holding up the G.S.A. lease. And, on a far larger scale, we are not entirely independent of the entanglements and wars that the trauma of September 11th drove us to, nor have we learned all the lessons we can in connection with that moment.
But that’s the nature of a declaration: it is a manifesto, a way forward, sometimes wildly uncertain, an assertion of freedom from fear. The national project that began on July 4, 1776, isn’t complete, either, but in that case, too, we’re getting there. The tower is an opening statement about the future which, by the light of the fireworks, we may catch a glimpse of this Fourth of July.
Photograph by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images.
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