Day 2:
September 10, 2003
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Q: As you think about New York since the days of the Dutch settlement, do you see it as a rising star or a falling star?
Alex Greening
Belleville, IL
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Answered by Niall Ferguson:
I sometimes wonder if New York will one day be like Venice -- a former commercial hub which history has turned into a tourist attraction. I've certainly heard it said that changes in technology and the global economy make it less necessary for major financial institutions to have their center of operations there. Purely from a practical point of view (as I can confirm from my experience) NY is a very expensive location.
On the other hand, Manhattan has a kind of cultural critical mass like no other place in the world. It may well be that the city's future lies more as a cultural center than as a financial center.
Finally, let's not forget that Venice declined precisely because trade across the Atlantic and round the Cape took over from trade via the Mediterranean. It's hard to imagine such a radical change in the direction of commercial and financial flows in our time.
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Answered by Mike Wallace:
I think the city has followed two different trajectories since Dutch days, one vis a vis the US, another vis a vis the world.
For the former, we went from being an insignificant urban bump on an agricultural hinterland, to de facto capital of the country, with our power and prestige arguably peaking in the era between the 1920s-40s. During the New Deal, when NY in effect boarded and seized Washington and expanded its powers tremendously, NY's dominance ebbed to a low point in the 1970s and though it rebounded somewhat -- still after all the nation's financial and media hub -- it ain't what it used to be.
As to the planet, the city's pathway was more steadily upward. From being an insignificant backwater of the Dutch empire, it became an important port for the English, then a critical interlink between industrializing Europe and the southern and western American hinterland, then the critical link between Europe and industrializing America, then after World War I a rival to London for status as capital of the nascent global economy, a status confirmed after World War II (albeit in tandem with Washington, center of the military apparatus), and strengthened in the postwar decades as it emerged as capital of an American-based multinational corporate economy.
It's future will be largely based on the fate of that American empire. Should it falter, and Europe's (or China's) star rise, it will be reduced to becoming one of several competing global centers.
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Answered by Ric Burns:
I see it as a gorgeous star that has now taken its permanent place in a constellation of stars -- world cities across the planet. The forces -- geographic, economic, demographic, cultural -- that caused New York to rise where it is and to become what it has become are deeply rooted, and although those forces have shifted and fluctuated over time, they show no signs of radically abating or driving the city from the firmament. In the last two decades, of course, it has gone through a remarkable renaissance, one of the most remarkable in urban history, and one that has gone far to erase memories of the 1970's, when it seemed New York was not only a falling star, but an imploding one well on its way to becoming a dead giant.
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Q: What happened to Minoru Yamasaki, the architect and primary designer of the Trade Center? Is he still alive, and if so, what were his thoughts of 9/11? If he is deceased, could you tell us a little more about this man, and what became of him in the 35 years.
Wanda Whitmer
Huntsville, AL
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Answered by Carol Willis:
Minoru Yamasaki died of cancer on February 7, 1986, at age 73, but the architectural firm he founded in 1949 in Troy, Michigan continues as Minoru Yamasaki Associates, Inc. Their website www.m-yamasaki.com/myaintro.html includes photographs of many of the projects that Yamasaki designed across North America and around the world in the years after the World Trade Center.
In 1979, Yamaski published a coffee-table monograph on his work titled A Life in Architecture (Weatherhill, 1979) that contains a long and poignant personal essay on his struggle as a nisei, a second-generation Japanese American to overcome discrimination, to earn his education, and to begin his career as an architect. He was a complex man who emphasized beauty and serenity as his values, but sometimes strained too hard in both his personal and professional life to achieve those goals. An interesting biographical article from the Detroit News with numerous handsome portraits of Yamasaki quotes a description of him as deceptively serene as a sunning panther.
Also see:
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Answered by Ric Burns:
Minoru Yamasaki died in 1986, never having quite lived down the impact of the World Trade Center on his career. It had made him, briefly, the most famous architect in the world; it had also been so frequently condemned that his reputation was always shadowed by a building he never lived long enough to see emerge from the clouds of controversy and disdain that followed it. One odd and extremely poignant footnote is that one of Yamasaki's other well-known projects -- the Pruitt-Igoe Public Housing Project in St. Louis, praised as groundbreaking when it opened in 1955 -- was torn down in disgrace in 1972 in a massive controlled demolition -- having become a national symbol of the worst kinds of failures of urban renewal architecture. Yamasaki thus has the curious distinction of being associated with not one but two large and ill-fated projects both of which fell to the ground long before anyone could have imagined.
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Q: What does each of you think of the Liebeskind plan and the Mayor's overall plan for Lower Manhattan (JFK train, Second Ave Subway, Water St promenade, etc.) and do you predict a Lower Manhattan renaissance? Would Mr. Burns consider a 9th episode on the WTC/Lower Manhattan rebuilding process?
Paul Vincenti
New York, NY
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Answered by Ric Burns:
Like a lot of people, I'm ambivalent about the Liebeskind plan in its current form. It's in play, though, and will continue to be for some time, which is not only inevitable but good. As many have pointed out, the most striking thing about the whole debate over what should be built on the site is not the conflicts and disagreements, but the extraordinary consensus that exists over the most important basic features. Everyone agrees that the template of the World Trade Center will never be rebuilt as it was -- i.e., that never again will so many streets be closed and combined to make superblocks set up above and turned away from the street life of the city. Everyone agrees that the site will be reintegrated into the pedestrian flow of lower Manhattan -- that many of the streets originally wiped away to make the World Trade Center will be restored -- that Battery Park City will be linked in a functional way for the first time in its life to the vitality of Wall Street -- that the hundred year old problems afflicting Lower Manhattan's transportation infrastructure will be finally addressed in a realistic and creative way. Everyone also agrees that the site should be vastly more mixed in its uses than before -- combining commercial, cultural, residential and memorial functions. Most people -- myself included -- also feel that, whatever shape it takes, something very tall, as tall or taller than what was there before, should be built on the site.
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Q: The interviews in your shows make me feel like I don't want to miss a single word. How do you find so many smart and interesting people and get them to say such profound things?
C.L.
Katy, TX
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Answered by Ric Burns:
I'm so grateful for the kind words about the interviews, and very glad that the extraordinary group of people we filmed struck you as they did us. There's no trick to it: if you ask a group of passionate, deeply talented people to sit down and talk with you on-camera about something that matters a great deal to them, and then really let them talk, they'll steal the show every time. There's almost nothing more fascinating than listening to and watching another human being on fire with what moves them most.
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Q: I once stood in a beautiful 16th century square in Warsaw, Poland, that had been bombed to rubble by Hitler's army -- a birthday present it was rumored. Two large photographs hung on a building in the square. One was of the square the day after the bombing -- not a single building was standing. The other was of the square the day before the bombing -- it was identical to the square I was standing in -- down to the molding. The Poles had rebuilt the devastated square exactly as it stood. It was a powerful message of resilience. I have often thought of this square as I think about what I would like to see built on the site of the World Trade Center. I think it would be madness, but have any of you explored the idea of rebuilding the same structures on the site?
D.K.
Hartford, CT
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Answered by Ric Burns:
As time has gone on, and as people have had a chance to reflect over time on the meaning of the events of September 11th and its aftermath, many people have come to sense that building something new, something original and beautiful and appropriate and integrated with the city in a way the Trade Center towers never quite were, might project an even more powerful message of resilience. One way or another, it seems clear now that the towers will never be built in anything like or even remotely resembling there original form. That doesn't mean that many people don't ache to have them back in the deepest way.
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Q: I'm curious about how the destruction of the Towers has changed people's views about those buildings -- both in an architectural and economic sense. Do you think history will look back at them more favorably now after 9/11, or perhaps more critically?
Meghan Campbell
St. Paul, MN
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Answered by Ric Burns:
The World Trade Center arguably went through more viscissitudes and changes of fortune, economically, architecturally, urbanistically and culturally, than any other building in the twentieth century. In its thirty-year history, it was raved about, pilloried, scorned, condemned, admired, hated, rehabilitated, patronised, shunned, accepted, loved and finally pitied. It started life as an awe-inspiring example of visionary urban planning, went on to become the pariah-skyscraper on the skyline of Manhattan, then turned into an economic success story during the financial boom of the 1990's and credited with helping make possible New York's downtown renaissance. The architectural critic Paul Goldberger has pointed out that the response to the World Trade Center has gone through three distinct phases: 1) rejection; 2) grudging acceptance; 3) martyrdom. Because of its size and presence on the skyline, it became the pre-eminent icon of New York; and even those who liked them least miss the towers sorely, for what they stood for, and for the role they played in the life of the metropolis.
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