A Conversation with Eric Darton

1) How did you first get involved in this project?

In 1992, I was working on my graduate thesis in the Media Studies program at Hunter College. I wanted to explore the idea that certain world-recognized architectural symbols are a mass medium in their own right, like TV or the movies or the web. I looked around for a project that would fill the bill. Virtually every high-visibility landmark had been "done" - and sometimes to death. But the World Trade Center was up for grabs. It was astonishing that nobody had bothered to seriously ask what this immense icon of urban civilization was actually about. What spurred my interest too was how the WTC's builders had touted it as a paradigm of the coming information age way back in the early 1960s - "the first buildings of the 21st Century" they called it.
Then in February 1993, when I was a little less than a year into my research, the trade center was bombed, killing six people and injuring over 1,000. A horrifying event that changed the way we look at our high-rise cities. For all that, it amounted to a lucky near miss compared to the carnage the bombers had intended. From that point out, it was clear that I was working on a bigger story than I'd realized.

2) There are lots of books on the growth of cities and on skyscrapers. What makes Divided We Stand… different?

Most books about modern cities and their buildings see them mainly as a collection of historical factoids or architectural styles. Divided We Stand identifies the World Trade Center as a key symbol of the turning point between two eras of urban life: the industrial and the informational.

The book shows how the enormous energies of post-WWII American culture were brought to bear on sixteen square blocks of Lower Manhattan real estate. Here, an unprecedented concentration of finance capital and mega-planning came together to produce a spectacular architectural event. The twin towers at the Hudson Rivers' shore became an icon of the world's skyline second only to the unforgettable mushroom cloud "logo" of the hydrogen bomb.

The world had never seen buildings like the trade towers before. Though their size and twin-ness has been copied - notably by the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur - the WTC represents a seismic event unique to its time and place. The trade towers were the first in a succession of urban peaks thrust upward by the traumatic global clash of Industrial Revolution and Information Age tectonic plates.

Though the twin towers are creatures of Lower Manhattan in the mid-twentieth century, their repercussions continue in new millennium. Wherever we make our homes and livelihoods today, we are living in the shadow of the World Trade Center. My book looks at these buildings and sees in them a defining moment for citizens of the 21st century - a moment when industrial-era technologies and planning strategies were harnessed to create the most massive structures ever devoted to the workings of finance, insurance and real estate - built atop the ruins of New York City's once-great port.

Like Greek masks symbolizing comedy and tragedy, the WTC presents two faces. These great buildings can be read either as tombstones of the industrial age or as beacons of the new global economy - or both.

3) What surprised you most in researching this book?

The degree to which the modern city acts as a stage for the reenactment of primal social conflict. In what I call New York's "World Trade Center Moment," this conflict played out along the lines of a struggle between the city's organic, self-inventing, self-regulating economic energies, and the master plans and profit-motives of a handful of very powerful men - among them David and Nelson Rockefeller - at that time New York's biggest banker and the NY State's governor.

At bottom the story of the building of the WTC is a tale of how New York's power-brokers hijacked a public agency, the Port Authority, to build a massive real estate speculation. Their goal was to use the trade center as leverage to expand Lower Manhattan's financial district - in which they were heavily invested - while driving up property values throughout the whole area. It is hard to imagine a more blatant instance of entrenched power and wealth circumventing - and in fact, subverting - the democratic process. So the WTC can also be looked at as a monument to the abuse of public trust.

4) In your book you draw a disturbing parallel between mindsets of master-builders and terrorists. Could you expand on this?

Digging into the historical material of the trade towers revealed some quite scary psychological similarities between the men who built the WTC and the terrorists who tried bring it down thirty years later.

First of all, whether we like it or not, the modern skyscraper city, along with the suburbs that rings it, represents the corporatization of the metropolis. It is a city engineered and built for finance, not for people. From the late 1940s through the '70s, the urban renewal movement, operating under the banner of "slum clearance," flattened American cities and displaced populations at a rate comparable to that of the devastation caused by World War II in Europe

In mid-century New York, David Rockefeller and Robert Moses concurred that most of Lower Manhattan was hopelessly outmoded and simply had to be leveled. In their view, neighborhoods like South Greenwich Village, Chinatown, Little Italy, SoHo, TriBeCa and the South Street Seaport represented just so much urban blight.

In 1958, David Rockefeller offered a Billion Dollar Plan for the renewal of Lower Manhattan. His language speaks volumes about his philosophy. He believed above all in the rightness of what he called "catalytic bigness." Had Rockefeller and Mose succeeded one hundred percent, there would be nothing but highways and slab high-rises from Washington Square Park down to the Battery today. The WTC - which, incidentally, cost a billion dollars and change to build - is the great monument to their vision.

Their extremism at the level of planning was eventually countered by another, far messier and single-minded scheme to change the face of Lower Manhattan. In this case the idea wasn't to level outmoded neighborhoods with the idea of building them up taller and more profitably than before - the notion was simply to lay waste. But one kind of extremism, unfortunately, begets another, and when you raise up an icon like the WTC and fill it with vulnerable humanity - it's a pretty sure bet that someone will try to bring it down if they can.

What emerges when you juxtapose mega-development with terrorism is a kind of unity of opposites. Both master-builders and terrorists consider everyday life at street level to be absolutely trivial. The former carry out make their plans the rarefied air of executive boardrooms; while the latter carry out their schemes, quite literally, underground.

Both master-builders and bombers adhere to single-minded cataclysmic visions - either the creation of a bright, corporate future; or a return to the "fundamental" values of the past. Both visions are abstract projections of an ideal world which has nothing to do with the here-and-now.

But the most frightening aspect of these men is that they appear incapable of connecting their actions with real world consequences for other living, breathing human beings. To them, people are insubstantial - the plan is what is real. When you think like this, whether on is a futurist or a fundamentalist, it becomes possible - even desirable - to push aside whomever and whatever gets in your way. One can justify yourself without ever falling prey to doubt, or guilt. One comes to believe that one actually knows what is best. One grants oneself a monopoly on truth, and no amount of reality-checking can challenge it.

5) Since the bombing on February 26, 1993, how has the WTC changed?

It has certainly transformed as a symbol. One great irony of the towers is that they were built to withstand a 747 slamming into them - the disaster scenario of a more "innocent" era. No one in the mid-'60s, when the buildings were designed, could have anticipated that thirty years later the threat would not come from a stray airplane - a symbol of the machine age gone awry - but from modernity's discontents: terrorists who knew the building's true vulnerability was in its basement. Fortunately they didn't know how to build a bomb that would do what they wanted.

One result of the bombing is that we've now got a twin mind to go along with our twin towers. While one part of our awareness still sees them as overawing symbols of modern engineering technology, the other part sees how in an unprotected instant, the whole edifice of modernity can come down around our ears. I take this as tentative sign of American social maturity. When you're a kid, you believe in the absolute power of mass and brawn. As you get older, you realize that what looks invulnerable often has an Achilles heel. We're a big country though and pretty much addicted to the positive value of bigness for bigness' sake. So it's a tough psychological adjustment to make.

For example, a few weeks ago the manager of the WTC told a newspaper reporter that the best way to imagine the twin towers is as three regular skyscrapers stacked on top of one another. He stopped short of saying, "then you go ahead stack another three right next to it." It was pretty stunning. This man is a Port Authority official charged with protecting 40,000 lives, and he was talking about the world's most massive inhabited vertical structures as though they were a big Lego toy. One thing I ask myself a lot is what sort of story we'd be telling ourselves about urban life if, say, thirty or fifty thousand people had died in Lower Manhattan one snowy noontime seven years ago?

For the tens of thousands who work in and around the trade center, not much has changed besides the tightened security. But for many of them, as for the rest of us, there is a heightened sense of free-floating anxiety - present in us even as we go about our daily routines. It is a very different sort of fear than the one my generation felt leaping under our desks when, during the cold war, Kruschev vowed that the USSR would "bury" us.

The terrorists hit the WTC in 1993, but they could have struck anywhere. The victims might have been any of us. But who are the terrorists anyway? Ramzi Yousef, the trade towers' convicted bomber and his cohorts? Osama bin Laden? The Unibomber? The Oklahoma City bomber? Or a couple of kids from an average Colorado high school? It reminds me of the line from the old Pogo cartoon strip: "we have met the enemy and he is us."

6) Where are cities heading today? And how has New York changed in the thirty years since the "World Trade Center Moment"?

The early years of the 21st century will see dozens of megacities of ten to twenty million as poverty pushes more people off the land, particularly in the global sunbelt. Greater Mexico City is already at 25 million, with São Paulo not far behind. Many of these urban agglomerations are gaining population exponentially. Mumbai (formerly Bombay) recently surpassed and is growing much faster than Los Angeles - whose population of 14 million is triple what it was in 1950.

Many of these new, gargantuan cities live on the edge of social and environmental catastrophe. They are creations of the widening gap between rich and poor worldwide. It is desperation, not aspiration that swells them past sustainability. In the rapidly growing urban centers of the Pacific Rim, the World Trade Center is being emulated as a symbol of prosperity and power. Everyone wants to top New York tallest - to build the towers that signify the arrival of the next great market center. It is worth remembering though, that a generation before the World Trade Organization was instituted, a World Trade Center had already been built just west of Wall Street. Globalism's logo had been there all the time.

For the past thirty years, and coinciding with the rise of the WTC, New York has been hard at work gutting its once-rich economic mix. We've gone from being a city that simultaneously financed, manufactured and transported things to a virtual economy organized around finance, insurance and real estate. And right now, of course, privileged New Yorkers are too busy counting their eggs to check how the basket is holding up. Historically, though, economic monocultures flare brilliantly and die out fast. To survive long-term a city has got to be, at bottom, a trading post - a place where anyone can come and set up shop. Everything glamorous about urban culture is an overlay on that reality.

So New York's present boom has masked a lot of very deep problems. Since the Trade Center moment, New York has seen an ever-widening gap between its richest and poorest citizens. On nearly every block, with numbing regularity, a huge, generic national chain stores displaces a viable locally-owned business. Why? Because for New York's mandarins, as well as most elected officials of both parties, instituting commercial rent controls would violate a fundamental tenet of real estate orthodoxy. Come what may, they say, let rents seek their "natural" level. Then we shower our biggest developers with tax breaks and throw billions after corporations who promise they won't desert us - this year. As a result, we've abandoned almost any pretense of offering social services to those who need them most. And we've achieved an absolute crisis in affordable housing, and with it, homelessness. New York isn't Calcutta yet, but we're doing our best to get there. Walking my seven-year old daughter to school the other day, we saw three nearly identical black plastic garbage bags sitting by the curb. One of the bags had feet sticking out of it, and a head. How was I to explain to her that at the dawn of the 21st century, one of the richest cities the world has ever known finds this an acceptable form of housing. Meanwhile, down the block an old industrial building is being converted into condos. The developers are asking for, and getting, $385,000 for what amounts to a large box overlooking an airshaft they have artfully termed a "courtyard."

These incredible distortions of social life around the drive for real estate profit are part of the enduring legacy of New York's World Trade Center moment. Of course, there are always other, more sane and humane cities we could build and live in if we develop the political will to make them real. Part of what has changed since the twin towers were built is that the issue of redistributing wealth and resources, both globally and in our cities, has ceased to be solely a moral issue. People are now beginning to perceive it as key to everyone's survival. But I don't have to make argument for this. The future will do it better.