CITY IN THE SKY
The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center.
By James Glanz and Eric Lipton.
Illustrated. 428 pp. New York:
Times Books/Henry Holt & Company. $26.
IN their account of the rise and fall of the World Trade Center, James Glanz and Eric Lipton evoke the romance of skyscraper construction in New York even as they tell a version of it that ended in unimaginable tragedy on Sept. 11, 2001. The book centers on the power of an unaccountable public agency, cunning legal and political maneuvers and brilliant engineering innovations devised to address extraordinary structural challenges. It also registers the dignity and determination of Oscar Nadel and other proprietors in Radio Row, the consumer electronics district, who fought a smart, tough and losing battle against the hugely more powerful Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Glanz and Lipton thus tell a fascinating story not unlike the one Robert Caro told in his now classic book on Robert Moses; their canvas is smaller but it is big enough to capture the grandeur and grandiosity of it all. Those who delighted in Caro's ''Power Broker'' will relish ''City in the Sky.'' At times, however, similarity undermines its particular virtues. Readers of both books will recall literary devices from the Caro playbook: ''Then, secretly, the World Trade Center got bigger''; ''Then something changed. Gradually, but unmistakably, New York City and the Port Authority went from partners to rivals.'' Caro's repetitions sustained the tragic sense that gave structure to his book. The tragedy of the World Trade Center is already known to readers.
The origins of the World Trade Center go back farther than most people realize. Eric Darton's 1999 biography of the World Trade Center, ''Divided We Stand,'' begins with architectural visions of urban modernity of the early 20th century. Glanz,+a+science+reporter+for+The+New+York+Times, and Lipton, a metropolitan reporter for The Times, focus more on business strategy. They point to Winthrop W. Aldrich, the president of Chase National Bank and an uncle of David Rockefeller, who began promoting the idea at the World's Fair of 1939.+In 1959, David Rockefeller, who worried that the financial community might abandon the district in which Chase was building its headquarters, organized the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association, which urged the creation of a center downtown ''where the United States and foreign businesses and financial interests can meet to do business; where representatives of the United States and foreign governments are available . . . to expedite business transactions.'' In the 1960's, international business was transformed by the multinationals, and ''foreign departments'' went the way of tail fins. The consequence: an embarrassing shortage of tenants when the towers opened for business.
But the Port Authority, rich in income from bridge and tunnel tolls, had embraced the idea. Austin Tobin, the authority's head, not only supported the project but made it his own and vastly expanded it. Could the Port Authority legally construct an office complex? Yes, he argued, for it would promote the port. This ingenious but flimsy justification became the target of an unsuccessful suit filed by the local merchants' organization and argued in the courts by Morris Ernst, who had represented Margaret Sanger in her efforts to legalize birth control and who had won the case that opened the door for James Joyce's ''Ulysses'' to be published in the United States.
The original plan called for a cluster of moderate-sized buildings in the area of South Street Seaport, but Tobin transformed it beyond recognition. To obtain support from the governor of New Jersey, he linked the trade center with a takeover of the financially strapped New Jersey commuter railroad we now call PATH. That required moving the project to the Hudson side, near the PATH terminal, adding the financial burden of the railroad and pushing Tobin to increase the size. He insisted upon 10 million square feet of rentable space, and his staff demanded the world's tallest building. Was there a market? The highly regarded New York business consulting firm McKinsey & Company had been commissioned to establish the need. McKinsey reported that the financial center was moving to Midtown and would continue to do so. Learning of these preliminary conclusions, Rockefeller's aides persuaded McKinsey to withdraw, and the report, in retrospect on target, was never completed.
The architect, Minoru Yamasaki of Detroit, was selected in part because of the delicacy of a project he designed for the Seattle World's Fair. Working with the Port Authority was both painful and corrupting for Yamasaki. Some of the most compelling pages in the book tell how he was forced to abandon delicacy and playfulness for gigantism. He did preserve the thin spandrels that defined the building's facade, and that -- along with the height -- demanded innovative engineering, the brilliant work of John Skilling.
A special strength of ''City in the Sky'' is the detail and clarity (including exceptionally effective illustrations) of the discussion of the engineering challenges. The structural innovations worked; when the planes struck the towers, the load was shifted as Skilling had calculated. The engineers were aware of the danger posed by jet fuel if a plane hit the towers, but it was not addressed; nor was heat. Decisions by the Port Authority, which was exempt from the city building code, resulted in grossly inadequate fireproofing.
The history of the World+Trade+Center was so short that many of the workers who had built the towers helped with the cleanup. Glanz and Lipton rely on interviews to capture key personalities and moments, and the reporting of the collapse and recovery deploys many affecting vignettes to evoke the human experience of the tragedy.
The story of the building of the World Trade Center+echoes disturbingly through the rebuilding project today. Save for the McKinsey analysts, who were ignored, no one considered the larger context of the city's development, nor did anyone pay attention to civic stakeholders' wishes for a less dense area, with greater mixed use. Then and now, the city tried to expand the discussion to larger urban issues, only to be shut out by the state.+And in both cases, a bizarre commitment to 10 million square feet of rentable space undercut sensible urban design and worried the real estate industry. Compliant architects were once pressed by developer-oriented state agencies into compromises that resulted in a monumental failure -- and might be again in the rebuilding project. Does this excellent history amount to a timely alert? Might those who fail to learn from history risk repeating it?
