A Vision for Ground Zero

Frederick Turner

The recent crop of designs for the redevelopment of Ground Zero have rightly been
widely condemned as miserably unimaginative. They not only fail to satisfy either the
spiritual or the economic mandate implied by the site—perhaps the most important piece
of real estate in the world—they also express, as clearly as if it had been written all over
them, that America was defeated by the terrorists.

Whatever else we do, the replacement for the World Trade Center has got to be more
splendid, more beautiful and more truly symbolic of New York and of America than its
predecessor. It must be a fitting monument to the citizens who worked there—and who
behaved, as far as we know, more than magnificently in their moment of trial—to the
firefighters who charged up the stairs, and to the police who died there. The present
wrangling between those who want the whole site to be a garden, and those who want
commercial development, is itself miserable, and is reflected in the misery of the designs
that have been proposed. In actual fact, there is a desperate futility in the project as
presently conceived, because even if the whole site were turned into a memorial garden it
would be in the wrong place. For most of the dead did not die there at all, but a thousand
feet away, a sixth of a mile, directly above. Ancient epics and dramas—the Odyssey, the
Aeneid, Antigone—tell of the unease and pollution of an improperly buried or unburied
corpse; the present quarrel reflects that unease in twentieth century terms: our loss of
courage in the marketplace, our baseless guilt at our prosperity, our secret qualms that
maybe we deserved to be attacked. The rebuilding of Ground Zero must be a monument
that will begin to heal those deep spiritual wounds and illnesses.

To be such a monument it must embody the future hopes of the nation, its resilience, its
pride, and the peculiarly American technique for achieving its goals.

What is that “American technique”? There is an ancient saying, that you cannot serve
God and Mammon. The Old World always took this saying as a simple command or
prohibition, an injunction to make the right choice. The genius of the framers of the
American Constitution is that they took it as a “koan”, so to speak. A koan in the
Buddhist tradition is a paradoxical utterance whose form is that of a puzzle but whose
solution is not an answer but a change in the answerer and thus a change in the conditions
in which the puzzle itself exists.

If it is a simple and absolute choice, between the spiritual and the economic, then of
course we should choose the spiritual. But if we do, rejecting any temptation to improve
our economic lot, we should not be too surprised--as the national sponsors of radical
Islamic terrorism have found--when it turns out that our economic decline into hideous
squalor ends up compromising any possible spiritual goal of our society. In another
saying Jesus hinted at something that did not imply that terrible choice, between the
world and one’s soul: render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, he said of the coin of
money he was shown, and unto God that which is God’s.

The solution to the problem that the American framers found was simple and radical:
make Mammon serve God, and then to serve Mammon is to serve God. The free market
democratic republic that resulted has spent two hundred years of fine-tuning the market
so that it has become almost impossible to get rich without in the process enriching
everyone else. Probably the best thing I could do in practical charity for my fellow
humans across the globe would be to buy a brand new Lexus. The stimulus to the world
economy would be efficient, and would lead to the creation of wealth, technological and
scientific progress, the ability of employees to buy educational and medical services, the
opening up of trade relationships between countries which might otherwise prefer to go
to war, the demand for a better natural environment, and the emancipation of women.
More real human benefit would likely accrue per dollar from my purchase than any
contribution of an equal amount of money to hunger relief, humanitarian aid, or third
world national development efforts. The free market as it has evolved, with its apparatus
of legal property rights, banks, joint stock companies, and so on, has solved the koan by
redefining the nature of money. In the Roman Empire of the first century in which Jesus
proposed the koan, money was still predominantly the sign of the other’s lack. Today
money has become predominantly the sign of the other’s wellbeing. Then, others were
poor because I was rich. Now, others are rich because I am rich.

The World Trade Center was a huge tool of that American solution. But its architecture
in the context of its site said no more than that. It served Mammon, but did not express
by its form that the Mammon it served served God. Its replacement must say
triumphantly that the terrorists have been defeated not only in terms of wealth and power,
but in terms of spiritual goodness and moral beauty as well.

The site itself offers three great architectural models for how New York historically
expressed these ideas: John A. Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and the
splendid Art Deco of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings further uptown. The
Gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge explicitly recall the religious vocabulary of Europe,
while the bridge itself was a mighty engine of economic development up and down the
east coast of the American continent. The great uptown skyscrapers were cathedrals
celebrating the servitude of profit to virtue and the paradox that the servitude enhanced
the profit. And Lady Liberty welcomed to the New World exactly the people that Jesus
and the Prophets had commanded us to serve:

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

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The golden door was the gate to profitable employment and the creation of wealth.

So the mandate for the new design for Ground Zero is as follows: it must be a monument
to those who served and protected world trade, it must be a golden door, it must express
as did the old World Trade Center the engineering genius that enabled the financial
district to enrich the world, it must nobly echo the architecture of hope and aspiration, it
must firmly insist by its very form on the preeminence of spiritual over economic
concerns, and it must at the same time indicate that spiritual concerns, in the American
way, are only possible with the support of economic progress. It must delineate a
hierarchy of values, not a choice between them—the koan, not the command. In this
spirit, the design sketched here is offered.

If one could call up the ghosts of John Roebling, Donato Bramante of St. Peter’s, the
Abbot Suger of Notre Dame, and Ictinos of the Parthenon, what would they say in
response to the mandate? I believe that the first thing they would say would be very
simple. Since the immediate practical problem is how to have a memorial garden and a
profitable business building in the same place, and you cannot put a building on top of a
garden without destroying the garden, I think they would say “Then put the garden on top
of the building”. “Memorialize the dead where they died, a thousand feet above the
street,” they would say; “not down below where their cenotaph would in any case
obstruct the creative work of the living.” The second thing I think they would say is that
if you want a golden door—and New York has no great gate or triumphal arch on the
scale of St. Louis’ parabola or San Francisco’s Golden Gate—then build one. So we
already have the basic form: a memorial garden on top of a triumphal arch that is also a
major business skyscraper. The design says that you can have god and mammon if
mammon is serving god, for the spiritual garden is supported by the secular marketplace,
and the marketplace is crowned by the garden.

New York Harbor would now be framed by Lady Liberty on one hand and the
welcoming gate of downtown on the other. The gothic archway of the gate will echo the
arches of Roebling’s bridge on the other side of the island. Millions of people uptown
will look downtown and see, beyond the spires of the Empire State and the Chrysler
Building, the art deco curved ribs of the great arch and the cantilevers of the garden it
supports; and would remember with a comfortable familiarity the twin towers that have
now been rebuilt in a more graceful form. And downtown will have its own Central
Park, a thousand feet up above the harbor and Wall Street, a haven of peace and memory
above the roar of the market below, in the very place where our fellow-citizens died.

Grand staircase/escalator wells, open to the sky, will carry the thousands of visitors,
pilgrims and tourists up the last three storeys into the cool upper air. They will wander
the paths and woodlands and little hills and the lakeshore until they come to the noble
monument to the dead in the center of the garden. And they will find their way to the
staggering views around its edge: sixty miles up and down the coast, inland to the
Hudson Valley, out into the Atlantic Ocean. They will notice how the very plantings

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here are of a different climate. The place will be windy and cleaner, the temperature
three degrees lower than the streets below—preserving a hundred years from now the
climate of New York as it was before global warming, and reminding them of what New
York was like two hundred years ago.

And Mammon, too, will be served. The combination of a huge tourist attraction, a
pilgrimage site, an architectural and engineering wonder, the historical associations of
America’s triumph over its most cruel enemies, and thus an economically revived
downtown, will make it once more the most desirable commercial real estate on the
planet.