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Tall Tales

The World Trade Center's replacement may be impressive, but it isn't the world's tallest building--despite what you may have heard

WEB EXCLUSIVE

By Gersh Kuntzman

Newsweek

Dec. 22 - How come everyone is calling a 60-story building the tallest building in the world? Probably because "World's Tallest Windmill to be Built at Ground Zero" doesn't sound like anyone's idea of a good story.

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But that proposed headline is accurate, which left the developers of the so-called "Freedom Tower"--the building that is supposed to fix the hole in New York City's grid plan while it also heals an entire nation's psyche--in need of the Big Lie.

You know the Big Lie. That's the lie that gets repeated so often that everyone will someday look up at this mid-sized New York skyscraper and see the second coming of The World Trade Center.

"The world's tallest building," said Freedom Tower architect, David Childs. "The world's tallest building," repeated the New York Times. "Building at twin towers site to be world's tallest," repeated the Boston Globe.

But in fact, the building itself would rise just 60 stories, from street level to a new observation deck and a reborn Windows on the World restaurant (although the restaurant should really be named "Windows on the Roof of That Lame 55-Story Building Next Door"). Those 60 stories would rise just 1,150 feet, meaning that the Freedom Tower wouldn't even crack the top 10. The structure would then be topped out with a cage-like girder-and-cable contraption containing windmills and a TV antenna whose pinnacle would be 1,776 feet above the street.

Yes, that could technically be considered the zenith of the tallest building in the world, but no reasonable person would draw that conclusion, not when office workers in the Taipei 101 will be pushing paper 101 floors and 1,470 feet above ground, when janitors at the Sears Tower in Chicago are mopping floors 110 stories and 1,431 feet in the air, or when secretaries at the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur are saying, "I'm sorry, he's in a meeting" a full 88 stories and 1,229 feet high. And don't forget the guys who change the red light bulb atop the CN Tower in Toronto, the highest freestanding structure in the world. When one guy says to the other, "Don't look down," he's saying it 1,815 feet above the icy pavement.

So why the Big Lie? Look, I don't think I'm violating my oath of New York citizenship to admit it, but we supposedly bold people in Gotham still go weak in the knees whenever the subject of the World Trade Center comes up (and it always does). And it goes beyond the sheer magnitude of human and structural loss. The absence of those towers is something we feel every day, not just when we look at the ruptured skyline, but even when we run our daily errands. There is hardly a single apartment, office or mom-and-pop store in this city that does not have a picture of the Twin Towers hanging prominently. We no longer even notice all the signs around saying things like, "The World's Greatest City Deserves the World's Tallest Building: Build It!"

So the politicians knew what we wanted spiritually. But, practically speaking, they also knew that few office workers (cannon fodder in the War on Terror) would accept even a company car and a health plan with a $0 co-pay if the office was on the 103rd floor of a building meant to replace the World Trade Center. This was a complex hit twice by terrorists. Care to try for three? No thanks.

So they created the Big Lie. They offer us a 60-story building with a windmill and a lot of exposed girders and they call it the tallest building in the world.

The head of the Skyscraper Museum, Carol Willis, told me that I'm "missing the point" because of my juvenile obsession with size, but there's a bigger lie here than merely fibbing about the height of a building. Anyone who was at the unveiling at Federal Hall on Friday morning heard it (I wasn't there, but I have such a sensitively tuned bulls--- meter, that it was ringing all the way in my office in Bay Ridge). And this lie has nothing to do with size.

"We will build it to show the world that freedom will always triumph over terror and that we will face the 21st century with confidence," said New York Governor George Pataki, in one of several platitude-filled speeches that were widely televised.

This entire comment is a Big Lie. If freedom will always triumph over terror, as Pataki says, why the windmills, which make the clear statement that our dependence on foreign oil partly contributed to the terror attacks? If freedom always beats terror, why hasn't the Statue of Liberty reopened, now more than two years after the attacks?

And if we're really facing the new century "with confidence," why is everyone afraid of renting above the 60th floor? Why is the governor and the Port Authority of New York forced to subsidize this supposed tribute to capitalism by renting one-third of the space? Aren't there
actual businesses that want to be in this symbol of our strength?

"Everything you see above the last occupied floor is symbolic," said Philip Nobel, an architecture critic and author of the forthcoming, "Sixteen Acres: The Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero." (scheduled to be published in August 2004 by Metropolitan Books). "By ceding that space to emptiness, it's admitting our fear. If the Freedom Tower and the original World Trade Center were standing next to each other, the biggest statement being made would be the number of floors on which Americans are afraid to be today."

Gersh Kuntzman is also Brooklyn bureau chief for The New York Post. His website is at http://www.gersh.tv