![]() Timothy Speed Levitch |
Philosopher tour guide Timothy Speed Levitch, featured in the documentary The Cruise, has an idea for a 9/11 memorial. But it does not quite fit in with the guidelines of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation's memorial competition.
"Sixteen acres of blazing green grass, a place for togetherness, healing out loud, and spontaneous culture, and in the middle of the park, the memorial should not be an inanimate slab of stone, but should have a heartbeat," Levitch says while giving a lower Manhattan tour in Richard Linklater's documentary Live from Shiva's Dance Floor. And that isn't the end of it. The heart that is beating should be a buffalo heart, Levitch says, hugging the line between philosopher and crackpot, "the lost sages of North America brought back to the existential front-and-center of America."
The movie is one of nine about New York City after September 11 playing at the second annual Tribeca Film Festival this week. The festival, which Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal started as a way to boost a neighborhood damaged by 9/11, has more movies and bigger sponsors this year. "The festival will crank up the feel-good early 1960s-style frippery, and steer clear of the Sundance-style wheeling and dealing. There will be fewer Sept. 11 memorials, less Marty Scorsese, but more Al Pacino," the New York Observer wrote last week. But there are still plenty of September 11 memorials, even though, like Live from Shiva's Dance Floor, they are far from straight-forward documentaries about the disaster.
The documentary Ashtanga, N.Y. shows aging yoga guru Sri K. Pattabhi Jois' visit to New York City in September 2001. Jois helps New Yorkers -- including Gwenyth Paltrow and Mike D from the Beastie Boys -- cope with 9/11 in his Soho studio.
In the feature Ash Tuesday, Janeane Garofalo and Giancarlo Esposito play lower Manhattan residents dealing with September 11. The movie shows how humor and wit can be responses to tragedy, and is billed as a comedy-drama. "It was important to me that we complete principle photography prior to the first anniversary of September 11. I wanted all of us, cast and crew, to make the film with a fresh wound, and without the benefit of perspective," filmmaker Jim Hershleder said in a director's statement.
In Evan Oppenheimer's movie Justice, E.R.'s Erik Palladino plays an artist who creates a comic book hero to help him get over his grief after September 11.
A schedule of films -- features, documentaries and shorts -- about rebuilding New York (for a full festival schedule, go to the film festival website):
Feature Films
Ash Tuesday
Dir by Jim Hershleder
Janeane Garofalo and Giancarlo Esposito play lower Manhattan residents in the aftermath of 9/11.
Friday, May 9, 6:00 p.m.
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave.
Saturday, May 10, 6:30 p.m.
The Screening Room, 54 Varick Street
Sunday, May 11, 3:30 p.m.
The Screening Room, 54 Varick Street
Justice
Dir by Evan Oppenheimer
An artist creates a comic-book superhero to help him cope with September 11.
Thursday, May 8, 6:45 p.m.
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave.
Friday, May 9, 10:15 p.m.
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave.
Feature Documentaries
Ashtanga, NY Dir by Caroline Laskow, Mary Wigmore
Aging yoga guru Sri K. Pattabhi Jois visits New York City in September 2001.
Wednesday, May 7, 3:15 p.m.
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave.
Friday, May 9, 6:30 p.m.
The Screening Room, 54 Varick Street
Sunday, May 11, 10:00 a.m.
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave.
Koenig's Sphere
Dir by Percy Adler
The German artist visits his damaged sculpture at Ground Zero, five weeks after 9/11.
Thursday, May 8, 8:00 p.m.
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave..
Friday, May 9, noon
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave.
Saturday, May 10, 6:30 p.m.
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave.
Witnessing
Dir by Aileen Ghee
Interviews with many of the photographers who contributed to the Here is New York exhibit of September 11 photographs.
Thursday, May 8, 8:00 p.m.
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave.
Friday, May 9, noon
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave.
Saturday, May 10, 6:30 p.m.
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave..
Shorts
From the Ashes - Epilogue
Dir by Deborah Shaffer, Michael Berz
A revisit of the artists originally profiled in From The Ashes - 10 Artists.
Wednesday, May 7, 3:15 p.m.
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave..
Friday, May 9, 6:30 p.m.
The Screening Room, 54 Varick Street
Sunday, May 11, 10:00 a.m.
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave.
Live from Shiva's Dance Floor
Dir by Richard Linklater
Philosopher tour guide Timothy Speed Levitch gives a tour of lower Manhattan.
Thursday, May 8, 12:30 p.m.
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave.
Friday, May 9, 3:00 p.m.
The Screening Room, 54 Varick Street
New Scenes from America
Dir by Jorgen Leth
Shot in New York, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and California in September 2001.
Wednesday, May 7, 8:30 p.m.
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave.
Saturday, May 10, 10:30 a.m.
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave.
Souvenir Views
Dir by Begonya Plaza
A Spanish tourist visits New York during the September 11 attacks.
Friday, May 9, 9:30 p.m.
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave.
Sunday, May 11, 3:00 p.m.
United Artists Battery Park Theatres,102 North End Ave.
At last week's Imagine New York workshop about lower Manhattan transportation projects, over 100 people debated downtown's transportation future. In small groups, they examined how well state and city plans stack up with their own transportation priorities.
Before the workshops began, transportation experts outlined the different plans for lower Manhattan, including the World Trade Center Transportation Hub at Ground Zero, a new Fulton Street Transit Center, a new South Ferry Subway Station, new connections to John F. Kennedy Airport and making a section of West Street an underground tunnel in order to build a park on top of it.
In group discussions, many said they were relieved that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority plans to untangle the confusing connections between the 2, 3, 4, 5, A, C, J, M and Z trains in a new Fulton Street Transit Center at Broadway.
Some of the other planned projects, however, were not so widely embraced. One group gave all of the different proposals a ranking from 1 to 5 and gave the plan to put a bus garage underneath the World Trade Center memorial site, which many victim's families find offensive, a score of -10.
In another group, Midtown resident Stephen Wilder took a look at the price estimates for bringing part of West Street underground, a project that Governor George Pataki is supporting, and said that a $900 million price tag is far too hefty. Spending that much on a short stretch of road is "wasteful," he said.
Jordan Gruzen, an architect whose office was destroyed on 9/11, quickly spoke up in defense of a short West Street tunnel. "It is a key element so that the entire World Trade Center rebuilding is finished," he said. "If you leave the traffic, the cars going by quickly, the noise they generate effects the memorial space. If we don't build this, it is something we'll look back twenty, thirty years from now and say, we missed our chance."
"I'm of the absolute opposite opinion," said Roland Gebhardt, from Rebuild Downtown Our Town. "Yes, we have to deal with the traffic in that area. But with a tunnel or underpass we would create two new ramps in areas that each will run over two blocks. Those ramps are a blight for the neighborhood. They are very difficult to design to make humane. They block people from crossing the street," he said. Gebhardt added that repaving West Street with certain materials could make traffic less noisy.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other politicians have said that providing a one-seat ride from lower Manhattan to John F. Kennedy Airport is an essential transportation plan. But Katie Taylor from the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development, said she doesn't see why a one-seat ride has become a must-do project. "Why are we prioritizing the airports, and the visitors more than we are residents? These are hard choices about money, you know, all of these things. In the end, we have to choose," she said.
"This plan doesn't even really serve the tourists, because it is a one-seat ride to lower Manhattan, where there frankly are very little hotels. The reality is, visitors budget for the maximum ease, which for them is a car. It will always be a car, I think for a very long time. It would take one incredible magical ride to take them absolutely everywhere they want to go to make them not get into a car. This just isn't a city that facilitates it."
"But Katie, what do we want the city to be like?" Gebhardt broke in. "Now we have an opportunity to change it. It is about what we want to be. Visitors bring in revenue. They are intimidated. If they can do it with a one-seat ride, they will do it."
![]() The Corbin Building |
With all the enormous public attention on rebuilding lower Manhattan, it seems inconceivable to me that anything could be missing from the debate. But something important has been overlooked thus far. The words "historic preservation" have not passed the lips of those planning the project. It is as if it was the 1960's again and the raze-and-build-anew urban renewal orthodoxy prevailed unchallenged. It is, as Yogi Berra said, "Deja vu all over again."
A case in point is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's $750 million proposal for the new Fulton Transit Center on Broadway between Fulton and John Streets. The authority's design concept envisions clearing the site of all structures, even though the improved station would be entirely below grade.
What alarms preservationists most about this proposal is that one of the historic buildings slated for demolition by the MTA is the Corbin Building, a slender, nine-story structure built in 1889, when it loomed over its neighbors and was tall enough to be called a "skyscraper." It features a rugged masonry facade hung on an iron frame (rolled steel sections were not available until 1893), with elaborate terra-cotta details.
The Corbin Building was designed by Francis Hatch Kimball, also the architect of the office buildings flanking the Trinity Church Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan, the Presbyterian Chapel in Riverdale, the Montauk Club and Emmanuel Baptist Church in Brooklyn, and the headquarters of the New York Architectural Terra-Cotta Company in western Queens. The building was named after Austin Corbin, a flamboyant 19th century financier who built railroads on Long Island, and in Reading, Pennsylvania, as well as hotels on Coney Island and his own game preserve in Newport, New Hampshire.
Instead of ending up in a landfill somewhere, the Corbin Building could be preserved and incorporated into a commercial building on this site. It would help anchor and enliven such a facility and could yield income and taxes to offset the cost of the Transit Center. Architecturally, it could be as exciting a new-old contrast as David Childs' design for the new Penn Station (now to be named after the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan) or Lord Norman Foster's tower atop the Hearst Building.
Robert Silman, the highly-regarded structural engineer who saved Frank Lloyd Wright's "Fallingwater" from falling into the water, has devised a way to underpin the Corbin Building's foundations so that it could be preserved and reused while a new and improved subway station is constructed beneath it. "From a structural engineering standpoint, it's entirely feasible, with proven technology, for the MTA to have its cake and eat it too - both preserving the Corbin Building and building the new Fulton Transit Center," says Silman.
Silman's client is the Lower Manhattan Emergency Preservation Fund, a consortium of five preservation groups: the World Monuments Fund, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, The Preservation League of New York State, The Municipal Art Society, and the New York Landmarks Conservancy, where I work. These groups raised funds to help preserve historic sites damaged on 9/11/01. The fund is now advocating to protect and preserve historic resources downtown.
The fund has identified three "corridors of concern" in lower Manhattan, along Fulton, Greenwich, and West Streets. In each instance, worthy historical structures are threatened by redevelopment plans that range well beyond the Ground Zero damage zone. In all, there are more than 225 historic sites in lower Manhattan that have no protection whatsoever from demolition or inappropriate alteration.
Awash in competitions, intrigue, and emotion, the planners for the MTA and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation seem to lack a sense of historical continuity. Ground Zero may be a tabula rasa, a "field of dreams." But the rest of the downtown must not be treated as if it were Sixth Avenue. The planners must not be allowed to repeat the mistakes of the 1960's.
Lower Manhattan has been the epicenter of this nation's most significant events for nearly four centuries. It boasts a street pattern and an array of venerable buildings unmatched in other precincts of our city. It is still a pillar of world finance, one of the largest commercial office markets in America, and an emerging residential neighborhood of great potential. It houses such strange bedfellows as the New York Stock Exchange and the South Street Seaport with equanimity. It boasts the largest business improvement district in the five boroughs. It is truly a unique, vital - and historical - place.
None of this heritage should be erased in the process of rebuilding Lower Manhattan's damaged heart. The situation calls for delicate, skilful surgery - not wholesale, indiscriminate change. As a preservationist, I pray that our planners are up to the task. But as an advocate, I am remembering what Yogi had to say on the subject. Stay tuned! Watch this space!
Roger P. Lang is a preservation architect who serves as director of community programs and services at the New York Landmarks Conservancy. If you want to receive a free copy of the preservation fund's illustrated, annotated map of these sites, send an email to %This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.">This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..