The first response of New Yorkers in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, was to ask how they could help and what they could do. Before long, professional organizations involving architects, urban planners, and real estate professionals issued statements, maps, guides, and even rudimentary plans for rebuilding the devastation in Lower Manhattan.
The Steven L. Newman Institute/CUNY Urban Consortium, in collaboration with the Rutgers Center for Urban Policy Research, weighed in with a daylong symposium on Feb. 8, 2002. These groups wanted to make their collective expertise and resources available to the city at a very fraught and confusing moment.
The conference included moments both somber and stressful. Stanley Moses, chairman of the Hunter College Planning Department, offered a particularly grim vision. Leaning across the lectern, Moses predicted that there would be another terrorist attack on New York—one that would nullify anything we planned. The Rev. James Morton asked the audience to observe a moment of silence and reminded us all that the whole world would be watching to see what was ultimately done with the World Trade Center site—whatever was finally decided on would have moral implications.
Guests could see in their programs that two of the participants had chosen lecture titles derived from “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats’s haunting poem. Fred Siegel, commentator and Cooper Union professor, chose “Can the Center Hold?” while Michael Sorkin, director of CCNY’s Urban Design Program, decided on “The Center Cannot Hold.” The poem says, in part: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” Yeats’s imagery reminded everyone that the conference was addressing previously unimaginable circumstances.
“What rough beast, its hour come round at last,” from the same poem, could easily have served as an introduction to the presentation by Maki Haberfeld. A former member of the Israel National Police and now a professor at John Jay College, Haberfeld described terrorism as a distorted form of communication initiated by people who are enraged. She was skeptical about whether the city administration, in its rush to reassure, had identified where the next threat might come from. A camera watching Osama bin Laden walking down Madison Avenue would mean nothing, Haberfeld argued, if an armed response or a swooping helicopter were not immediately available to capture him. Another John Jay faculty member, Charles Jennings, described Sept. 11 as the most serious failure of the U.S. intelligence community in the nation’s history. To drive home his point, he cited grim instances of FAA lapses and pointed out that prior to 9/11 there had been “precedents and warnings,” including an Al Qaeda hijacking of an Air France jet in 1994.
One of the many worrisome issues addressed at the conference was the continued viability of Lower Manhattan as New York’s financial center. Fred Siegel reminded everyone that “the dispersion of economic activity was well under way . . . in 1898.” Invoking H.G. Wells, writing in 1902, he read a passage from Wells predicting “the city will diffuse itself until it has taken up considerable areas and many of the characteristics, the greenness, the fresh air, what is now country.” Wells went on to note, “Already, for a great number of businesses, it is no longer necessary that the offices should be in London, and only habit, tradition, and minor considerations keep them there.” And yet Siegel was among the most sanguine of symposium participants, pointing out that despite the impact of the terrorist attack New York continues to attract the key element of the modern economy: talented people.
Addressing the terrible but necessary tension between those who want nothing to be built on the WTC site and those who think only rebuilding as quickly as possible can spur healing, James Young, author of two books on the symbolism of memorials, asked us to consider, “What is to be remembered here and how? For whom are we remembering?” We must not, Young cautioned, turn the devastated site into a memorial “only to the 3,000 lives lost here.” Such a memorial “would inadvertently sanctify the culture of death and its veneration”—the very thing that inspired the killers themselves. He advised the audience to let time pass as the city goes through the necessary stages of mourning and the site is transformed from a seven-story “mountain of tangled and jutting ruins,” to a “gigantic hole in the ground,” to an open area. Then, he urged New Yorkers to “remember life with life.”
Symposium organizers planned Feb. 8 to be the beginning of a thoughtful conversation by New Yorkers for the benefit of their city. They intend for that conversation to continue.

—Ellen Posner, director, CUNY Urban Consortium

The daylong symposium on the fate of lower Manhattan featured experts from a variety of fields, including urban planning, economics, real estate, and religion.

A University-wide academic group of schools, departments, and individual faculty members from a variety of related disciplines, the CUNY Urban Consortium includes architects, real estate professionals, designers, sociologists, economists, urban planners, and metropolitan studies specialists. The group meets periodically and functions as a kind of informal “think tank” on a variety of citywide issues. The combined expertise of the consortium is also available to state and city agencies, neighborhood groups, and nonprofits on a consulting basis. Ellen Posner, former architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal, chairs the CUNY Urban Consortium, which is based at Baruch’s Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute.