Why can’t we learn from the visionary who built the Twin Towers?
It was the grandson of a Tipperary immigrant to the US who helped build the World Trade Center and turn Lower Manhattan into an economic hub. Given the talent we have here...
AT the entrance to every room in New York’s 9/11 Memorial Museum stands a waist-high metal tower. It looks like one of those standing ashtrays they used to have in hotel lobbies, except there’s no way anyone could smoke here. Instead, you might be forgiven for thinking it was a replica of one of the World Trade Center towers, given where you are.
In fact, each tower holds a giant stack of tissues. And the reason they are there is that so many of the visitors are bawling uncontrollable cascades of tears.
That’s what this place does to you. For me, although you are surrounded at every turn by the most extraordinary, poignant, courageous and heartbreaking stories, it was the voice messages in one of the audio-visual rooms that tipped me over the edge.
The reconstruction of the hijacking of United 93 is presented simply, without unnecessary drama – but in extraordinary detail. Even though I knew the story – as well as seeing the eponymous film, I had read the 9/11 inquiry report in full – I was still left reeling, the tears streaming down my face, when they played some of the voice messages left by passengers and crew for their loved ones.
In particular, I was haunted by the message left by Lauren Grandcolas for her husband. There’s the measured urgency as she asks him to pick up the phone; the resigned acceptance when she realises he’s not there; the calmness with which she describes her predicament; and the astonishing dignity with which, facing death, she tells the man she loves how much he has meant to her.
Although no transcript could ever do it justice, it goes roughly like this: [BEEP] ‘Honey, are you there? Jack? Pick up sweetie...’ [PAUSE] ‘Okay, well I just wanted to tell you I love you.
‘We’re having a real problem on the plane. I’m totally fine… um… I just love you more than anything, just know that… and… uh… you know I’m comfortable, and I’m okay. ‘For now. ‘Um… it’s a little problem, so I’ll… uh…
‘I, I just love you. Please tell my family I love them too. [PAUSE] ‘Bye, honey.’
It doesn’t make it any easier, I think, to know that Lauren Grandcolas was three months pregnant with her first child. To read that she wasn’t meant to be on United 93, but had arrived early at the airport and was given a spare seat. Or to discover that her beloved Jack was asleep when she left her message: that’s why he didn’t pick up.
It’s also hard not to try to imagine Lauren’s last moments in this life: as the passengers fought to retake the aircraft, the hijackers turned it upside down – and then nosedived into the ground. It’s hard not to think about Jack Grandcolas, and what he must have gone through – and what he must be going through still.
It’s also hard not to think about what message you would leave for your own loved ones in such a situation. I hope I’d be aware enough to say thank you to my family, for giving me more joy than I’ve ever known in my life, but you also know that whatever you did say would be woefully inadequate to communicate everything you want them to know.
Any museum that makes you think about your own life on that level is, I think, somewhere very special. I’ve never visited Auschwitz, but with that caveat, the 9/11 Memorial is by far the most astonishing museum I’ve ever visited (and I have been to a few). The artefacts are extraordinary, from a melted Pentagon telephone to the actual steel columns from the South Tower which were hit by United 175; from children’s clothes recovered from American Airlines flight 77 to an entire fire truck crushed by debris from the collapsing towers – this giant vehicle now looking like a child’s toy that’s been bent and bashed in a toddlerish rage.
Just as powerful, perhaps, is the fact that the story of 9/11 is told without malice, without anger – dispassionately and yet proudly; calmly yet laden with emotion. This was, after all, the defining moment of our age. We saw global terrorism unfolding live on television. We saw people dying, live on television. We saw the technological military might of the USA breached by a handful of fanatics with craft knives. We were ringside for an event that changed the future of the world.
Many events are seismic, but often they are symptoms of what is happening. They don’t change the outcome – they are the outcome.
But 9/11 was different. Without 9/11, there would probably have been no re-election for George W Bush – and so no Obama, no Trump. No invasion of Iraq – and so no 7/7, no lies about weapons of mass destruction, no early departure for Tony Blair and takeover by Gordon Brown. Just think: no Brown, no Miliband, no Prime Minister Cameron, no Brexit referendum, no Brexit. No fall of Iraq, no Arab Spring, no Isis, no Gaddafi, no Syrian conflict.
We can’t ever know what would have happened instead, of course, but 9/11 changed the course of the planet. And this extraordinary repository does an extraordinary job of capturing the events of that day.
And yet, for all that, there’s something else extraordinary about this museum. It’s a message that resonated with me
all the way home to Dublin, and has stayed with me ever since. The first few exhibits in the museum are actually nothing to do with 9/11: they’re all about the construction of the World Trade Center. The Twin Towers were completed the year I was born, and so I always took them for granted, yet at the time they were an absolute marvel of engineering.
Entirely new technologies had to be created to allow them to be built. First, there was the need to find a way of building on a site that was effectively 21 metres underwater – and couldn’t just be continuously pumped out. Then there was the challenge of building higher than anyone had ever built before – without having to first build a giant central concrete tower which would have eaten up too much of the floor space.
On top of that, the builders needed to address the fact that a building that tall would sway in high winds – by up to 3.6metres on a gusty day. All of these challenges – and many more – were solved by teams of architects and scientists working together to take building into the Space Age.
AS impressive as any of the technological feats, though, was the story of WHY the World Trade Center was built. I had long assumed that the Wall Street area had always been swimming with money, and rich people had simply decided to build a couple of big towers. I couldn’t have been more wrong. In fact, in the 1960s, Lower Manhattan was rundown to the point of being derelict. Almost nobody lived there; the businesses that existed were generally small retailers. There was a very real danger of major financial businesses leaving altogether as the area crept into urban decay.
And then came a man with a vision. David Rockefeller was the grandson of oil baron John D Rockefeller. Born a billionaire, he could have simply wasted his life away; instead he chose to serve. He earned a PhD in economics. He interned for the New York mayor for a salary of $1 per year. Rather than trying to dodge the draft when World War II came along, he volunteered: Captain David Rockefeller served with distinction as a US army captain in France and North Africa, helping to save the free world. And in 1958, he began trying to save his city.
His plans came to public attention in 1960, when he unveiled proposals for a new World Trade Center. The idea, he said, would be to create a ‘United Nations of Trade’ that would breathe new life into Lower Manhattan. A similar idea had been floated in 1939, and again after the war: but like most such projects, it needed someone with true vision – and no little political influence – to back it. Rockefeller (whose brother Nelson was, handily enough, governor of New York) made sure that the World Trade Center idea took flight.
The proposal, like any such greater undertaking, was hit by huge amounts of opposition. The businesses that operated at the planned site were furious at being evicted, and attempted to stop it through the courts. The owner of the Empire State Building, Lawrence Wien, also tried to block it – not least because his tower would no longer be the tallest in the world. Various political stakeholders demanded their slice: as well as building the Twin Towers, the authorities had to agree to build two new port terminals (one each in Manhattan and Brooklyn) and take over the failed Hudson and Manhattan Railroad (since then known as the PATH rail service). But just ten years after the original plan was unveiled, on December 23, 1970, the first of the Twin Towers was formally topped out.
And, perhaps inevitably, the man who had actually turned Rockefeller’s dream into reality was an Irishman.
Austin Joseph Tobin was the grandson of an emigrant from Tipperary, William Mortimer Tobin, who had worked (and died) on the Brooklyn docks following his arrival in the New World. After attending Holy Cross College and Fordham Law School, Austin Tobin worked his way up from being a humble law clerk to becoming the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. And it was in that role that Tobin oversaw the building of the World Trade Center – financed not by government or taxpayers, but by the Port Authority itself using its own investment bonds.
It was Tobin who had seized on Rockefeller’s idea and, with his characteristic grim determination allied to his ferocious intellect, made it concrete. It was Tobin who forced consensus where it was needed, bought the land, developed the financial model, saw off the naysayers, overcame technical hurdles, defeated a tugboat strike and ultimately drove the entire process. In doing so, Tobin created what was effectively a new minicity – with the plaza at its heart named after him.
And it was this story of the creation of the World Trade Center, as much as those of the victims of 9/11, that stayed with me as I returned home earlier this month. My own port city of Dublin is facing its own crisis today – in the first instance due to a lack of housing, but in reality due to a lack of vision. This city, and this country, could become the English-speaking financial and legal services bridge between Europe and the rest of the world. Our port city could become the Lower Manhattan of the 22nd century.
THE question, though, is whether we have men and women of the stature required to contemplate, far less create, something of this scale. If one Irishman could change New York forever, surely 158 in Dáil Éireann could transform their own capital?
Yet while other cities are reaching for the sky, our legislators are allowing a handful of councillors to keep our vision rooted to the ground. While other cities are becoming more connected, the only way for us to cross the 8km of Dublin Bay is a 26km journey through the city centre. While other cities are turning their ports into gleaming metropolises of steel and glass, ours is still unloading containers and disgorging giant trucks into the city centre. It’s hard not to suspect that if our political classes had been in charge of America in the 1960s, not only would Lower Manhattan still be decrepit today, Neil Armstrong would probably have lived out the rest of his days gazing at the Moon and wondering what it might have been like to reach it.
Opportunities to build something epoch-defining for future generations are rare indeed, yet ours is here, now. The chance to change our own world lies right in front of us. As Brexit looms over the City of London, we have an opportunity here to do for our capital what Rockefeller and Tobin did for New York: to turn our port into a new mini-city of our own, to transform Ireland into a commercial and financial hub – and to make this country a world trade centre in its own right. The question is not our technical ability, nor our ingenuity or our intellect or our capacity for hard work – we have all those in abundance.
The question, very simply, is whether we have the courage.