Lower Manhattan takes time to remember
This part of the city has bounced back beautifully from the terrible tragedy
NEW YORK— At first, it’s weird, then it’s wonderful. So bright and white, it almost hurts your eyes, the Oculus draws your eyes skyward, its steel and glass designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava to evoke a dove in flight.
Officially the focal point of the massive World Trade Center Transportation Hub, it was more than a decade in the making, gobbling up some $4 billion (U.S.), its 800,000 square feet spiriting a quarter million commuters, daily, to their destinations.
You could also say that the wings of the Oculus, fixed in perpetual flight, now serve the hub of New York’s newly reinvented downtown. Anchored by the opening of One World Trade Center — at 546 metres, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere — Lower Manhattan is, once again, on the rise.
Famously home to Ground Zero, this neighbourhood has been utterly transformed since that disastrous day, gone from mostly financial and, some would say, faceless, to a place where New Yorkers gather, to eat, drink — and remember.
Walking the twisting streets here in the oldest part of the city, on the tip of the island — these curving lanes a stark contrast to the staid grid of a midtown — I can hear them before I see them, the water rushing into two entirely symmetrical squares, sitting in the footprint of once-mighty towers.
Once, visitors craned their necks up, squinting to see the tandem tops of the World Trade Center, but now, at its Memorial, we cast our faces down, eyes boring into that black abyss, reading the names of the lost, inscribed into the stone of these reflecting pools.
A few steps away, I take a tour through the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, where I hear whispered snippets of conversation around me, people recounting, in many different languages, their own stories of that terrible day.
Walking through its minute-byminute recounting of those awful events, everything from news clips to artifacts — a destroyed fire truck, the door of a Port Authority police car — take me right back to Sept. 11. But I emerge into the sun, eager to explore what this resilient city has created since then.
I’m met at Hudson Eats by Callie Haines, a civil engineer and a senior vice-president for the company that owns and operates Brookfield Place, which houses this food hall.
She explains some of the structural challenges of building on top of reclaimed land, much of it comprised by the fill created by the building of the Twin Towers, then explains that this building was originally constructed as the World Financial Center, a place made for captains of the commercial world, “masters of the universe,” as Tom Wolfe would call them.
“It was built in the 1980s like a fortress, facing the river, its back to the city,” Haines explains.
Its airy winter garden was one of the first buildings to rise again, reopening exactly one year later, on Sept. 11, 2002. But with the added calamity of the Global Financial Crisis, when most of its corporate clients fled (or shut down), this place was rebranded and forced to trans- form. It’s now home to a sailing school, a fully functioning marina and Hudson Eats, which opened in 2014, a 30,000-square-foot space where 14 chef-driven fast-casual restaurants feed hungry New Yorkers.
“For so long, Lower Manhattan was all construction, with no sense of community,” Haines remembers. “We needed a place to gather. The food here, it grounds us.”
I tour and taste my way through some of the area’s other culinary offerings, including Le District, a French-themed space that includes food stations, a wine bar and a topshelf restaurant — L’Appart, which recently, in almost record time, gained its first Michelin Star. And I visit the downtown outlet of Eataly, the massively popular foodie phenomenon, founded in Turin, Italy, its first outpost opened uptown by chefs Mario Batali, Lidia Bastianich, and Joe Bastianich.
Occupying the third floor of 4 World Trade Center, a sort of upscale mall that’s also home to an H& M and a Banana Republic, the place is jammed on a rainy Saturday afternoon, people wolfing down panini sandwiches and authentic Neapolitan-style pizza (Eduardo, the man behind the counter, tells me the ingredients, oven and recipe are all imported from the Italian homeland), while scooping up oysters and cured meats and a wide variety of Italian cheeses.
After wandering farther, way downtown, past the statue of the vaunted (and controversial) Fearless Girl and Wall Street’s Charging Bull, to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, whose artifacts span from a Coast Salish robe to a Quechua trumpet to a Lakota hand drum, I loop back, past the Oculus, to One World Trade Center.
Here, at its Observatory, you’ll find little information about Sept. 11, with exhibits at the base instead focusing on the future.
One celebrates the men and women who built the tower, from labourers to engineers, and includes short clips of them talking about it; another is semi-geological, taking you through the bedrock on which the tower is built.
Boarding the elevator, I’m rocketed up 102 floors in fewer than 60 seconds. At the top, we’re ushered into what looks like a theatre, where, after showing a short, inspirational film focused on rebirth and the rhythms of the city, the screen drops away. Revealed: a wall of massive windows.
I step forward, eager to explore from above, making the rounds, past the bar and restaurant and a cadre of interpreters, all of them at the ready to explain what we see below, getting close to the glass, soaring spires at my feet, looking out on the downtown, from the Oculus to Lady Liberty and beyond, seeing what is once, and again, one of the world’s greatest cities. Tim Johnson (timjohnsontravels@gmail.com) was hosted by NYC & Co., which didn’t review or approve this story.