FWIW, just an opinion
What Future for Wall Street?
The center for world finance can't also be a graveyard.
BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY
Monday, September 23, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT
URL: opinionjournal.com
The explosion that September day was the largest terrorist attack in U.S. history. An everyday horse-drawn carriage pulled up on Wall Street, and was left to explode between the Morgan Bank and the Federal Building across the street. Windows were shattered for a half-mile around, fire belched up and ignited awnings 12 stories above. With shrapnel tearing through a lunchtime crowd, 38 people were killed and some 300 wounded.
The attack of Sept. 16, 1920, described for example in Ron Chernow's "House of Morgan," was part of a terrorist campaign. Five months earlier an anarchist and escaped mental patient shot and killed a physician to the Morgans who was passing the collection plate in St. George's Church on Stuyvesant Square. The Wall Street bomber was never apprehended, but a later historian maintained the act was retribution for the indictment a few days earlier of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
While you can still see an arc of scars in the stone facade of the Morgan Building, not even a plaque tells the history. Nor was there an urge to commemorate the 1975 bombing in Fraunces Tavern, or for that matter the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. As the command center of world capitalism, Wall Street has repeatedly been a target for violence by the disaffected, but heretofore its response has been to grieve, shrug and move on, ultimately reaching new heights.
In the September 11 destruction of the World Trade Center, of course, deaths totaled nearly 3,000. Too, it beckons to make it a turning point in world history, the spark for new international security arrangements for the new century. A permanent memorial is entirely fitting.
Yellow ribbons were nowhere to be seen on Sept. 12; the cult of victimization gave way to a spontaneous display of American flags. Over the last year much of this spirit has been lost. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani has suggested that the entire 16-acre site be turned into a memorial to the victims. Gov. George Pataki told a gathering of victim families that "Where the towers stood is hallowed ground," promising not to build on either of the one-acre footprints. In the minds of the most outspoken family representative, the footprint reaches down to China.
Sympathy is understandable and healthy. But the moving memorials for President Lincoln and the Vietnam veterans have a footprint of a single acre. The proper place for a cemetery is, as my colleague Daniel Henninger has urged, at Fresh Kills on Staten Island, where the remains of the towers were in fact buried and a site now suitable for truly reverential landscaping.
Crippling restrictions on rebuilding the site in the midst of downtown Manhattan, though, would blight the area in perpetuity, eventually leading to its demise as a center of world commerce. Such an outcome would give Osama bin Laden the symbolic victory he sought.
Even with two monumental buildings destroyed, the Wall Street area is the third largest business center in the nation, behind only midtown Manhattan and the Chicago loop. It remains the headquarters of the New York Stock Exchange, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, American Express, the American International Insurance Group, and other important companies including Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
Most of these companies have diversified part of their workforce out of the area. Whether they remain as leases expire over the next decade will probably depend on the signal public authorities give about their determination to maintain a world-class environment for corporations and their employees. To avoid decline, the area needs to retain its vitality, and with the anniversary celebrations of the attack now movingly behind us, a group of business leaders led by the Alliance for Downtown New York finally managed to say this last week.
As their statement recognized, the key issue is transportation. The PATH service to New Jersey is expected to be restored next year, and there have been improvements in ferry service. But even if the status quo ante is restored, downtown has been shortchanged, and further midtown improvements are under way.
Rebuilding should be the opportunity to restore this balance. Everyone believes redesign should connect the PATH and the Fulton Street subway hub. But the footprint issue may impede both this and the routing of PATH trains. In any event, such steps are marginal for the high-level employees and visitors essential to Wall Street.
The most visionary plan would connect downtown and Westchester County via Metro North, but this is hugely expensive and would take an eternity. But it would be possible to connect with the Long Island Railroad in Brooklyn, and thus to Jamaica Station and the new train to Kennedy Airport. And also to link the PATH to Newark Airport. These connections would allow Wall Street to make its bid as the entryway for international business and remain the center of world finance.
While not a proponent of big memorials, current Mayor Michael Bloomberg puts his emphasis not on protecting the vitality of downtown but on building housing. It's easy to guess that someone who made a fortune selling computer screens sees the future as telecommuting, and underrates face-to-face contact at the highest levels of world commerce. If the talent and investment in Wall Street dissipates, it will flow partially to midtown, but also to London and points around the globe.
As a business success, Mayor Bloomberg ought to recognize that the brand of Wall Street is a valuable world-wide asset, as our newspaper attests. As for Gov. Pataki, whether to make Wall Street a cemetery or revitalize it as the center of world finance is an issue made to order for independent gubernatorial candidate B. Thomas Golisano.
Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com. |
