And the walls come tumbling down
Writing by treason on Friday, 24 of August , 2007 at 10:53 pm
“Even in these times, an August dimmed with miners trapped in Utah and China, Mexico’s hurricane and the final body pulled from below the Minnesota bridge, the story of two New York firemen dying in a dead building was just too much.
Since September 11, when so many died across the street from the Deutsche Bank building in lower Manhattan, a great deal of effort has been made to ensure that no more people die in the U.S. from anything remotely connected to that day. Nearly six years after, we in New York have become used on any given morning to finding additional police on subway platforms (as yesterday) or seeing fleets of police cars in front of large commercial buildings. The purpose is to show presence, and deter terror.
So when it emerged that all the sirens one was hearing last Saturday afternoon in Manhattan were because the empty building known as 130 Liberty Street had caught fire, and that two firemen had died on the 14th floor when their bottled air ran out, one was dumbstruck. Then angry.”
– Daniel Henninger, The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page
When I was little, we moved catty-corner, across Sheridan Road, from one apartment building to another. The first building was a typical Chicago tenement, perhaps a hundred years old, and there was a plan to tear it down and replace it with a high-rise – the type that was so popular in urban areas during the 1960s.
We moved out, carrying our belongings across Sheridan Road and walking them up several flights of stairs into our new residence. From our windows that stretched from the livingroom, across a sun porch, to my sister’s bedroom, we could see our old building. It stood empty, except for the few items residents had abandoned, like those my mother had decided to leave behind. One of those things was my beloved stuffed bear. It was large, with coarse brown hair, and I liked it precisely because it looked like a real bear. According to my mother, it smelled like one, too. She hated it, so it stayed behind.
One day the building caught fire. Chicago’s finest arrived and extinguished the flames, but the building remained standing. I saw it every day from our apartment and had to walk past it twice each day on my way to and from school. I noticed my bear, singed from the flames and wet from the fire hose, stretched on the lawn near a broken window where our old home had been. Forty years have passed and I can still see my bear and the shell of that burnt out old building.
One morning I heard a crash and ran to the window. It was barely light outside but I could see the wrecking ball swinging into the side of the structure where our apartment had been. The yellow bricks toppled, the dust rose, and within a few hours there was nothing left but rubble. I watched as the building was demolished, but as horrible as that was, it was also a relief. I just didn’t have to look at the corpse anymore.
Just this week I went online looking for some information about my high school. It had been built in the 1920s and my stepfather had graduated with the class of ’37. I think he was tickled that forty years later, I graduated from the school he had attended. But four years later, my stepfather was dead and the city had torn down the school buildings and ripped out the landscaping, replacing what had been there with shops, offices, and apartments.
I was home, visiting from college, and my sister warned: “Trust me. You don’t want to see it.” But I drove past it one day and saw the façade still standing, only sky behind it.
I found a lot of information this week about former classmates, and discovered that some of them, like our alma mater, are gone. Two of my classmates who married are still together; their adult son has created a website about the old school.
I was tentative at first, but I found the site and looked at the photographs. There was something sickening about seeing the chain link fence around the campus and buildings, once so majestic, crumbling, in ruins. A decision had been made quickly and there had been no effort to save or even preserve part of what had been. Years have passed and many have come to realize that the city had been too hasty. A mistake had been made.
Today, New Yorkers and tourists alike are forced to look at a corpse towering over what had been. A dead bank building that serves to remind them of the horror of that September morning and the weeks and months which followed. But the dead bank remains for the reasons Henninger describes in his article: safety reasons. The debate and litigation over the removal of this black mark continue, and the stain remains on the landscape.
After two firefighters died during a blaze last week, there was another accident a few days later and two more firefighters were injured. Unlike my high school, this isn’t a piece of architectural beauty that needs to be saved. It’s a moldy, asbestos-filled monstrosity that serves only one purpose.
The imposing black tower at 130 Liberty Street. It is time to stop the litigation and careful dissection. Conclude this autopsy: liberate this corpse and those who are forced to live with it. That building will come down one day, but I swear to you that forty years from now those who have been subjected to it all this time will still have its image branded into them.
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