JAMES LILEKS: The Martyred Towers — The WTC was more controversial than you might think.
It seems cold to ask it now, today, but I’ve a reason. Did we love the World Trade Center for what it was, or what it came to mean?
Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic for the New York Times, had it right: one tower would have been rather banal, but two towers had the appearance of abstract sculpture. In a 2004 lecture he spoke of his initial reaction:
The first phase we could call Resentment: what was this thing, or this pair of things, doing here, so big, so banal, so unthinkably intrusive, all the more insulting because it is taking away the title of tallest building that everyone knows rightfully belongs to the Empire State Building.
He wasn’t alone. A lot of people thought the buildings were too big. In 1967, the Committee for a Reasonable World Trade Center ran this ad, demanding the project be downscaled.
In the ‘70s and ‘80s, the WTC and the Pan Am (later MetLife) Building were the two most hated buildings by Manhattanites. As Lileks writes, “Goldberger came to accept, grudgingly, the WTC’s role as a landmark, the shifting attributes that varied depending on the light, the wise decisions to place them at angle to each other instead of side by side. But he never ended up admiring them, and in his 2004 remarks noted that its final role was not love, but respect for its martyred status.” Even far-left Salon noted on September 17th, 2001, “They jeered when it went up. They cried when it crashed down.”