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Reviewed by:
  • City in the Sky
  • Scott Gabriel Knowles (bio)
City in the Sky. By James Glanz and Eric Lipton. New York: Times Books, 2003. Pp. 428. $26.

In 1977, a 27-year-old toymaker from Queens named George H. Willig scaled the 1,362-foot South Tower of the World Trade Center. "It's a very appealing wall," said this "human fly," as he was immediately dubbed, when asked what had gotten into him. "It looked unscalable—I thought I'd like to try it" (p. 218). The human fly, it turns out, had a great deal in common with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the government agency responsible for raising the Twin Towers. Mounting the heights of steel and glass to get to the top of a political, economic, and technological behemoth, both took thrilling and ultimately death-defying risks. James Glanz and Eric Lipton's City in the Sky provides the most detailed narrative of the World Trade Center's history and the first major recontextualization of that history to appear since 9/11. In so doing, Glanz, a science reporter, and Lipton, a metropolitan reporter for the New York Times, offer a much-needed antidote to the largely celebratory literature on the Twin Towers and skyscrapers generally.

At the New York World's Fair in 1939, amid the futuristic corporate demonstrations of technological utopias in the city, the laboratory, and the kitchen, the International Chamber of Commerce erected a model World Trade Center and invited visitors to imagine "world peace through trade." The idea, with its ill-timed catchphrase, had friends in high places—especially businessmen and politicians who saw that more and more of their local economies were shaped by international flows of capital, materials, and labor. But global conflict and recovery intervened.

Then in 1958 the trade center concept was revived by David Rockefeller, ambitious grandson of John D. Rockefeller and a rising star at Chase Bank. Rockefeller's Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association began championing a $250 million UN-style complex on the East River (eventually moved to the west side to placate the governor of New Jersey), built on free-market gospel, the belief that as "a jet age . . . shrinks the globe, the exchange of new goods promises to raise the standard of living of the people of many nations" (p. 37). Additionally, Rockefeller aimed to revitalize the sagging commercial economy of lower Manhattan, where he planned to build a new world headquarters for Chase Bank.

Here we meet the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and its director Austin Tobin, a master builder surpassed in his enthusiasm for concrete only by Robert Moses. Formed in 1921, the Port Authority used its bi-state mandate to control the activities of New York Harbor, and over a few decades transformed the entire definition of a port—from a traditional center of shipping to a modernist hive that moves cars, trains, commuters, foreign capital, and information. Responsible for the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, [End Page 670] the George Washington Bridge, and all the region's major airports, the Port Authority ultimately held the keys to success for the World Trade Center, and, spotting an opportunity to raise a "vertical global port," it acted.

Glanz and Lipton show us the skill and power that the Port Authority and its numerous operatives used to remove each of many roadblocks. Having Nelson Rockefeller sitting in the New York State governor's chair was not a hindrance, but neither was it enough to carry the day easily. When business owners in lower Manhattan's Radio Row district yelled about being displaced, the Port Authority beat them in court, then exercised its powers of eminent domain to silence them and roll them out of the way. When powerful neighborhood advocates like Jane Jacobs and real-estate developers like Lawrence Wien opposed the project's size, the Port Authority's public relations team succeeded in portraying them as enemies of progress. And, when Mayor John V. Lindsay refused to authorize the permits to tear up the local streets, the planners successfully countered by offering to create more city for the mayor to tax, dumping enough...

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