Both the Times and the Post ran cover stories on construction projects today. The subject at the Times is the new Trade Center design, which is finally beginning to build some sort of consensus among politicians, developers, and architects. Hopefully New Yorkers will come along soon. Of the many articles included in the “Rebuilding Lower Manhattan” feature, the most interesting, I think, is a short editorial by Joel Meyerowitz, who spent nine months taking more than 8,000 photographs of ground zero during the recovery and clean-up. For Meyerowitz, the “inanimate hero of the disaster” is the “bathtub” of steel and concrete that surrounds the site, holding back the waters of the Hudson River.
Now the bathtub has been exposed to daylight, and walking into it reveals a power similar to that of the pyramids. Every day I spent down there I felt the majesty of those walls, with the city soaring into the sky above. This is a new perspective for a city to offer in its midst — a sacred space below sea level yet open to the sky.
With the choice of the design by Studio Daniel Libeskind for the World Trade Center site, this space has a chance of being preserved. Mr. Libeskind centered his memorial on the bathtub, keeping it uncovered, allowing sunlight to grace it. Of course, his design is only the beginning, and in the days ahead it will be subject to constant pressures and alterations. For this reason, New Yorkers need to stand watch to ensure that the final plans sanctify this space deep in the earth. Although unasked for, it is our Parthenon, our Stonehenge. Purified by loss, it is ours to shape and renew.
The piece in the Post is much closer to my heart (and my ass, as anyone who has sat motionless in beltway traffic can testify). The new Woodrow Wilson bridge is inching closer and closer to becoming a reality, and it sounds as though it will be quite an engineering marvel once completed. A twelve-lane drawbridge (!), it will be powered by “motors with no more power than a Dodge Neon engine.” Unbelievable.
The piers must be strong enough to hold up under the daily strain of more than 300,000 cars and trucks — and possibly train traffic someday. They also were designed to withstand warping and sagging through sizzling summers and freezing winters, not to mention the possibility of a ship collision or earthquake. The piers must keep the draw spans rigid enough to open and close almost 5,000 times during the next 75 years and still line up within that one-eighth of an inch every time — so closely that a bottle cap could barely fit between them.
Engineers have even accounted for the way the sun passes through the Washington sky. Because the sun will bake the bridge’s southern side more than its northern side, the concrete and steel on different parts of the bridge will expand and contract at different rates, Healy said. Unless compensated for during construction, that difference alone could cause the draw spans to warp enough to throw off the alignment. How do they account for so many possible calamities? “A lot of math,” Jim Ruddell, head construction manager, said with a chuckle.
Speaking of Howard Roark, if you’re ever up for a night of good, campy fun, rent King Vidor’s 1949 version of The Fountainhead, starring (Knoxville’s own) Patricia Neal as Dominique Francon and Gary Cooper (!!) as Roark. You just haven’t lived until you’ve heard Cooper chunk his way through pages and pages of Rand’s ridiculous dialogue. Oh, it’s so bad.