Posted on 09/19/2001 10:14:38 AM PDT by Antiwar Republican
September 19, 2001 Wall Street Journal Don’t Rebuild the World Trade Center By HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR. The first time the World Trade Center came under attack, a bunch of new faces popped up in the Dow Jones cafeteria in the World Financial Center. They were bond traders from Cantor Fitzgerald, knocked out of their offices next door by a truck bomb in the parking garage 107 floors below. We had an agreement with them at the time to distribute bond-pricing data, so they were bunking with us as guests of this paper’s publisher. Now everybody knows the name Cantor Fitzgerald. Its chief, Howard Lutnick, has been on TV recounting his horrific loss, 700 out of 1,000 employees, including his brother. Mr. Lutnick survived only because he was taking his kid to kindergarten. Mr. Lutnick has become a symbol to the public that bond traders are human after all, but to Wall Street he is a symbol of something else, though you won’t find much on-the-record talk about it. His wasn’t the only company to be defenestrated from the towers a second time. A dozen or more Asian banks had their stock-trading arms there, as did a Dean Witter contingent of what is now Morgan Stanley. Salomon Smith Barney’s legal department was housed in Building 7, now a smoking pile. Its roster of employees, with names, salaries and bonuses, was found on a Tribeca street two days after the attack. When a once-in-a-lifetime calamity befalls the financial district twice in eight years, old assumptions are up for rethinking. There is no exaggeration in the statement that everyone has been touched by this disaster. We’ve had to revise our thinking to include the possibility of a permanent terrorist threat. Why this recognition didn’t take hold after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, or the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa is an interesting question. But the recognition has arrived. Insurance companies reaching into their pockets a second time have begun to think about redrawing their "acts of war" clauses. Executives calculating where to house their employees are factoring in the need not to build something a suicide bomber might be tempted to knock down. The New York Times reported last week that dislocated firms were rushing to sign leases on nondescript properties outside the city, on terms suggesting no plans to come back. Cries went up against such unpatriotic real estate behavior, but what goes by the name Wall Street has been moving away for decades to Midtown, to Stamford and Greenwich, to Queens and Jersey City. Now it has one more reason. The compaction of 210 floors of offices into a crater the size of a city block raises many questions, even short of the wisdom of creating high-value targets. More to the point, somebody should be asking why it was necessary for the securities markets to shut down for a week. The nation’s phone network didn’t quit. TV, radio and the Internet were up and running. The markets are not essentially different from other electronic-communications networks, yet were treated like the airlines, as if they were delivering physical things that might blow up. When the New York Stock Exchange takes a holiday to protect a handful of Manhattan-based middlemen at the expense of its global customers, it’s time to think again. Nasdaq trades electronically and could have kept going, yet closed down too out of "solidarity" with the specialists who execute trades on the big board. This column once defended the NYSE and its floorshow of shouting dealers as a wonderful branding tool. It looks good on television, and a stock market is a business and needs to sell its services to its customers. But closing for a week ended up benefiting only savvy traders who dumped their soured positions on patriotically misguided investors who fell for the "Buy America" nonsense. CNBC earned its stripes by trying gently to combat this silliness, but the best way to sort myth from fact is to leave markets open and let them trade. Back in the 1960s, clearing the ground for the World Trade Center, diggers found newspapers from 1883 buried in a rusted pipe, along with a note reading, "It is our hope that whoever finds this will be building a greater marketplace." Maybe it’s time to let Wall Street complete its evolution to electronic trading. It tells you something that the towers were built by a government agency called the "Port Authority," casting about for a new role. When banker David Rockefeller began proselytizing for a megaproject in the late 1950s, financial firms were already fleeing the congestion and antique architecture of the financial district, threatening to strand his bank’s investment in local white elephantry. He hit the jackpot when his brother became governor, and the towers did stem the exodus for a while, at great cost to bridge and tunnel tollpayers and airport users who subsidized the Port Authority’s real estate speculations. Talk of rebuilding the WTC is brave and understandable, but not especially realistic. Technology and economics have been running against proud towers—they’re now the province of vainglorious Malaysian despots and vice mayors of Shanghai. New York City has always been an easy touch for tax breaks whenever the Big Board or investment banks flaunt thoughts of decamping for Jersey. One blanches at the potential boondoggle now that Hillary and Chuck Schumer have extracted a promise of $20 billion from the president for the city. Even buildings that are sound on the outside have ash and cement dust and asbestos clogging their respiratory ducts. Important north-south arteries in lower Manhattan will be congested with demolition vehicles for months to come. Business will adjust quickly to the loss of 10 million feet of office space in the Twin Towers, so the question then becomes whether backward-looking politicians can resist their urge to re-create the past. The process of moneymen bugging out of lower Manhattan to make way for condos, tennis courts and tourist havens reflects a natural evolution in the purposes to which cities are put. There is no good reason now to spend a zillion dollars trying to stop it just to prove a point.
I am buying,I am patriotic and there are bargains.Is it "misguided" to buy low and sell high!
only savvy traders who dumped their soured positions
Soured positions, I have to assume means selling at a loss, is it "savvy" to buy high and sell low?
Newspapers and liberal hacks should keep their opinions to themselves.
I personally hope they rebuild them even taller than before.
I'd say the owners and insurance companies have a large say in it. As soon as they ask for (and get) taxpayer money from the federal govt. then all taxpayers have a say in it.
Rag-headed Berserkers with delusions of grandeur do NOT make the zoning laws in Sodom.
NOT rebuilding the site with a 100+ story tower (or two) would be tantamount to surrender.
As to the patriotism arguement, what war has ever been won by building or rebuilding an office building? We are in for a 10 year war of attrition where the costs and casualties are going to be significant on both sides. Better to focus our money and efforts on rebuilding the economy and winning that war.
If you want it, you pay for it.
How about, as a way to thumb our noses and/or give the finger to the Taliban, we give the people of this country more freedom?
How about we let law-abiding Americans keep and carry guns?
How about we give Americans freedom of choice in schools?
How about we let Americans donate as much money as they want to the political candidate of their choice -- just like the First Amendment says?
How about we call American servicemen home from godforsaken places like Kosovo and Bosnia?
How about the federal government's Taliban-style bureaucrats get out of our faces, and stop telling us we can't eat eggs sunny-side up, or flush our toilets only one time, or set the rules for private golf associations.
How about the mullahs of the federal government regulatory agencies at least let Americans have steak knives with which to eat their dinners on airline flights?
What good is throwing up a pair of stupid buildings to show we're not afraid -- when meanwhile we're actually so scared that we won't trust our own citizens with steak knives? Don't you think the Taliban will get the message from that?
Instead of throwing up a pair of stupid buildings, why not build a spiritual monument to freedom -- by actually making Americans freer?
One way to do that would be to give tax rebates for the $20 billion you wish to spend in rebuilding the WTC. That would run about $250 per taxpayer -- about the size of Bush's rebate check, by the way.
Let's do it next year, and let freedom ring.
Take that, Taliban!
I was merely saying, as someone for whom downtown Manhattan has been a part of life since birth, that I do not want to surrender it, even symbolically, to the bastards.
Private developers will fight each other for the OPPORTUNITY to invest in a new structure. And free enterprises will pay BIG bucks for the privilege of being in it.
You miss the point.
The point is that while the property owners can do what they like, the prospective *tenants* may have a very different outlook on the matter.
I doubt the property owners would want to build two more 110 story buildings only to have them remain mostly empty in perpetuity because the financial players have decided there's no good reason to all gather in one spot anymore (and good reasons *not* to).
People started crowding into Manhattan and other city centers before the invention of the telephone. The bandwidth revolution is making high-density urban areas more and more obsolete.
sw
Germany is investigating this question now; shouldn't we be? Or are we in some way afraid to even ask that question?
One other thing: Did anyone else hear that many people did not show up for work in those buildings on the day of the attack? Coincidence or prior knowledge? Any truth? If not, any evidence against the rumor? Thanks.
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