Joe Walentini / Writing  

Elegy for Two Friends - Remembering the Twin Towers
From: Abstract Art Online, October 2001, Vol IV, Issue 2

There is a joke I recall from around the time I moved to New York City in 1985.  It went that the World Trade Center towers were the two crates the Empire State and Chrysler buildings came in.  Since their inception they never garnered a great deal of respect from architectural critics. Then too there was the controversial political jury-rigging to get them built, attributable in large part to David and Nelson Rockefeller.  But after nearly 30 years they eventually found their center of gravity in the culture of the city.  We came to accept the towers from a distance at least, which was perhaps the best way to appreciate them.  Though they never truly integrated with the rest of New York in their aloofness, they nevertheless helped to define (and locate) the city as the first clearly recognizable objects from any great distance.

Up close they were too much, way too much.  I was always struck by how impossibly high they were.  On a complex sprawling across 25 acres, the twin towers rose to the clouds and beyond.  It all seemed designed and created for giants, or more realistically the gigantic aspirations of New York and of America, which of course made them highly symbolic. Some people saw this as arrogant and imposing (not just one tall tower would do -  it had to be two)!  Others, like myself, simply marveled at the technical genius that allowed such massive edifices to rise so high.

As architectural objects they were bluntly impersonal and boring as the two packing crates mentioned above. To an extent they could be seen as the ultimate trump of the Bauhaus: Walter Gropuis on steroids.  Completed in the early 1970s, the Trade Towers were a complete reflection of that period when Minimalism ruled.  Still, it was really their size that rated the attention focused on them. But all of this constitutes an objective look at them.  Although they didn’t invite intimacy it was impossible not to have some sort of relationship with them if one lived or worked downtown.

Like many people I had been to the observation deck, first as a tourist and then as a guide for visiting family and friends. On one occasion I remember enjoying a spectacular sunset and observed a Hasidic family bowed in prayer.  On another, a friend, Pat Dougherty, had

constructed a sculpture of woven branches in the lobby of the North Tower.  I remember dropping in to visit him while he was putting it all  together.  Finally, moving to New Jersey had been somewhat traumatic for me after living ten years in New York and establishing a strong  identity with the city.  One consoling factor had been looking east from an attic window in my new home in Maplewood.  From there I could see the twin towers peeping up over the trees. It was soothing to know just where and how close New York was

My relationship with the World Trade Center became a bit more intimate about five years ago when I began working as a software consultant on Wall Street.  Nearly everyday since,  I had taken the PATH train from Hoboken in New Jersey to the World Trade Center.  From the PATH station, some 80 feet below the ground, I rode a very long escalator to the mezzanine level and then walked through the mall underneath the complex.  About 2 years ago I took another job in an office building located between Broadway and Church streets that flanked Liberty Street.  This was a block and a half east from the South Tower.  I was especially pleased about my new location because of the spectacular views it offered of the area, including the WTC, and that I now had only a 5 minute walk to the PATH.  Often when it rained I wouldn’t even bother to open an umbrella.