The "Mosque at Ground Zero" (i.e., the Community Center a couple blocks away) is one 9/11-related building controversy in New York. Another is what, if anything, will someday be built on the site where the World Trade Center once stood. I've been following both discussions and at the risk of seeming tasteless or cowardly, I'll bring up one rarely-discussed aspect of the latter. If you were the CEO of some big company looking for office space, would you lease it in a new World Trade Center? I mean, if we have this oft-expressed reason to rebuild there — to show terrorists they can't intimdate us — don't the terrorists have as much reason to attack it again in some way? I'm not saying they could bring it down again or that another attack would necessarily wreak comparable amounts of death and destruction…but if you were that CEO, would you want the responsibility and guilt if you moved in there and something did happen?
This keeps popping into my brain when I read about plans because one of my most vivid memories of 9/11 is watching some gentleman — and he was obviously a very gentle man — sobbing uncontrollably on the street outside the rubble. He was the boss at some company housed in one of the towers and almost every employee had been killed. He would have been too if he'd come to work earlier that day and he almost wished he had. The official body count of 9/11 didn't begin to itemize all the human tragedy of that day. That boss was one of many who were devastated by the planes flying into the buildings. I felt so sorry for that poor man, punishing himself like that when he did nothing wrong.
Leaving aside matters of economic practicality, which I'll get to in a moment, I'd like to see the World Trade Center rebuilt — bigger, bolder, more defiant than before. It would say something about the American spirit and determination. But I also think it would say something like, "We double-dog dare ya to come try something with this one, ragheads!" Even if I were courageous enough to place myself into that building, I don't think I'd say to my hypothetical employees, "Hey, we're all moving into the new World Trade Center. I know it may make some of you uneasy and I know your family may worry about you going to work each day there…but if you want to keep your job, that's where you're going to have to go." And if, God forbid, even one employee or office visitor did get hurt in even one terrorist attempt…well, I wouldn't want that guilt. I'd certainly feel more responsible than that crying gent whose entire staff perished on 9/11.
This is almost never mentioned in all the discussions I've read about how and what to build there. Would enough companies lease space in a new WTC that the enterprise wouldn't be a colossal failure? And if it were, wouldn't that at least partially nullify the "We'll show those $@#&* terrorists they can't harm us" reason for erecting anew? After a big air crash, there are always a lot of people who give up flying, if not forever then for quite a while. How many people might simply balk at setting foot in World Trade Center II?
Add to all this the apparent fact that even without that hanging over it, a new and bigger WTC might not make monetary sense. Joe Nocera cautiously and respectfully makes the argument that the proposed Freedom Tower (aka 1 World Trade Center) would be a bad place to rent office space just because of the price per square foot. Like most of you probably, when they knocked it down, my immediate reaction was, "Well then, we'll put it back up!" But of course, that's easy for me to say. I don't have to pay to put it back up, nor am I a prospective tenant. Maybe we oughta put the legendary American ingenuity to work and think of something else that would be appropriate to build there.