A sketch of the Brooklyn Bridge by Lewis Mumford

On the eve of another 9/11, a love letter to New York from Lewis Mumford comes to mind. His autobiography, Sketches From Life, describes a youthful walk across the Brooklyn Bridge when he caught "a fleeting glimpse of the utmost possibilities life may hold for man." Yes: I loved the great bridges and walked back and forth over them, year after year. But as often happens with repeated experiences, one memory stands out above all others: a twilight hour in early spring - it was March, I think - when starting from the Brooklyn end, I faced into the west wind sweeping over the rivers from New Jersey. The ragged, slate-blue cumulus clouds that gathered over the horizon left open patches for the light of the waning sun to shine through, and finally, as I reached the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, the sunlight spread across the sky, forming a halo around the jagged mountain of skyscrapers, with the darkened loft buildings and warehouses huddling below in the foreground. The towers, topped by the golden pinnacles of the new Woolworth Building, still caught the light even as it began to ebb away. Three-quarters of the way across the Bridge I saw the skyscrapers in the deepening darkness become slowly honeycombed with lights until, before I reached the Manhattan end, these buildings piled up in a dazzling mass against an indigo sky. Here was my city, immense, overpowering, flooded with energy and light; there below lay the river and the harbor, catching the last flakes of gold on their waters, with the black tugs, free from their barges, plodding dockward, the ferryboats lumbering from pier to pier, the tramp steamers slowly crawling toward the sea, the Statue of Liberty erectly standing, little curls of steam coming out of boat whistles or towered chimneys, while the rumbling elevated trains and trolley cars just below me on the bridge moved in a relentless tide to carry tens of thousands homeward. And there was I, breasting the March wind, drinking in the city and the sky, both vast, yet both contained in me, transmitting through me the great mysterious will that had made them and the promise of the new day that was still to come. The world, at that moment, opened before me, challenging me, beckoning me, demanding something of me that it would take more than a lifetime to give, but raising all my energies by its own vivid promise to a higher pitch. In that sudden revelation of power and beauty all the confusions of adolescence dropped from me, and I trod the narrow, resilient boards of the footway with a new confidence that came, not from my isolated self alone but from the collective energies I had confronted and risen to. In those "collective energies" Mumford hits squarely on the best New York has to offer. It's hard not to hold the contagious vitality of his Lower Manhattan up against the quagmire at ground zero, or compare his view from the Brooklyn Bridge to what will be.

The Woolworth Building, left, and Municipal Building are shown under construction. Their generation of Lower Manhattan skyscrapers will become part of the foothills of ground zero's tower group.

The new Woolworth Building Mumford beheld had been completed in 1913. Its 792 foot height made it the world's tallest building, but its real pioneering was in design. As Paul Goldberger wrote in his book, The Skyscraper, "There was a general sense among architects and critics of the period that at last an architect had done it - had found a way to express height, to create a work that was stylistically appropriate to the new forms."

The Woolworth Building around 1913

Tomorrow's walkers of the Brooklyn Bridge may notice this accomplishment, at the feet of a Freedom Tower that will be nearly a thousand feet taller. Today's architects and critics aren't very enthusiastic about the Freedom Tower and its entourage, but these buildings were always overridingly about a sentiment. As time passes, whatever reason their huge size had fades. They belong to a time we've largely gotten over, when the urgency to do something led to self-defeating decisions. They are only now coming out of the ground, too late to meet the mood that summoned them. Freedom Tower has already outlived its name; last March, it was officially changed to 1 World Trade Center, the better to attract foreign tenants. This act of desperation underscores not only the needlessness of the new skyscrapers, but the demise of their meaning. Freedom Tower's symbolic 1776 foot height, which generated such a huge spiral of useless office buildings, is already on its way to being a piece of tour guide trivia. With each passing 9/11, the effort at ground zero feels less vital and more compulsory. Discouraged New Yorkers were found in a recent poll to have little confidence that its current deadlines will be met, while a draft report last month challenged Freedom Tower's officially scheduled 2013 completion, substituting 2018 as more likely.

A miniaturized Woolworth building peers out from the center of this rendering of the ground zero towers, viewed from about eye-level with its top.

If ground zero has one foot in 2003, its other is in 1963, when the World Trade Center was being conceived to the music of Penn Station's wrecking balls. It's as if the Trade Center's pre-preservation mentality and the "purposeless giantism" Mumford saw in it were grandfathered into ground zero. The magnitude of the appropriateness-pass ground zero was handed can be measured by a comparison of Jean Nouvel's 54th Street MoMA Tower to Norman Foster's 200 Greenwich Street, the second-tallest of the ground zero towers. Nouvel's design is 1250 feet tall, Foster's 1270. Yesterday, the City Planning Commission voted to approve Nouvel's MoMA Tower, provided its height is reduced by 200 feet. City Planning Chair Amanda Burden explained that “while the proposed design of the building is exemplary, the applicant has not made a convincing argument that the building’s top 200 feet is worthy of the zone in which it would rise.” Burden reputedly settled on the new height as appropriately deferential to the Empire State Building, which is 1250 feet tall at the base of its spire. Whether this is true or not, she had earlier said of Nouvel's tower and its proposed height, "let’s see it, and see where it falls with the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building and if it deserves it." The Empire State Building is a full mile from Nouvel's proposed tower. Foster's much bulkier tower will be 478 feet taller than the Woolworth Building, only 400 feet away. Midtown might be another country from Downtown, where the violence done to any enlightened preservation standard is staggering. Amanda Burden's use of the Empire State Building as the measure of New York skyscrapers is telling. Completed under budget and ahead of schedule in 410 days, this monument to the power of New York's collective energies is everything ground zero isn't. Permanently restoring its status as New York's tallest building would have reinvested it with symbolic value and spared Lower Manhattan the devaluation of its historic architecture. Is it too late?

9/11 returned the Empire State Building to the position of tallest building in New York. Adjusted for technological inflation, it may never have stopped being the world's tallest building. A 2007 poll by the American Institute of Architects ranked it first among "America's Favorite Architecture". (Photo: Daniel Schwen/CC-attribution-ShareAlike)