London

Brian Farnham,
Editor, Time Out New York
For more than a year after 9/11, a shop owner in lower Manhattan named David Cohen kept a tribute alive in his clothing store. When the towers fell, the impact blew in the windows of his Chelsea Jeans shop and coated everything – the stacks of T-shirts, the cargo pants, the hoodie sweatshirts – with a thick, grey ash. Eventually he cleaned up the mess and reopened for business, but not before spending $10,000 to build a glass wall around a front corner, to preserve some of the ash-covered clothes exactly the way they were. He attracted many visitors, got some press, became one of those stories of resilience and determination that are often born of disasters.And then he closed the store. He had to: people came to see his exhibit but they didn’t buy his jeans. Feature continues

New Yorkers can be as sentimental as anybody – and the memories of the attack will always stir deep feelings of sadness and anger – but the city itself has never been driven by emotion. You either sell the goods or you close the store and let somebody else take your place and take a shot. You’d probably need to annihilate New York to change that basic metabolic reality.

The terrorist attack of 9/11 was traumatic and destructive but it wasn’t, of course, annihilative. For a while, New Yorkers worried a great deal about how they and their town would be changed by what happened. It was like waiting for the effect of a snakebite to set in: the bite itself was painful and shocking but nobody knew what kind of poison, if any, had been injected and how it might debilitate us in the long run.
Five years on, it turns out there was no poison to speak of, although there is scarring. Nowhere has that been more evident than in the battles over how to rebuild the area where the towers stood, Ground Zero.

The development of Ground Zero has been the most exasperating kind of street theatre. Four of New York’s greatest and oldest characters – Ego, Art, Money and Politics – have been clashing at the site for nearly half a decade now, with nothing to show for it but excuses and crumpled blueprints. And just when you thought the scrum had become so tightly knotted that no one would be able to wiggle a toe, let alone take a step, somebody blinks, some papers get signed, and the earth moves.

In July, the first gigantic beams that will help frame the Freedom Tower came sliding out of the forges in a steel plant in Differdange, Luxembourg. In August, the first construction contracts for the 9/11 memorial were awarded, meaning work on that tortured project will also finally get under way. It’s far less than what should have happened by now, but it’s a relief just to see the change begin.

Great cities become great by changing at a pace that seems almost unhealthy, especially when it comes to building and real estate. On that level alone, the fact that one prime 16-acre parcel of Manhattan could not seem to evolve was only slightly less alarming than all the upgraded terror alerts, bag checks and freshly plastered ‘If you see something, say something’ posters on the subways. Nobody wanted the legacy of the tragedy to be that it flummoxed our progressive nature.

David Cohen couldn’t keep his store open, but he found a way to preserve his frozen-moment exhibit by moving it forward: The New York Historical Society stepped in at the last minute and offered to house it. This September, it’s on view as part of a special fifth-anniversary exhibit at the Society, one of many, many tributes and remembrances that will take place in the city.
And after the tributes, thankfully, everything will keep changing.