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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
At the northeast corner of Vesey and Church Streets, across from the graveyard of St. Paul's Chapel, there is a tiny, crowded deli called the Stage Door. I went there recently to meet Joyce Gold, a guide who used to lead a World Trade Center tour called "From Landfill to Landscape." She had agreed to show me some of the historical remains of the area, and after we picked up our coffee and squeezed past workers in orange mesh vests and tourists in F.D.N.Y. caps to get to the street outside, she led me up a flight of stairs to a large, hot room above the deli, full of empty cafeteria tables and chairs. An entire windowed wall of the room looked out on the sixteen-acre hole that had been the World Trade Center.
When the Trade Center towers were destroyed, on September 11th, I experienced, among many other emotions, a desire to know the history of the site better, much the way one wishes one had known a distant but beloved uncle better after he dies. A life has a beginning and a middle as well as an end, and I suppose that I wanted to uncover that narrative meaning. I had visited the World Trade Center only twice: once to interview a city official; once to attend an awards party held at Windows on the World. This was a distant uncle, indeed. The Twin Towers existed for me, as for many people, I suspect, only as landmarks against the sky, as familiar as the North Star, and as remote. The ground on which the towers sat was just a subway stop, a busy pavement, a downtown blur. Now that the airborne landmarks were gone, the ground was really all that was left, and, as people argued about what would replace the World Trade Center, I kept wondering what had been there before.
I wasn't even sure which streets were included and had to consult several maps before I could draw a grid, five blocks by four blocks, sixteen acres. The northern border was Vesey Street. South of Vesey, the trade center had been built over Fulton, Dey, and Cortlandt Streets. The southern border was Liberty Street. Church Street ran along the eastern edge. To the west, the site covered Greenwich and Washington Streets and ended at West Street.
From the Stage Door's second-floor dining room, I could clearly see the blank space that had once been crisscrossed by my grid. As Joyce Gold described buildings and streets that no longer existed, tourists below us struggled for a clear view of the site. They crowded up against chain-link fences and shuffled along in the sun on plywood platforms. Sitting in the secret, stuffy room with its unobstructed aerial vista was sobering, moving, and, as with any Ground Zero gawking, almost obscene: a sad, ironic inversion of Windows on the World.
After a while, the conversation turned to "The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909, Compiled from Original Sources and Illustrated by Photo-Intaglio Reproductions of Important Maps Plans Views and Documents In Public and Private Collections," an indispensable, comprehensive, wildly idiosyncratic work that I had encountered at the New-York Historical Society. "The 'Iconography' has always been my choice for my only book on a desert island," Gold said. It was completed in 1928 by Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, who had worked on it for nineteen years. Stokes originally envisioned one volume devoted to important historical moments. The record of New York's first three hundred years sprawled, instead, into six volumes of land grants, Common Council meetings, leases, legal challenges, hotel advertisements, funerals, fires, wars, ferry crossings, firehouse openings, riots, and just about anything else that happens in a great modern city.
In Volume I, where the early photo-intaglio views can be found, there are prints of lower Manhattan as the Dutch first saw it: a pristine, hilly, verdant...
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