The real story of the Ground Zero mosque is that the project only became feasible because of the appalling and astonishing fecklessness of the officials who were charged with the reconstruction of the site and the neighborhood all the way back in 2001.
We’re just three weeks shy of the moment, nine years ago, when the landing-gear assembly from the plane that hit the South Tower smashed through the roof and two floors of 45 Park Place, which housed a Burlington Coat Factory.
Imagine that, in the weeks following, you had expressed the opinion that in nine years’ time, that building would sit abandoned only 560 feet from Ground Zero — and there would be no memorial, no museum, no nothing on the 16 acres on which the towers themselves sat.
Forget the whole question of whether there would be a mosque (or Islamic cultural center) in its place. Just imagine that you’d delivered the view that New York would so completely fail to maintain a sense of purpose regarding the salvation of Ground Zero. Imagine the scorn to which you’d have been subjected at the suggestion.
Yet here we are. Memories of the last nine years have turned Ground Zero from a site of horror, to a reminder of grief, to an occasion for ludicrous artistic posturing — and now to something very close to parody.
Grand and grandiose schemes floated in the immediate aftermath of the attacks — opera houses, museums, exact replacements of the Twin Towers, the tunneling of West Street, the memorial inside the “slurry walls,” the 1,776-foot building, the $2 billion PATH station — have vanished or shrunk to meaninglessness or transmuted into nothing.
In retrospect, with the exception of finding the precious remains of the victims, maybe Ground Zero shouldn’t have been cleared at all. Maybe those 80-foot piles of twisted steel — which seemed to go on forever, and filled everyone who saw them with a kind of horrified rage almost impossible to put into words — should’ve stayed in place as a reminder of the evil, just as the hull of the USS Arizona sits in the waters of Pearl Harbor and always will.
It seems certain now that the clearance of the horror led directly to the shameful dereliction of leadership that allowed the most important building site in American history to become a ludicrous testament to the ability of postmodern Americans to hamstring themselves and lose sight of what is most important.
With the removal of the wreckage came a lassitude, a lack of urgency, that turned the silly arguments over whether this second-class dance troupe or that weird little museum should get a major venue on the site into urgent matters requiring months of public debate.
Then, of course, there was the design competition that led to the preposterous and architecturally unfeasible Daniel Liebeskind building — which was basically scrapped two years after it was declared the winner.
Oh, and how about that Michael Arad memorial, called “Reflecting Absence,” with reflecting pools and an “underground interpretive center” whose designer all but demanded control of the $350 million set aside to pay for it?
Something will be there, something called a memorial. But it isn’t there yet. Nine years have passed. Nine years. Nothing.
It’s safe to say that, had Ground Zero been handled better, or handled at all, the Burlington Coat Factory site wouldn’t have been sitting there fallow to be snapped up for a song and given to Imam Feisal Rauf. The buildings around the site would have been renovated in ways that would have been respectful of it and with some positive relation to it.
It’s an unimaginable failure with many fathers: the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the politicians who control it; the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., and others. But at the top of the list of shame sits former Gov. George Pataki, who had primary statutory authority for the site and whose idea the design competition was.
Pataki’s forgettable 12-year governorship deserves to be remembered only for what he was unable, unwilling or just incapable of doing when history called on him to do something great. Instead, he dithered and fought and pouted when Rudy Giuliani got too much credit, and fantasized about running for president and finally faded away.
Pataki called President Obama “dead wrong” for supporting construction of the mosque. But this wouldn’t be an issue at all if Pataki had done the job that posterity called upon him to do. His failure is our shame.
johnpodhorezt@gmail.com