Rubble Excerpt: The Alchemy of Unbuilding
At dawn one summer Sunday, I scurried over a stranger’s rooftop in Brooklyn—coffee cup clutched in one hand, zoom lens cradled in the other—and stood slack-jawed with hundreds of onlookers who had stormed the quiet Greenpoint neighborhood for the implosion of two hulking natural gas tanks, known as the Maspeth Holders. By that time, my occasional research jaunts had dredged up two decades of Demolition Age magazine at the Library of Congress (headline: “Yea, Rah, Urban Renewal!”); scored video footage of the Dunes Hotel’s Technicolor destruction in Las Vegas (commentator: “No one actually shed a tear over the Dunes’ demise. After all, there is no crying in Vegas.”); and explored how the ruin of buildings evokes Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime: the psychic wallop of awe and danger he once called “tranquillity tinged with terror.”
If you’d come to scout tranquillity in Brooklyn that day, well, fuggedaboudit. The end of the Maspeth Holders was more like a funeral cortege gone carnivalesque—or just a good Irish wake. As news choppers circled like vultures overhead, and fresh-faced crowds jostled against police barricades, in their last moments the decrepit holders radiated something like the blush of majesty. “The tanks seem to be growing more beautiful as the hour of their death approaches,” a reporter noted, telling how days before the implosion, demolition crews had weakened the steel structures with dozens of narrow slits, piercing the murky volumes with light. “It’s definitely art,” a tank inspector marveled, as sunlight spilled through the metal in thin, spangly shafts and gleamed like the arcs of some giant Calder mobile. “I’m used to the inside and the outside of this thing being separate,” he added with a mystical air. “Now we’re letting the outside in. Soon the inside will be the outside.”
But with a sulphurous flash and a hollow report, explosives gored the 400-foot-tall holders and crumpled them like tin cans. Whorls of rust-colored dust punched the air while pigeons pinwheeled above, stunned by the blast. Meanwhile, reporters swarmed local residents, who had campaigned fruitlessly to rescue the half-century-old neighborhood icons from oblivion. “I feel like my heart was just ripped out,” one resident stammered. “My son said he felt like he just witnessed an execution.” In the event, the havoc was captured most fittingly by a 21-year-old lad who had turned out for the blast with his art student pals. He roundly declared: “The four of us are here to see a post-modern spectacle.” Outside a local bakery, departing gawkers were obliged to tuck into a twin-towered confection: the Maspeth Holders in sugar-and-flour miniature, topped with red-and-white checkered frosting.
Two months later I was working as a writer-in-residence for the World Views program, which offered artists studio space atop the World Trade Center. Perched on the 92nd floor of the north tower, I and my 16 colleagues exulted in the site’s dizzying verticality, which I had deemed a “barnstormer’s-eye-view” of the city. The phrase now seems uncanny. On September 11, 2001, I stood near Sixth Avenue and watched both towers collapse, taking with them one of my studio mates, the sculptor Michael Richards, who had been on the 92nd floor that morning. My nightstand at the time held Eric Darton’s history of the World Trade Center, Divided We Stand, and beneath it a long out-of-print children’s title on demolition called Tear Down to Build Up. (“It is a scene of order and confusion at the same time,” the latter says with spooky aplomb, “wonderful to watch!”) When that dreadful vellum of smoke and dust finally settled, demolition had become my leitmotif, and rubble my métier.
There was no cake, of course, after the Twin Towers crumbled, and the Irish wakes proved all too welteringly real. As contractors divvied up the acreage at Ground Zero and, after a time, the Augean “scoop-and-dump” brigades began to toil, I delved into the literature of destruction. Whether it was Heracleitus (who supposedly said, “The most beautiful world is like a heap of rubble, tossed down in confusion.”), or dear old Rose Macaulay (“to be fascinated by ruins has always, it would seem, been a human tendency”), or the earth artist Robert Smithson (“After all,” he quipped, “wreckage is often more interesting than structure.”), I aimed to understand rubble as some sort of going concern.
New Yorkers soon began searching on similar wavelengths, gently telegraphing thoughts from Ground Zero of “beauty in a moonscape of tragedy.” In time, as my forays took me farther afield, I found Gothamites held no particular monopoly on Dresden-like ruins.
Demolition was minting moonscapes all over.
If you’d come to scout tranquillity in Brooklyn that day, well, fuggedaboudit. The end of the Maspeth Holders was more like a funeral cortege gone carnivalesque—or just a good Irish wake. As news choppers circled like vultures overhead, and fresh-faced crowds jostled against police barricades, in their last moments the decrepit holders radiated something like the blush of majesty. “The tanks seem to be growing more beautiful as the hour of their death approaches,” a reporter noted, telling how days before the implosion, demolition crews had weakened the steel structures with dozens of narrow slits, piercing the murky volumes with light. “It’s definitely art,” a tank inspector marveled, as sunlight spilled through the metal in thin, spangly shafts and gleamed like the arcs of some giant Calder mobile. “I’m used to the inside and the outside of this thing being separate,” he added with a mystical air. “Now we’re letting the outside in. Soon the inside will be the outside.”
But with a sulphurous flash and a hollow report, explosives gored the 400-foot-tall holders and crumpled them like tin cans. Whorls of rust-colored dust punched the air while pigeons pinwheeled above, stunned by the blast. Meanwhile, reporters swarmed local residents, who had campaigned fruitlessly to rescue the half-century-old neighborhood icons from oblivion. “I feel like my heart was just ripped out,” one resident stammered. “My son said he felt like he just witnessed an execution.” In the event, the havoc was captured most fittingly by a 21-year-old lad who had turned out for the blast with his art student pals. He roundly declared: “The four of us are here to see a post-modern spectacle.” Outside a local bakery, departing gawkers were obliged to tuck into a twin-towered confection: the Maspeth Holders in sugar-and-flour miniature, topped with red-and-white checkered frosting.
Two months later I was working as a writer-in-residence for the World Views program, which offered artists studio space atop the World Trade Center. Perched on the 92nd floor of the north tower, I and my 16 colleagues exulted in the site’s dizzying verticality, which I had deemed a “barnstormer’s-eye-view” of the city. The phrase now seems uncanny. On September 11, 2001, I stood near Sixth Avenue and watched both towers collapse, taking with them one of my studio mates, the sculptor Michael Richards, who had been on the 92nd floor that morning. My nightstand at the time held Eric Darton’s history of the World Trade Center, Divided We Stand, and beneath it a long out-of-print children’s title on demolition called Tear Down to Build Up. (“It is a scene of order and confusion at the same time,” the latter says with spooky aplomb, “wonderful to watch!”) When that dreadful vellum of smoke and dust finally settled, demolition had become my leitmotif, and rubble my métier.
There was no cake, of course, after the Twin Towers crumbled, and the Irish wakes proved all too welteringly real. As contractors divvied up the acreage at Ground Zero and, after a time, the Augean “scoop-and-dump” brigades began to toil, I delved into the literature of destruction. Whether it was Heracleitus (who supposedly said, “The most beautiful world is like a heap of rubble, tossed down in confusion.”), or dear old Rose Macaulay (“to be fascinated by ruins has always, it would seem, been a human tendency”), or the earth artist Robert Smithson (“After all,” he quipped, “wreckage is often more interesting than structure.”), I aimed to understand rubble as some sort of going concern.
New Yorkers soon began searching on similar wavelengths, gently telegraphing thoughts from Ground Zero of “beauty in a moonscape of tragedy.” In time, as my forays took me farther afield, I found Gothamites held no particular monopoly on Dresden-like ruins.
Demolition was minting moonscapes all over.
