New York -- So what happened? In October 2001, a month after 9/11, the New York Citycomptroller's office produced a report sunk in doom. It was the answer toOsamabin Laden's prayer, portaying a city devastated not by the collapse of thetwintowers but by the resulting hysteria. Companies would flee. Thousands ofjobswould be lost and billions in income would disappear. Forget heroicresilience,this was panic.
The loss of buildings was assessed at $34 billion, of which only half wasinsured. Beyond that was an "ongoing" impact of up to $60 billion.Manhattanwas already suffering a recession and now even companies inclined to stay"willin future avoid concentrating employees in one area." Pundits wereconcernedthat the new generation of high, lightweight glass buildings would have tobeso strengthened as to be uneconomic. Tourists would shun a city with somanyiconic targets.
The truth is that governments, even New York ones, do not understandcities.They are the unruly teenagers of the modern state. One survey after anotherhasshown that the impact of 9/11 on New York has been negligible. Touristsbrieflypunished the city for its suffering by staying away but the place soonreturnedto normal. The Wall Street area near the World Trade Centre had been infastdecline, with office vacancies running at a dreadful 30 per cent in the1990s.But drastic action by Mayor Giuliani through tax abatement and rezoning forhousing had reversed this and the 9/11 did not affect this. The only firmtoleave New York was the cigarette company, Philip Morris, fleeing to thetobacco-friendly south. Visitors poured downtown to see the site and a boomoccurred in yuppie riverside apartments near ground zero.
New York was blessed with two mayors well suited to the moment. RudolphGiuliani steadied the ship when Washington was taking to the hills. MichaelBloomberg, coming to office soon afterwards, rectified New York's evercriticalfinances. The city in 1975 had faced bankruptcy and still lurches in thatdirection. Wall Street moaned incessantly against high taxes andover-regulation, which it says have led to New York this year losingfinancialpre-eminence to London. Yet some survival instinct always pulls cities backfrom the precipice.
I lived in New York for six months as a child and must have visited italmostevery year since. I have been seduced by it and experienced its rage,watchedit stamp its foot, howl with pain, brag, fight and express pride and joy.Afterthe horrors of the 1970s and the resulting crime wave I did join those whowondered if, like some ancient Sumerian city, it would finally turn up itstoesand die.
But New York never cut its umbilical chord, new immigration. As fast aswhitecitizens fled the crime and squalor, newcomers arrived. A decliningpopulationin the 1980s has for the first time topped 8m, an astonishing third bornoverseas (and a third of a million Britons). Conventional wisdom attributesmuch of this to the conquest of crime and the recovery of the city'sself-esteem. Credit for this is disputed, but the fact is that in the early1990s Mayor Dimkins recruiting a police force double the size of London'sandtold them to get out of their cars and walk the streets. The impact wasinstantand remarkable.
In 1990 New Yorkers were killing as many of their fellow citizens each yearasdied in 9/11. The number was halved and then halved again, to 550 today.Crimeis still falling annually even after Bloomberg cut the police by 20 percent tosave money. New York's portrayal in fiction has changed from the grimintroversion of Death Wish and Bonfire of the Vanities to the casualexoticismof Friends and Sex in the City.
Much of the credit for this goes to the micro-renaissance ofneighbourhoods.Block associations and business improvement districts run their owncleansing,organise their policing and levy their own taxes. They monitor crime andoversee that most creative New York obsession, urban colonisation (orgentrification).
Over the years I have watched Greenwich move to Gramercy then to Soho thentoTribeca and now to the Lower East Side, not to mention Brooklyn, Harlem andWilliamsburg. The thesis of the urbanologist, Richard Florida, that renewalfollows an influx of artists, gays, bohemians and ethnic minorities may bequestionable elsewhere but it applies in New York.
The writer, E.B.White, divined half a century ago that New York's survivallayin its magnetism for ambition. It was a place "of strangers who have pulledupstakes somewhere and come to town". There they are offered "the gift ofloneliness, the gift of privacy" but with a generous hand and a dose ofluck.London and New York are the gilded Siamese twins of urban glory. I havepreferred London for its gentleness, against New York's harsh geometry anditscanyons of the mind and spirit. Yet New York offers what London never does,always a warm handshake. A passing couple this week saw me reading White'sNewYork essay in a sidewalk café in Soho and stopped immediately to discuss itwith me. It seemed the most natural thing to do.
Like White I believe New York's survival lies in what it never admits, inhistoricism, in "the unexpungeable odour of the long past the vibrations ofgreat times and tall deeds and queer people." It is the most trulyold-fashioned city in the world. On each visit I find it like Proust'sAlbertine, unrecognisable not because it has changed but because it has notchanged as in the mind it should.
The taxis still look like imports from Congo Brazzaville, as do thepot-holedstreets. Faded advertisements and rickety fire-escapes cloak streetfacades.School buses and fire engines have stepped from a 1950s movie, as have thesoapads on television.
The city still has trade unions and a mafia running garbage disposal.Elevatorsstill have manual operators. Parking meters are antique. Newspapers such astheNew York Times and Wall Street Journal look as if they have just beenpeeledfrom a museum wall: I expect to read in them of the Titanic or the GreatCrash.As for the new skyscrapers, these banal characterless boxes, so unlike thegreats of Empire State and Chrysler, are transients from Mars. As the doyenofNew York critics, Ada Louise Huxtable, predicted of the twin towers back in1970, they would prove "the biggest tombstones in the world".
Only one scar of 9/11 has failed to heal, the site itself. It is a literalandmetaphorical bomb crater, a battleground across which architects, planners,financiers and politicians continue to fight to no conclusion. Ground zeroisnot a monument to terrorism but to the inadequacy of government.
New York is not surprised. George Bush and Tony Blair had their reasons forregarding 9/11 as a monstrous assault on western civilisation from whichonlythey could offer salvation. To most New Yorkers of my acquaintance it was anasty accident at Fulton and Church when sadly a lot of people died. Butthatwas five years ago.