9/12/2023 0 Comments New world trade center![]() I too begin to leave when Dupré points out that she and I are free to stay and continues with her tutorial. Apparently, he’s the one who had given them permission not two minutes ago. “No cameras,” says a large man with rueful conviction. Our first stop is the lobby of 4 World Trade Center, where the TV producer just negotiated permission for his camera and sound to enter. ![]() But this saga of glass, steel, and concrete does offer a unity of place, to use the Aristotelian term, and Dupré and I are smack in the middle of it. The cast is too large (26,000 people have worked on these buildings), and the action is, by literary standards, slow, diffuse, and, 15 years later, still incomplete, as work on building 3 continues and the design of 2 is not yet settled. Although built on a more human scale and according to a gentler, more pedestrian-friendly aesthetic, the complex doesn’t lend itself easily to character-driven storytelling. Hard to build, hard to describe, but finally a sight to behold, the new World Trade Center consists, so far, of three completed buildings, a memorial, a museum, and a transportation hub, with at least a couple more skyscrapers to come. And, of course, post–9/11 security concerns raised the bar significantly on how landmark skyscrapers, especially ones that symbolize the soaring American spirit, are to be built and kept safe. The Number 1 subway line and four PATH trains from New Jersey run underground. The Hudson River flows only a few blocks west of what eventually became the construction site. The intensity of feeling surrounding the project was but one of many challenges. Every square inch of land at Ground Zero was subject to multiple claims of ownership, jurisdiction, and oversight. Almost immediately after the attacks, Mayor Rudy Giuliani declared, “We are going to rebuild,” but it was not at all clear who “we” was. They also destroyed 7 World Trade Center and fatally damaged four other buildings within the complex, leading to their eventual demolition. On September 11, 2001, terrorist-hijacked commercial airplanes crashed into and destroyed the famous Twin Towers at 1 and 2 World Trade Center. And there they are, a few paces behind, producer, cameraman, and Phil the sound guy, who is quickly running a mic through the belt holes of my pants and up my shirt. After inviting me for a Cook’s tour of the new One World Trade Center, the subject of her NEH-supported book of the same name, she lets me know one day prior that a television documentary crew will be following us. In the language of NEH grantmaking, Dupré is a “public scholar,” which is also the name of a new program of research grants aimed at academics who write for the public and professional writers who favor scholarly methods of research. Her books are a more sophisticated relative of the large-format nonfiction titles that are marketed to children or designed for coffee-table display. Throughout her work, text and image share equal billing, as they should when you are writing about the built environment in the age of color printing. Another, Skyscrapers, thin and tall like its subjects, is very popular and has been updated and reprinted several times. One of these, Churches, was a New York Times bestseller. She is also the author of picture books, well-researched, fact-filled, photographically rich, “illustrated histories,” she calls them at one point, for the tourist and connoisseur alike. She holds a master’s of divinity from Yale and has completed a string of research projects, aided by grants and fellowships. I have to wonder whether anyone with the common touch even uses that phrase anymore, but in Dupré’s case it’s more or less true. “I am a scholar but I have the common touch,” she says not long into our first conversation.
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