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Examining the politics around two of New York’s prominent public spaces, the World Trade Center and Union Square Park, Sharon Zukin traces two faces of the American body politic co-existing in conflict. These diverse spaces suggest that the contemporary embodiment of democracy is truly divided.


Since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, public space in New York City has carried an extraordinary political charge. Streets, parks, and subways are more crowded than ever but are also subject to more surveillance by the authorities. The city government no longer permits political demonstrations at sensitive sites like the United Nations Headquarters or in Central Park, and the police have arrested participants in the “spontaneous” monthly bicycle rides of Critical Mass, an environmental protest group. Two public spaces in Lower Manhattan are centers of contention but for different reasons: Union Square Park, where the cyclists and many other New Yorkers discover a sense of authentic community, and the World Trade Center site itself, where the government’s plans to rebuild limit rather than defend democracy. At this moment, these two public spaces represent two faces of the American body politic co-existing in conflict.


After the terrorists struck on September 11, New Yorkers gathered at Union Square Park to mourn the victims, to express solidarity with the dead and their families, and to feel that they still were a part of a living community. This was the closest open space to the World Trade Center site while the New York City Police controlled access to the area below 14th Street. And all day and all night for weeks Union Square Park was filled. People stood in the park, lit candles at informal shrines, and signed declarations of peace and tolerance on big white sheets that were spread on the grass. Someone hung a garland of flowers around the equestrian statue of George Washington at the park’s southern entrance, where Washington’s hand pointed toward the World Trade Center site, two miles away, marking the absence of the Twin Towers. Many other flowers were brought to the park and placed on the ground or in jars of water near the statue’s base. Although some police officers stood around the park, no one interfered with the milling crowd. By the same token, during those few weeks, no one organized a rally or demonstration. Cell phones and the Internet were not working or, if they were, were not considered adequate to communicate the sad regret people felt and the need to be in the presence of others. Moreover, without television news programs—since antennas for nearly all the networks had been on top of the Twin Towers–some people came to Union Square to exchange information. The park embodied, in a physical as well as a spiritual sense, the city’s public sphere.


The World trade center


What a contrast to the WTC site itself, where searching for 3,000 victims’ bodies and clearing the debris prevented either mourning or healing. The physical labor of clearing the site developed its own rituals of solidarity. Volunteers worked around the clock without adequate environmental protection. Some dug in the ruins and carried away the ashes and twisted steel. Others cooked meals and fed the workers. Weeks later, when visitors were allowed to come to the site, wooden barriers and police officers restricted their access. A viewing platform was eventually built so that the thousands of people who came could look over the construction fence at the empty space—Ground Zero, as television reporters quickly named it; the void, as some architects called it; or sacred ground, in the words of elected public officials and the victims’ families. Unlike the spontaneous community that developed at Union Square Park, this public sphere was created by massive interventions, most important, that of the state. Instead of expressing a common humanity, the WTC site reflected the state’s ambitions—nationalistic, in the explicit patriotism of the plans for a museum of freedom and “Freedom Tower”; egotistic, in the control over rebuilding plans held by New York State Governor George Pataki, who is thinking about running for the Republican Party’s nomination for president; and heavily oriented toward the private sector, with financial executives and business people in the majority on the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, appointed by Governor Pataki to decide the future of the site.


The differences between Union Square Park and the WTC site after 9/11 were not accidental. Although the land in both cases belongs to public agencies, what was built on it—and the governance of each site—had been at least in part under others’ control for years.


The Twin Towers were built in the 1960s on the place where a wholesale fruit and vegetable market had stood for more than a century, close to Wall Street but surrounded by low-price stores. Although it was not striking architecturally, this was New York’s version of Les Halles. With one brother serving as governor of New York State, however, and the other leading Chase Manhattan Bank, the very rich Rockefeller family planned to move the market and demolish the stores, creating a larger and more modern financial district that could compete not only with the midtown commercial district in Manhattan but also with other financial centers around the world. The World Trade Center embodied their desire to strengthen New York’s place in global competition—both symbolically, as one of the tallest buildings on the planet, and physically, as a work space for global exchanges led by U.S. firms. Conceived by Nelson and David Rockefeller, the WTC was formally owned and managed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a public authority responsible to the governors of these two states but to neither the voters nor their elected representatives.


Union square park


Union Square has a different, more populist history. In the 1860s, at the beginning of the Civil War, a rally at Union Square drew 150,000 people to express support for the Union cause. They placed a flag that had flown at Fort Sumter, where the first battle of the Civil War was fought, on George Washington’s statue. During the next eight decades, the surrounding blocks, filled with factory lofts, offices, and discount stores, teemed with workers and immigrants, who attended meetings in nearby headquarters of labor unions. (This is thought, mistakenly, to be the origin of the name Union Square). The headquarters of the U.S. Socialist and Communist parties, and the city-wide Tammany (Machine) Democratic club, were also located there. For this reason, the square was a popular rallying point for political protests and demonstrations, especially the May Day parade sponsored by the Communist and Socialist parties on May 1 of every year—until 1954, when the Cold War gripped Americans’ imaginations, and the local merchants’ association convinced the New York City Police Department to allow them to take over the square for a day of patriotic activities, renaming it “Union Square U.S.A.”


Most New Yorkers don’t know or don’t remember this history. But they are familiar with the more recent history of the square since the mid 1970s, when a private business association representing major employers in the district organized a local development corporation—now a Business Improvement District (BID)—to pay for and manage the park, bringing it effectively under private control. Thirty years ago, the last vestiges of small-scale manufacturing were leaving the neighborhood, either going out of business or displaced by living lofts and live-work space that paid higher rents. Drug dealers did business inside the park, shielded from view by luxuriant trees and bushes planted along the borders as well as a high stone wall. At that time, the city’s fiscal crisis drove it close to bankruptcy; many city agencies, including the Parks Department, were unable to fulfill their traditional roles, and the city government was placed under the management of a financial control board drawn from the leaders of transnational investment banks and other New York-based corporations. Business Improvement Districts emerged as a way that the private sector in each area of the city could take control of public spaces that the city government could no longer manage, paying for the “essential services” like police and sanitation that the city could not afford. Established under New York State law, BIDs collect a self-imposed financial assessment from commercial property owners above and beyond the required municipal taxes. They then use this money to pay their own security guards, street sweepers, gardeners, and general keepers of social order. They buy street furniture, install street lights and holiday decorations, organize festivals, and try to control the aesthetic look of the street, especially signage. The few BIDs that manage parks—besides Union Square, there is also the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation in midtown—plant gardens, maintain dog runs, chess tables, and other amenities, and both organize and rent the park for special events like the semi-annual fashion shows in Bryant Park and the photo shoots that are often held at Union Square. The Union Square Partnership, for that is this BID’s name, also pays the salary of a special Parks Department Police officer who “is trained,” according to the Partnership’s website, “to offer outreach to the homeless” and to deal with any “unlawful activity.” Established in 1984, the Union Square BID was the first in New York State. By 2006, there are more than 50 BIDs in New York City—as many as farmers’ markets, and just as widespread throughout the city.


Official vs. spontaneous public spaces


Because of their histories and current governance, both Union Square Park and the World Trade Center site are private as well as public spaces. Each attracts thousands of visitors each week, but for very different reasons. While the WTC site represents an official vision of the public sphere—formally ordered and visually coherent, patriotic, under control—Union Square Park embodies a more spontaneous form of community that is both global and local, social and commercial, and visibly fought over by ordinary people and the public authorities. On almost any day, the farmers’ market at Union Square is a real agora, vendors sell T-shirts and posters, and political candidates ask passers by to sign their petitions. Although the square once again has become the rallying point for political protestors—most recently, against the war in Iraq and for immigrants’ rights–the police do not hesitate to limit their activity. At the WTC site, conflicts occur out of view: in meeting rooms where victims’ families argue over the form of the 9/11 memorial, the governor’s and mayor’s representatives struggle with those of the real estate developer who will build the Freedom Tower, and no one has a clear idea about the future. If public space is where the body politic is formed, these places suggest that the embodiment of democracy at this time is truly divided.


Further links


The architect and the other


The politics of public space in the media city

Special issue: cities in flux, recent articles
Tags: New York, public space, sharon zukin, Union Square Park, World Trade Centre

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