-Caveat Lector- >>>As unpopular as this may read, my personal take on the towers' fall is actually an improvement of the NYC skyline. Before 9/11 (not the Porsche model), I never paid that much attention to them as I had very little or no interest in NYC (even after the '93 bombing) aside from the genericised TV shows that used NYC as a probable, stereotypical backdrop to all the sin, sex and violence that a modern American city could offer. Since their fall, I've seen a number of movies with them in the background, most notably *Mazes & Monsters* (if memory serves) with T Hanks (?!), with a bunch of scenes with the NYC WTC in them. Others I've seen (even an old *Mike Hammer* episode last night) show them off in the distance. Somehow, as the writer of the following article points out, they are "cookie-cutter modern architecture", edifices that don't blend in with the rest of the scenery. They look like they'd be more in place at the Denver Tech Centre rather than in a trans Art Deco/ Neo-Gothamic milieu like NYC. To the point: perhaps this was their greatest detraction and greatest attraction for misguided jets. They were just plain old ugly. Was the attack more an act against Modernism, the way the towers contrasted against and clashed with the rest of NYC as the U.S.ian "Western" ways contrast against the Islamic panorama? Is this the "clash" of civilisations using architecture as metaphor? A<>E<>R<<<
From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64890- 2001Nov8.html }}}>Begin Jonathan Yardley 'Empire: A Tale of Obsession, Betrayal and the Battle for an American Icon' by Mitchell Pacelle Sunday's Book World, as well as daily reviews, news and features, can be found on our Books page. The Washington Post Book Club gives you access to discounts, discussions, special events and more. E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Version Subscribe to The Post By Jonathan Yardley Sunday, November 11, 2001; Page BW02 EMPIRE A Tale of Obsession, Betrayal and The Battle for an American Icon By Mitchell Pacelle Wiley. 344 pp. $27.95 The temptation to view this account of the struggle for control of the Empire State Building through the prism of the ghastly events of Sept. 11 is strong, but in my judgment should be resisted. Empire is not about the vulnerability of skyscrapers (though Mitchell Pacelle does remind us of one incident, when a bomber accidentally crashed into the building in 1945, that underscores the point) or, for that matter, about most other important questions raised by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Instead it is a book -- and a very good one -- about the huge egos that often are behind the construction and operation of these buildings, about the extremes to which men and women will go in hopes of owning them, and about the symbolic import that becomes attached to them. This last does have some bearing on the World Trade Center, for those who attacked it clearly despised it as a symbol of globalization, American economic might and other such matters. But the Twin Towers were cookie-cutter modern architecture essentially indistinguishable in design, if not in height, from all the other glass boxes erected all over the world in the past few decades. The Empire State Building, by contrast, is distinctively American and distinctively New York. Pacelle describes its emblematic power with forgivable hyperbole: "Although long since vanquished in the contest for the world's tallest building, this monument to American hubris in the Roaring Twenties still had the almost magical capacity to fill people with wonder and joy, even jaded Manhattanites long since deadened to the scale and brawn of the city. There was something enduring about the way the Empire State Building towered over the midtown skyline, a rock-solid sentinel that, when the late afternoon sun hung low, seemed to shimmer with power and glory. Its profile -- the soaring limestone tower with its streamlined crown that glowed in the twilight like a dream -- was etched into the mind's eye of nearly everyone who had ever laid eyes on it." Small wonder, then, that ever since its completion in the spring of 1931, the building has been "irresistible to a great many property men," a "monument to what could be accomplished by those with ambition and pluck," a " Holy Grail" pursued out of motives that range from vanity to ambition to greed. Small wonder too that the building has been an object of desire for Donald Trump, to whom none of the aforementioned emotions is unfamiliar, who says: "The building is magic. It's got a unique place in people's hearts." It is a considerable irony that for much of its history the building has been a lousy investment. It opened a year and a half after the stock-market crash of 1929, and a year and a half after that "only 25 percent of the building's available space had been leased, and 56 of its 86 floors were vacant." Business picked up after World War II and remained steady for some time, but most of its space has always been occupied by small firms nota bly devoid of glamour -- unlike the big-name firms drawn to the World Trade Center -- and by the 1990s it had fallen into such disrepair that one office worker complained in a press release of "muggings, men urinating on hallway walls, homeless people wandering the corridors, faulty windows, floods, rodents roaming the workplace during working hours, bad smells, mold, and bursting water pipes." Yet from the war that was then being fought over ownership of the building, one would have thought the Taj Mahal or the chateau de Versailles was at stake. The story of that war is the core of Pacelle's book. As one whose grasp of the minutiae of high-finance and real-estate skulduggery is limited, I cannot claim to have a complete understanding of every twist and turn that Pacelle patiently describes, but this is not required in order to appreciate and enjoy his book, which ultimately is far less about money than it is about people. So rather than attempt to unravel the incredibly twisted succession of deals and events that Pacelle recounts, herewith is a brief introduction to the principal characters. You already know Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley , though you may not fully appreciate just how deeply they despise each other. To the Donald, Helmsley is "a disgrace to humanity," a "vicious, horrible woman," a "living nightmare," while the Queen of Mean once said of T rump, "I wouldn't believe him if his tongue were notarized." This is the stuff of comedy rather than boardroom melodrama, and Pacelle has the self-restraint to let it play out on its own terms rather than trying to gild the lily; his account is straightforward and underplayed. Ditt o for his portrayal of the bizarre feud within the family of Hideki Yokoi, the Japanese billionaire who owned the building for a while in the 1990s and presided over "the peculiar constellation that he called his family - - a messy universe in which even the number of children he had fathered and the women who had borne them was a topic of considerable debate." Yokoi, who died in 1998, was a piece of work. He went to prison for gross negli gence involving a fire in a Tokyo hotel he owned in which 33 people died, he had associations with the Japanese underworld, his business practices were utterly ruthless; he was, in sum, "one of Japan's most hated business men." Yokoi's children mostly emerge in Pacelle's chronicle as a faceless crowd, with one singular exception: his illegitimate daughter, Kiiko Nakahara, born in 1945, whose mother was an employee of his. Yokoi "had never offici ally recognized Kiiko as his own," but he "demanded the same sort of filial devotion from her that he did of his legitimate children" and lavished "unflagging generosity" upon her. Eventually he "made her a director of Ni ppon Sangyo, his primary holding company," and in 1989 added her "to his official family registry, elevating her to the same official status as his legitimate children." Kiiko and her husband, a Frenchman named Jean-Paul Renoir, became Yokoi's chief agents in the purchase of the Empire State Building, which Yokoi assumed took place in 1991. Assumed, that is, because the nature of the deal and the identities of the actual purchasers almost immediately were brought into question and, this being the world of New York high-end real estate, legal dispute. The whole business was (and still is) greatly complicat ed by a 114-year lease on the building that had been granted in 1961 to two real-estate operators, one of whom was Harry Helmsley. In time of course he married Leona Mindy Roberts, "a brassy, foul-mouthed, enormously ambi tious broker who had willed herself to rise above her dreary Brooklyn upbringing," and who, after his death in 1997, took control of his not-inconsiderable estate. That put her into direct conflict with Trump, who in 1994 had entered into a joint venture with Nakahara and Renoir the terms of which gave him "powerful incentive to cook up a legal version of a tire iron to the kneecaps of the woman he despised, Leona Helmsley." It is here, about midway through Pacelle's account, that things get juicy. The details of the legal and financial wheeling and dealing are pretty confusing, at least to the lay reader, but the spectacle of these two outsized caricatures of ego and vanity in mortal battle against each other makes for delicious reading. It is, in the end, a story with no last chapter, another way of saying that the only real winners are the lawyers. It is certainly, Lord knows, a story with no heroes. But it is a grand human comedy, and Mitchell Pacelle has a fine time with it. � Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] � 2001 The Washington Post Company End<{{{ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + "Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe simply because it has been handed down for many generations. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. 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