Happy 2015!

Happy New Year! Happy 2015!

Kevin Traynor on Shelfari

Torch in the Night, Phantom Train, Mysterious Boat, and Debacle are now featured on Shelfari, which has lists and descriptions of characters, organizations, and locations, tables of contents, and many more in-depth book details and facts and makes them available on the Shelfari website and as Book Extras on Kindle readers.

BTW, you don't need a Kindle reader to read Kindle e-books. You can download free reader software from Amazon and read Kindle e-books on your computer or smart phone. It's available for Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and Windows Phone 7. Or you use the Kindle Cloud Reader to read Kindle e-books in your web browser. Plus, if you've got a laptop or a smart phone, you can even take it with you, like a Kindle reader.

Thus you can profit from the low prices of Kevin Traynor e-books and the free Book Extras without spending money on a Kindle reader. Nifty, huh?

Debacle: Failing to Rebuild the Twin Towers at Amazon.com

The dead tree edition of Debacle: Failing to Rebuild the Twin Towers is now available from Amazon.com or direct from the book's online store. This edition contains two bonus essays that are not found in the present Kindle edition.

Debacle: Failing to Rebuild the Twin Towers Out Now

Friends, Americans, civilized humans, lend me your eyes; I come to praise the WTC, not to bury it. The evil that men do lives after them; the good should not be interred with their bones: nor should it be with the bones of the Twin Towers. The vile Caesars have told you the Twin Towers were ambitious: If it was so, it was not a grievous fault, but their noblest virtue. But grievously hath Caesar answered it.

World trade means world peace… The World Trade Center is a living symbol of man's dedication to world peace. Beyond the compelling need to make this a monument to world peace, the World Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a representation of man's belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and through cooperation, his ability to find greatness.

— Minoru Yamasaki

Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window — no, I don't feel how small I am — but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.

— Ayn Rand

Those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights, and humanity have been destroyed. They have gone up in smoke.

— Osama bin Laden

Ten years ago today, murderous terrorists crashed jetliners into the Word Trade Center Towers, realizing their plan that the Twin Towers that stood for rational man's achievement, capitalism, freedom, free trade, and world peace should no longer grace the New York skyline, aiming to extinguish the twin beacons of liberty and enlightenment, so that the forces of darkness should rule the world once more.

The terrorists have failed, as rule by faith and force must always fail. They have not brought about another Dark Age. But they murdered 3,000 human beings, wrecked four jetliners, prompted people to sacrifice priceless liberties to fear, caused economic damage in the trillions of dollars, and destroyed two landmark building complexes.

Some of these battles are battles for another day and not the primary subject of our book. But on September 12, 2001, there was little doubt as to what had to be done about one of these points. The landmark complex less completely destroyed, the Pentagon, was quickly restored. To this day, people from around the US and the world are shocked to learn that what is built at the WTC is not new Twin Towers, taller, stronger, and safer.

For ten wasted years now, the worst of contemporary politics has made sure that no towers of comparable stature are rising at the WTC, thus kept the killers' legacy intact and respected their wish that New York and America be cut down to size, never to rise again.

Groups that favored drastically different philosophies of urban design, groups that saw professional opportunities for themselves, and groups that saw any pool of funds dedicated to relief of the needy as best devoted to their own priorities swooped in to claim they spoke for all.

Allied to this was the most vocal proportion of those who had lost loved ones in the attacks, casting about in their grief for solace. Whether seeking to blame someone for their loss or seeking maximum public recognition of their loss, they made pleas of a kind rare in previous historical disasters that often amounted to leaving the site as the killers of their loved ones had desired rather than permitting it to be reclaimed for the purposes to which and for which their loved ones had given their lives.

To the vulture-like opportunists seeing an opportunity to remake the city, and to the emotionally devastated seeking to see its unmaking left as a tribute to the victims, the officials listened. To the wider nation anxious to see the restoration of what could be restored, they paid no heed.

— Louis Epstein, World Trade Center Restoration Movement

WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein has been determined to rebuild the office space, but lacks the vision and vigor to rebuild the towers he had once said he lusted for, towers he could only buy, but not create. He prefers the bulk of the iconic Twin Towers to be broken down into a bunch of buildings each half the size of a Twin Tower, to be built at a pace that minimizes his economic risk.

Moreover, he won't permit any new building at the WTC to have nearly as many occupied floors as the 110-story Twin Towers, as he now believes he has to protect the people who would work there from themselves.

All new WTC buildings now planned or under construction are much smaller and shorter than the Twin Towers, with the exception of the antenna on the new One WTC, which will be slighter taller than the old antenna. Thanks to officials' incompetence, there will not even be a new Windows on the World restaurant.

While politicians made sure that the public was never offered a poll pitting the stunted designs preferred by the interests they catered to — victims' families, urban utopian planners, and Silverstein — against restored Twin Towers, any poll there was soundly rejected the official offerings, which never managed to beat "none of the above" and usually took a shellacking from "none of the above."

Results on Imagine New York (the LMDC's official poll):
Libeskind: 205 votes / 26%
THINK: 260 votes / 33%
None of the above: 323 votes / 41%
Total: 788 votes

Results on NY1:
Results since February 4, 2003
Libeskind: 6,853 votes / 21%
THINK: 4,615 votes / 14%
I don't like either of these plans: 20,892 votes / 64%
Total: 32,360 votes

Results on CNN:
Which of the two finalists' designs do you prefer for the World Trade Center site?
Libeskind: 33,050 votes / 32%
THINK: 34,867 votes / 34%
Neither is good: 35,747 votes / 34%
Total: 103,664 votes

The incompetent and intellectually bankrupt officials have seen their WTC plans fall apart again and again for ten years because they treated the WTC rebuilding as a random office development with a memorial plopped in and failed to heed the most fundamental advice for great architecture:

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will themselves not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die.

— Daniel H. Burnham

The human beings we lost were bold. These people deserve majestic new towers as bold as they were. One of the best ways we can honor them is to carry on their work. Safer, taller towers will be a living testament that complements our memorial and helps make it one of the seven modern wonders of the world. We need a skyline that does justice to the wonderful people we lost. We will not sell these people short.

— Jonathan Hakala, tenant, One World Trade Center

In the words of New Yorkers from all walks of life, Debacle: Failing to Rebuild the Twin Towers chronicles their love of their city and their towers, their hopes for rebuilding, their experience with the corrupt official rebuilding process, and the blueprints that can still restore tall Twin Towers to the WTC.

Debacle: Failing to Rebuild the Twin Towers is now available for Amazon Kindle. Dead tree edition coming soon.

Debacle: Failing to Rebuild the Twin Towers Is Coming

Why aren't the World Trade Center Twin Towers being rebuilt taller, stronger, and safer? Why is what pretty much everyone took for granted on September 12, 2001, not coming true? Why are iconic 110-story Towers being replaced with a bunch of shorter buildings topped by pointless spires?

Ten years after the original disaster and ten years into the disaster that is the rebuilding process, New Yorkers and out-of-towners from all walks of life come forward to tell the story of the second destruction of the World Trade Center, not at the hands of terrorists, but at the hands of politicians, builders, and activists, who sacrificed the world's most famous landmark to their own narrow interests and thus perpetuated the destruction wreaked by the terrorists.

The tales they have to tell are not pretty: stories of corruption, venality, opportunism, greed, short-term thinking, irrationality, incompetence, cowardice, and betrayal. Keeping the Twin Towers destroyed did not even require a grand conspiracy. All it took was the business as usual of New York politics. The twin behemoths of City Hall and Albany were all it took to make sure that rebuilding the icons of New York, America, and the free world was sacrificed to the personal gain and the short-term political advantage of a few politicians pandering to vocal minorities and well-connected builders.

Together, these essays mesh into a kaleidoscopic epic of how the worst of mankind was first met with the best of man, only to be thwarted by the worst of contemporary politics.

Due out September 11, 2011.

Silverstein's Latest Lawsuit

From The New York Times:

"Silverstein's Latest Lawsuit"

At a time when everything seemed to go on swimmingly at the World Trade Center, the new Tower One rising steadily past the halfway mark, the memorial on track, and an agreement for the other new towers in place, a new round of downtown trouble is afoot. Yesterday, World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein filed a notice of dispute, sending his troubled partnership with the Port Authority into arbitration once more. Moreover, a source close to Mr. Silverstein's lawyers, Grapsh, Snyder, Renner, said on condition of anonymity that Mr. Silverstein is preparing to file lawsuits against WTC master planner Daniel Libeskind and the World Trade Organization.

The bone of contention is once more the space allocation in the new WTC buildings, but this time with a twist. Mr. Silverstein alleges that he has been defrauded all along by the WTO, the Port Authority, and their master planner.

From the get go, Mr. Silverstein's complaint claims, the Port Authority conspired with the WTO and the architect, Mr. Libeskind, to keep the most profitable office space to itself. "From day one, they had this plan where four buildings wrap around the memorial plaza. And even when people rallied for rebuilding the Twin Towers, they held on to that scheme, come hell or high water," said the Grapsh, Snyder, Renner insider. "There was method to that madness."

The Twin Towers design was fatally flawed, as it kept disparate parties cooped up together, which led to insurmountable conflicts of interest that sunk the original World Trade Center in its intended function as a center of world trade. Consequently, the Twin Towers sat empty for years, until Wall Street firms could be persuaded to move in once other space downtown had filled up.

Conversely, the new World Trade Center will sort tenants by their affluence, with a First World Trade Center for those from developed countries like North America, Europe, and Japan, a Second World Trade Center for those from emerging economies like Russia and China, a Third World Trade Center for those from underdeveloped countries in the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and a Fourth World Trade Center for those from the least developed countries and for government agencies, like the PA itself, which are notoriously cheap tenants with their tax dollars.

"When Larry couldn't build them all, the PA kept Tower One, the future First World Trade Center, to itself and saddled him with the less prosperous tenants. You might say, how comes a shrewd Manhattan developer like Larry could be kept in the dark like this for ten years, but this is the big league, WTO and international diplomats. He's a babe in arms among those global players," the lawyer said.

"If they didn't plan that from square one, why four towers? Doesn't make sense. Why did they move into Tower Four instead of the taller, more prestigious Tower One, like before? Those PA guys knew exactly what they were doing.

"Why do the towers decrease in height, size, and architectural quality as the building numbers increase? Libeskind designed it that way and refused to budge, no matter how impractical this design turned out to be in all other respects."

"The Twin Towers just didn't work," said Katharina Prilova, who worked in the Twin Towers when she was a foreign trade commissar for Russia. "You'd take the elevator down for lunch, and in the sky lobby some scrawny African would accost you for money."

"Once, I was in the cafeteria and that Polynesian trade commissioner tried to trade me one of his daughters for sweetener," said Jack Springshear, a former US delegate to the WTO. "You've got to understand, not an aristocratic statesman, but some money-grubbing, nouveau riche business type. Those daughters of him must have been fat like whales and straight from the pineapple fields. I'd rather keep my Sweet'n Low, thank you very much."

Faced with conditions like those, the capitalists at the WTO seem to prefer to keep diversity down and different people from different worlds segregated. Unsurprisingly, their promise of a diverse WTC turns out to not be worth the air it was spoken into.

The only inequality Mr. Silverstein seems to care about, however, is that he got saddled with the least prosperous peons. His office refused to comment on pending lawsuits. A spokesperson for the Port Authority didn't return calls, the WTO was closed for a Micronesian holiday, and Mr. Libeskind, according to his assistant, attended a garden gnome conference.

Chris Ward Couldn't Make Money with Plates

Port Authority honcho Chris Ward couldn't make money if you sent him the printing plates in a gift box.

Developers of 1 World Trade Center have abruptly scratched plans for a Windows on the World-type restaurant on the top floors of the iconic, 1,776-foot-tall tower now rising downtown.

Plans for the eatery … were shelved due to concerns about design and construction costs and the difficulty of finding a restaurateur willing to run a likely money-losing operation, sources said.

"These things are always money-losers. We think we can achieve a far better financial return given the [quality of the] space and avoid all the complexities," Port Authority Executive Director Chris Ward said.

…

The former owners of Tavern on the Green, the Strip House chain, and Windows on the World itself were among many restaurateurs who expressed interest in taking on a reborn Windows.

"In 2000, its final full year of operation, it reported revenues of US$37 million, making it the highest-grossing restaurant in the United States."

Windows on the World is a license for printing money. If you can't make money with that, it's a miracle you can find the way to your refrigerator to ward off death by starvation. Does your wife keep feeding you, Chrissy Snow-Ward?

The only loser here is you, Chrissy. You couldn't find your own ass with a map and GPS.

I expect your immediate resignation. The only reason you don't is that you'd starve, as you couldn't even run a hot dog stand.

" 'We do not build vanity projects at the top of tall buildings,' said PA Executive Director Chris Ward."

But you do build vanity projects next door to tall buildings, huh? Like that pointless mega-memorial Disneyland of Death?

" 'We are committed to finding the highest, best, and most practical use for this space — one that does not require subsidizing a restaurant with public money for years to come,' he said."

So what do you morons want to put there instead? Thanks to that coward Silverstein, there aren't going to be any offices at a decent height like that.

So what are you going to put onto those floors? More mechanical and communications equipment, like you wasted the other upper floors on?

I want my restaurant back, you government-funded imbeciles!

Rent Is Too Damn High

I could not agree more with Jimmy McMillan. Rent is too damn high.

I have yet to see a desirable decent apartment whose rent isn't too damn high.

But socialism doesn't help.

In capitalism, the desirable and expensive apartments go to those who produce most.

Under communism, they go to the commissars.

Under less comprehensive forms of socialism, like rent control, they go to the well-connected.

If you give up capitalism for socialism, it no longer matters how much you make, but who you know.

For cheaper and more plentiful housing, it takes more capitalism, not less. End frivolous government regulation.

End zoning rules that limit building height and floor area. End runaway landmarking that turns whole neighborhoods into historic districts museums where townhouses cannot be demolished to build apartment towers.

A Tale of Two Cities

(Make that one City and one cow frog town.)

For what would happen to New York if the NIMBYs and Tony Munchkins had their way, look at Paris. It died from what the frogs call museification.

Sure, it's full of American tourists who want to see what they have been told to find romantic. So they do this original Disneyland with its Cinderella architecture.

But Paris is dead. Sure, there are plenty of people and nightlife and whatever.

But it can't grow, it can't improve, it can't change. It's forever stuck in a period from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.

When Montparnasse Tower, the first and only skyscraper in Paris proper, was built, Parisians, or at least the majority of them, decided that they hated such buildings and banned them. Ever since, businesses have been leaving for the suburbs, like La Defense, where skyscrapers are allowed. What's left to the city is the tourist trade.

Now look at London. Just like Paris, the City of London outlawed modern skyscrapers with large floor plates to protect the views of its ugly, kitschy cathedral. The result was that the world's biggest banks moved their European headquarters from the City to Canary Wharf, where they can build beautiful, boxy, modern skyscrapers with trading floors as big as they want to.

Suddenly, it became possible to build modern skyscrapers in the City. As I am writing this, the tallest buildings in London are going up in or just across the Thames from the City.

Now, Britain is no purely capitalist country. It's in fact a strange blend of capitalism, democracy, and monarchy. But it sure is way more capitalist than France, and observe the results.

Capitalism = The market wants skyscrapers. The City gets skyscrapers.

Democracy = The majority doesn't want skyscrapers. The frog town gets stuck in the past, a quaint little Disneyland for the majority that is afraid of change and likes to stagnate and the deluded tourists who believe vacation means watching stagnation happen.

(That doesn't mean that slumming in Paris isn't fun. It just isn't exactly noble.)

Empire State Looter

Next week, the City Council is expected to approve 15 Penn Plaza, a proposed office tower that has generated some criticism from its neighbors — namely the owners of the Empire State Building, which is two blocks east.

The 67-story tower by Vornado Realty Trust is planned to rise as much as 1,216 feet on the site of the Hotel Pennsylvania at West 33rd Street. The tower is expected to get the green light, despite opposition from Community Board 5 and Malkin Holdings, which controls the Empire State Building.

Like guild socialism or fascism: Use the power of the state to get rid of superior competition, in this case of those who want to build a more modern and beautiful building a couple blocks from your aging landmark.

"Community Board 5 had unanimously voted down the project."

Damn NIMBYs.

However, the full City Council is expected to vote on Wednesday to grant Vornado the final approval needed to proceed with the project.

"The height and bulk of 15 Penn Plaza are the result of waivers and bonuses greatly in excess of code. Another waiver granted 15 Penn Plaza the right to build without setbacks," said Tony Malkin, president of Malkin Holdings, in a press statement.

Setbacks make a building apologize for its greatness. Setbacks are bad. And who can't use a bit of shade in the summer?

"At only 67 stories, 15 Penn Plaza would be as tall as the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building…"

So what? What's it to you how many or how few floors the competition has?

In fact, it shows how outdated your building is. No space between floors for modern wiring.

"…and would, if built, be as much a scar on the complexion of New York City as the loss of Penn Station."

Really? If anything, the ESB is the scar on the complexion of New York City. If you look at the rendering in the article, sleekly soaring 15 Penn Plaza is much more beautiful than the ESB with its atrocious setbacks, no matter how much the general public has gotten used to it and thus even grown attached to it. Goes to prove that the general public is stupid.

The City Planning Commission, which gave the development a green light last month, said in its report that "the prominence of the Empire State Building would not be significantly affected because the new building… would be shorter than the Empire State Building (approximately 230 feet shorter), and the two buildings are approximately 1,000 feet apart, which would further diminish the perceived height of the new building in more distant views."

Who cares about the prominence of the Empire State Building? I hope towers twice or thrice as tall will be built all around the ESB.

If anything, the ESB embodies all that's wrong with New York: bad architecture pandering to the bad taste of the masses and a stagnation that would protect views of an outdated building, short by today's standards, instead of building the taller towers the city deserves.

Whatever became of "Excelsior!"?

Damn you, Tony Munchkin, damn you to hell, for stabbing the New York skyline in the back so that you can squeeze some more ill-gotten gains out of your ugly 1,250-foot hand-me-down hovel with its idiotic zeppelin docking mast on top. Damn looter.

WTC Radon Alarm Puts Rebuilding in Limbo Again

I think someone's trying to hush this up. Yesterday, there was an article in the Post, with a title along the lines of "Oh, No! Ew, Another Problem: Radon in Land under WTC" or something. Now it's gone.

Below the relevant article from the Times.

"WTC Radon Alarm Puts Rebuilding in Limbo Again"

By ADAM P. RUSH and INEZ LANSKY
Published: March 31, 2010

At the World Trade Center construction site, rumors abound that the rebuilding project in the wake of the devastating terrorist attacks might be derailed by an invisible, colorless, odorless, tasteless, but radioactive terror: radon-229 gas. Radon is a known carcinogen and the second most frequent cause of lung cancer, after cigarette smoking, causing 21,000 lung cancer deaths per year in the United States.

Radon occurs naturally as the decay product of radium. If traces of radium are present in underground rock, radon gas from these natural sources can accumulate in buildings, especially in confined areas such as attics and basements.

The primary route of exposure to radon and its progeny is inhalation. Radiation exposure from radon is indirect: The health hazard from radon does not come primarily from radon itself, but rather from the radioactive products formed in the decay of radon.

If radon gas is inhaled, the particles that result from its radioactive decay may attach to the inner lining of the lung. These radioactive particles remain lodged in the lungs and continue to decay further, causing continued exposure by emitting alpha radiation.

Of the 35 known isotopes of radon, radon-229 may very well be the sneakiest, as it evades all standard chemical tests for radon. It can only be detected by mass spectrometers and very sensitive Geiger counters. Due to its stealthy characteristics, the isotope is nicknamed "radoff" by scientists.

The problem is compounded by the fact that radon-229 is much more dangerous than the more common radon-222, particularly for smokers. While prolonged exposure to radon-222 roughly doubles a nonsmoker's risk of contracting lung cancer, radoff is twice again as harmful for nonsmokers. For regular smokers, long-term exposure to high concentrations of radoff can boost their cancer risk to almost 100%. The products from the decay of radoff lodge in the lungs more easily and are particularly destructive to the already damaged lungs of smokers.

In the absence of other causes of death, the absolute risks of lung cancer by age 75 at usual radon-222 concentrations of 0, 100, and 400 Bq/m3 would be about 0.4%, 0.5%, and 0.7%, respectively, for lifelong nonsmokers and about 25 times greater (10%, 12%, and 16%) for cigarette smokers. The corresponding numbers for radoff are about 0.9%, 1.3%, and 1.9% for lifelong nonsmokers and 60%, 72%, and 96% for cigarette smokers.

Due to its hard-to-detect and hazardous nature, if found, the presence of radoff requires complex and extensive mitigation measures, like ground insulation of basements and custom HVAC systems. In most cases, demolition and new construction is the cheapest alternative.

While radon itself is rare in Manhattan, radoff is even rarer. Although it is more commonly encountered in cities in or near mining districts, like Pittsburgh or Denver, and major earthquake zones, like Los Angeles, it is not unheard of in New York, where it can emanate from pockets in the Manhattan schist.

The building 18 West 11th Street had to be demolished due to radoff contamination. Radoff was also found in the basement of the American Radiator Building during its conversion into The Bryant Park Hotel, whose boarded-up state is still remembered by many New Yorkers. Demolishing the building and starting the hotel from scratch would have been much cheaper than the conservationist approach known as adaptive-protective radoff in-location mitigation, but as the building had already been landmarked, the former was never an option.

The rumors regarding radon and radoff at the WTC site could neither be corroborated nor refuted. Neither the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the land under the WTC, nor Larry A. Silverstein, the developer, nor the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene returned calls.

The engineer and developer, Alan F. Termarch, a partner at One Astor Plaza Realty Investors, LLC, and at Rad-on/Rad-off, the only radoff mitigation contractor in the city, wasn't surprised by this radio silence. "Developers and even public officials are extremely reluctant to come forward with a finding of radoff, as that's too often the death sentence for a project," he said. "Just like inhaling radoff is a virtual death sentence for a smoker."

Mr. Termarch estimates the extent of the necessary mitigation work at billions of dollars and several years in delays. "Obviously, the cheapest way to keep radoff out of a building is pouring several seamless layers of concrete and plastic under the building. Obviously, you can't do that if the building's already in place. Can't undermine all of its columns at the same time, right? Might be cheaper to rip out everything built at the WTC site in the past eight years and start over."

A version of this article appeared in print on April 1, 2010, on page A22 of the New York edition.

Will the Real Hotaling Please Stand Up?

The skyscrapers of Santiago at least still are. Standing up, that is. Other structures, however, don't share that virtue.

So, speaking of whatever gods there may be:

The company says code changes made in 1996 in particular have led to a "majority of Chile's insured risks" being well designed, and far more likely to survive than "older counterparts."

Indeed, churches and other buildings that were constructed without reinforced concrete were prominent among those that have collapsed, early reports indicted.

"They just crumbled to rubble," said one expert.

Reminds me:

If, as some say, god spanked the town
For being over frisky,
Why did he burn his churches down
And save Hotaling's whiskey?

All good questions.

The Ayn Rand Code

A guide to Howard Roark's Manhattan as built in steel and dreams.

Read The Fountainhead, been to New York, bought the centennial edition? But did you ever wonder which real buildings may have inspired the steel and concrete stars of The Fountainhead?

As for that hideous Frink National Bank Building, I know of no building in New York City "on the top of which, twenty-five floors above the pavements, there burned in a miniature replica of the Hadrian Mausoleum a wind-blown torch made of glass and the best General Electric bulbs." (Lucky me.)

Yet, there is a bank building topped by a copy of what put the "Mausol" in mausoleum, the original Mausoleum of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, twenty-nine floors above the pavements. Like the Frink National Bank Building, which was apparently among the tallest buildings Downtown, the Bankers Trust Building at 14 Wall Street was among the three tallest buildings in the city when it opened in 1912. What's more, it's as eclectically Greek as the Frink National Bank Building is Roman:

"Sources for the design included the Ionic order on the Erechtheum at the Acropolis, ancient Macedonian prototypes, and reconstruction drawings of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the model for the stepped-pyramid temple which crowns the building, giving it its distinctive profile against the skyline." (Opens PDF)

That would make 14 Wall Street's architects, Trowbridge & Livingston, Francon & Heyer, right? Well, Samuel Beck Parkman Trowbridge studied at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. The Stanton Institute of Technology? Like Guy Francon, he later studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Finally, while the tip of 14 Wall Street functions as nothing but a lowly smokestack, Trowbridge & Livingston's Gulf Tower in Pittsburgh, another replica of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (like one copy wasn't bad enough), is topped by a locally famous beacon.

Another candidate is 26 Broadway, the old Standard Oil Building. Of course it's not a bank building, but like 14 Wall Street it is topped by a pyramid modeled on the Mausoleum of Mausolus. Plus: "At the time of construction, the pyramid was the tallest tower at the tip of Manhattan and was illuminated as a beacon for ships entering the harbor."

A little more than "[t]hree blocks east of the Frink National Bank" — in fact, more like thirty blocks north of 14 Wall Street — stands the real-life Dana Building, its lines "hard and simple, revealing, emphasizing the harmony of the steel skeleton within." It is more than just some stories lower, though. The thirteen-story Bayard-Condict Building at 65 Bleecker Street is the only building in New York by Louis Sullivan, the inspiration for Henry Cameron. Its "curtain wall of terra cotta that expresses the inner steel skeleton was a radical departure from the heavy masonry of building in this period. … With this building, Sullivan revolutionized the way architects think about tall buildings." In her Ayn Rand biography, Anne Heller concurs and adds that Rand likely named the building in honor of Frank Lloyd Wright's Dana House in Springfield, Illinois (pp. 118).

Just a few blocks away, by the way, is Stanton Street. Coincidence?

The Cosmo-Slotnick Building on Broadway, "a skyscraper to house a motion-picture theater and forty floors of offices," no doubt was Ayn Rand's take on the 1927 Paramount Building on Times Square, a 3,600-seat theater fronted by a thirty-three-floor office building in shape of a giant desk clock. Heller concurs and adds that it too was the result of a public competition (p. 119).

According to her, Roark's low-slung Stoddard Temple is based on Wright's Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois (p. 115).

For a glimpse of a very rudimentary Enright House, you can look at the 1930 Howe & Lescaze design for the Museum of Modern Art. While its individual gallery blocks attached to a service core may have given Ayn Rand the idea of "each a single house held to the other houses like a single crystal to the side of a rock," sans Roark they still look a lot like a "pile of cages." Recently, Santiago Calatrava infused the design with some Roark quality when he adapted it into an apartment tower much like the Enright House. Sadly, this Enright House at 80 South Street remains unbuilt. Another possible inspiration is Wright's equally unbuilt St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie Towers (model, rendering).

The Cord Building would appear to be the Chrysler Building. Both share the name of an automobile manufacturer. While in The Fountainhead, Anthony Cord has nothing to do with the Cord Corporation, it is significant that, not unlike Roark, E.L. "Cord had a philosophy to build truly different, innovative cars, believing they would also sell well and turn a profit."

Of course, the Cord Building is more than twenty stories shorter than the Chrysler Building, but Ayn Rand couldn't have Roark build the world's tallest building at that early point in his career. Nevertheless, that "tower of copper and glass" "in the center of Manhattan" sure reflects the tower with the elegant top of stainless steel and glass at Grand Central.

As for "the Aquitania Hotel on Central Park South," that's anyone's guess. If there is a real-life inspiration, and if that inspiration is on Central Park South, it's probably 240 Central Park South, completed in 1941. It's more modern than the other major prewar buildings on that street, like the Essex House or the Hampshire House, and the one that comes closest to a "study of angles and terraces."

The year Ayn Rand came to America, 1926, there was a proposal all over the news for a real Wynand Building in Hell's Kitchen. The Larkin Tower was to rise west of Eighth Avenue, between Forty-first and Forty-second Streets, where the old McGraw-Hill Building was eventually built in 1931. At 108 stories and 1,208 feet, the Larkin Tower would have been the world's tallest building, nearly as tall as the Empire State Building half a decade later.

Yet, the proposed design for the Larkin Tower decidedly lacked Roark quality. The top floors would have had room for little more than an elevator. Unless they were meant to be mere token floors for a height record, like those in the Empire State Building's dirigible mooring mast, the building badly needed to be redesigned. Maybe they should have let Roark give it a try.

Anyways, Happy Ayn Rand Day!

"Capitalism," Dubai Style

If you thought Southern slavocrats and Russian kleptocrats had been giving capitalism a bad name, get a load of this: "The Dark Side of Dubai".

I used to say, "Wait till the bottom falls out of Dubai," but I didn't expect it to fall that soon or that spectacularly.

In 2001, we were, for the first time in human history, treated to the spectacle of skyscrapers collapsing. Now we may observe how a city disintegrates in a real-life version of I Am Legend.

Once Dubai runs out of cash, it runs out of oil to fire its desalination plants, and then, without water, human life will be impossible there. That's what happens if you build on sand, credit, and slavery, instead of on true capitalism, reason, and liberty.

Of course that's not the conclusion the commie author draws: "Dubai is Market Fundamentalist Globalization in One City."

Well, stealing passports and investing other people's money in unsustainable projects is not "market fundamentalism" or capitalism, it's force and fraud, the very antithesis of capitalism (voluntary cooperation to mutual advantage).

Capitalism cannot work if a country is ruled either by delusional monarchs or by equally delusional mobs. (Think of the mob rule in the US, the Fed the mob government appointed, and the bubble it created.) Capitalism can only work if the world is ruled by enlightened plutocrats, by entrepreneurs who act in the best long-term interest of their corporations, who rise to power not by birth or by populism, but by merit and productivity.

Downtown Dawn?

Those years of impasses that are the World Trade Center rebuilding saga left developer Larry Silverstein, as Johnny Cash would put it, with no tenants, no loans, no chance. Yet the whole project boils down to government and private incompetence of epic proportions.

Here's the epic. (With apologies to Tanya Tucker.)

Chris O. Ward, what's that tower you work on
Could it be the faded plans from days gone by?
And did I hear you say they was a-meeting you here today
To take off your hands some floors in the sky?

It's been eight years and folks here 'round still call them ugly
All the folks around New York say you're crazy
'Cause you walk around town with tax rebates in your hand
Looking for that mysterious tenant man

In the olden days they called it Libescheme then
Ugliest buildings you ever laid eyes on
Then some men of low degree hijacked the site
And promised us they'd sure rebuild it right

Chris O. Ward, what's that tower you work on
Could it be the faded plans from days gone by?
And did I hear you say they was a-meeting you here today
To take off your hands some floors in the sky?

Chris O. Ward, what's that tower you work on
Could it be the faded plans from days gone by?
And did I hear you say they was a-meeting you here today
To take off your hands some floors in the sky?

Chris O. Ward, what's that tower you work on
Could it be the faded plans from days gone by?
And did I hear you say they was a-meeting you here today
To take off your hands some floors in the sky?

Chris O. Ward, what's that tower you work on
Could it be the faded plans from days gone by?
And did I hear you say they was a-meeting you here today
To take off your hands some floors in the sky?

(FADE)
Chris O. Ward, what's that tower you work on
Could it be the faded plans from days gone by?
And did I hear you say they was a-meeting you here today
To take off your hands some floors in the sky?

Shuster on WTC Back Room Deals

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No News Is Bad News

By guest columnists Margaret Donovan and Richard Hughes of The Twin Towers Alliance.

What we are witnessing at the World Trade Center is a massive failure of imagination. If not arrested, it will undermine the nation that so many have fought for and died to preserve.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said last week: "It is in the interest of the city and this country to get development going at the World Trade Center site."

He went on to warn us: "There's no easy solution here. We'll try and come to an agreement."

The sad spectacle at Ground Zero is demoralizing our country. As it happens, there is indeed an easy solution for the World Trade Center and the majority of the people have always been in agreement on what that is — rebuild the Twin Towers.

What we want is clearly irrelevant to officials who determine which "answers" will do. But America is only as strong as its social contract.

When officials fail to hold up their end of the bargain, our only hope is a faithful and resolute press.

America was founded on the belief that we, the people, know how to run our affairs. The only way our country will thrive is if those we elect to represent us actually do.

In the past year it has become apparent how completely the official plan for the Trade Center has failed. Unsound from the start, the credit crisis has exacerbated the distress of a project that has been on life-support all along.

At the same time, officials have known that there is a fully developed plan to build 21st-century Twin Towers. The plan would save billions of dollars, years of time, and honor the will of the people, but for some reason that doesn't matter.

The viability of "Twin Towers II" has been recognized as clearly superior by some of the most eminent skyscraper authorities in the world. But instead of analyzing its merits, officials put a bad plan on steroids, closed their eyes, and held their breath — with predictable results.

Now the Port Authority wants to replace two of the four towers with retail "stumps," but instead of canceling the windowless wonder that by any name is still an eyesore, they want to replace the only towers that have a little character.

The latest price tag for the WTC transit station — inaccurately hailed as a "hub" — is projected at between $3 and $5 billion dollars. For not much more we could build two spectacular mixed-used Twin Towers.

And the morbid 9/11 Memorial is again up over a billion dollars and will require another billion-dollar endowment to finance the annual $50 million dollars-plus needed to run it.

It may be privately funded, but why should something that is detested by 9/11 family members, that manages to be extravagant and insipid at the same time, be treated as a sacred cow? Only because the facts are not widely known.

It is time to let the public become part of the solution. People can learn more about the "Twin Towers II" plan and leave their names and comments on the petition at www.twintowersalliance.com.

Between now and June 11th, intensive meetings will be held to examine the options for the site. Now that there is one final chance to get it right, we can't let officials decide our future behind closed doors, because they have a different set of priorities and the public is not high on their list.

Nothing good can come of allowing politicians to hide the details of their discussions from scrutiny. They are not authorized to use the public's money to sell our World Trade Center short, when a real solution has been provided that they won't consider. If they need imagination the people have plenty to spare.

The time has come for a free and probing press to stand up for the public's best interests by challenging the news blackout and by insisting on the people's behalf to know how officials are addressing the robust alternative plan that would powerfully resolve the breakdown.

If there is a good reason to deny the American people the incomparable delight of seeing those Twin Towers reclaim their place in the skyline, let's hear it. Because that's the kind of country this is. It was created of, by, and for the people.

It is the entire country's burden and the entire country's privilege to build a World Trade Center that we can all be proud of. It is illogical and improper that the future of this site should be limited to what the people of New York and New Jersey can afford in an economic slump.

The ideal solution would be for the Federal Government to buy the air rights to the site, form a public corporation, and, while it is being fully funded, to advance Mr. Silverstein the money needed to go full speed ahead with the project to restore the skyline by 9/11/2011.

The two states need the money and the American people need their towers back. Given the chance to fund new Twin Towers and profit from their investment, the people would eagerly rush to be a part of the win-win venture.

There is only one way to make sense of the past eight years. There is no need to justify honest mistakes with dishonest excuses. We have one last opportunity that we can't afford to squander.

Going Down

Basement One: Bargain basement. Office towers.

Basement Two: Corpses of foreign investors that jumped off the roof. (Craters in the portion that extends under the sidewalk.)

Again, I'm not a guy to go, "I told you so," but I told you so.

"Have I Got an Office Tower for You."

"Skyscrapers across the U.S. are being sold at fire-sale prices."

This Is So Cool

Shuster on Silverstein's Bailout

Over at the World Trade Center, nobody wants to rent the ugly Libeskind buildings, nobody wants to fund them. So developer Larry Silverstein, in the current spirit of looting, wants four billion dollars from taxpayers. That's not even for the Fraud'em Tower the Port Authority is building, but for his three stunted Church Street buildings.

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