Preserving The World's Great Cities: The Destruction and Renewal of the Historic Metropolis.

• Author: Greenblatt, Alan
• Position: After the World Trade Center: can America build anything beautiful anymore?

PRESERVING THE WORLD'S GREAT CITIES: The Destruction and Renewal of the Historic Metropolis

by Anthony M. Tung Clarkson Potter, $40.00

ONE OF THE BIGGEST QUESTIONS IN the current war is what to do about rebuilding lower Manhattan. The families of firefighters and brokers and maintenance crews and back-office workers won't be comforted much by the thought of their loved ones' final resting place being the aptly but unfortunately named landfill Fresh Kills, where the World Trade Center debris is being buried. They will desire, along with the city and the nation, a formal memorial. But New York City is not Oklahoma City; the site of the wasted buildings will not lie fallow forever.

History is filled with examples of cities rebuilding themselves following the devastation of war. After World War II, Viennese buildings that had been damaged or destroyed were rebuilt with plain stucco fronts, stark reminders that sit next to richly decorated neighbors. During the war, 80 percent of the buildings in Warsaw were destroyed and 60 percent of the city's prewar population killed. The Nazis had hoped to break Poland's will by deliberately destroying its cultural landmarks. The architecture faculty of Warsaw Technical University, knowing that war must inevitably end, risked their lives and those of their students to record the designs and interplay of the city's historic structures, hiding their plans at an out-of-town monastery. Warsaw's brick-by-brick postwar reconstruction occupied one out of every six workers in the city and spawned a rebirth of handcraftsmanship.

But things aren't always rebuilt. In Berlin, the headquarters of the Gestapo, SS, and Reich Security Main Office all shared a city block targeted, naturally, for destruction by the Allies. The land was home to a portion of the Berlin Wall during the Cold War. Following reunification, the city decided to leave the vacant lot and scattered ruins of the security buildings as a memorial called "Topography of Terror," signaling that the land was too polluted for civilized use. These examples are drawn from Preserving the World's Great Cities, in which former New York City landmarks commissioner Anthony M. Tung demonstrates time and again that contemporary ideas about what the past might mean go a long way toward determining what is done with historic structures and their environment. Where there is a communal sense of pride in the past, as in London or Amsterdam, much of the older city has been maintained against the demands of vastly increased urban populations, cars, and modern interior wiring. Where there have been sharp ideological breaks with the past, as in communist Moscow and Beijing, and in Rome in times of both fascist and papal rule, older buildings were torn down to form the building blocks of cities that went in for big makeovers. It depends on whether the past is something you want to claim or want to destroy. What to put on the site of the World Trade Center, then, depends on whether what it represented--a triumph of American-style capitalism in the world--is something we want to reclaim.

Tung's book was designed to demonstrate why civic preservation efforts are essential, where they have worked, and how much of our urban heritage that had survived centuries of war and natural...