Some time ago I was eating with friends one of the more renowned establishments in town when we were presented with what one of them derisively called the ‘Magic Truffle’ trick. You’ve seen the scam. Server comes out and rattles off the impressive specials list, and at the end, in a particularly excited voice, shares a little tale about the chef, and maybe he was getting on the plane, when a gnome pressed a particularly impressive white truffle in his hand, as if truffle shopping was like heroin smuggling. And this truffle can be shaved on your risotto, or your toro, or your damn flan, for only fifty bucks a hit. And we are all supposed to ooh at our good fortune and pony up, when it is all an elaborate ruse from the word go.
Pataki pulled what was effectively the truffle trick this week, announcing with what I assume he hoped was proper gravitas, that we needed “a fresh commitment” (the Times interpretation) to fulfill our “solemn obligation” (his words). Are we all supposed to melt at his assertive leadership? Why is it that no one is bothering to point that he’s been in fucking charge for the past four years? Fresh start? That would be his resignation, not Kevin Rampe’s — who is hardly a scapegoat. Rampe made off with $300 million of the remaining block grants for his new gig raising money for the Memorial, which seems like the sort of ‘fresh start’ we are so desperately looking for: take the man in charge locally, who managed to drive the entire process into the bedrock on which it sits, and give him a job trying to recover a failing fundraising project (which, let us note, was formally started over three years after the attacks, even though it aims to raise three times more than any memorial fundraiser in history).
If you want an abbreviated timeline of what an idiot Pataki is, let’s visit the wayback machine. Late last summer, Pataki came downstate to take a kayak ride, and after, announced that he would leave decision making on the West Street Tunnel to the local representatives (CB1, LMDC, etc.). Well, there has never been measurable support for the tunnel, outside of John Zuccotti (they kept doing phone surveys with local residents and changing the questions to drive towards approval ratings in the Bloomberg territory), but it kept trudging along. In the meantime, apparently both the NYPD and Goldman Sachs kept voicing concerns about security, all for naught. It was all tunnel tunnel tunnel, sounding like a damn Simpsons episode. Goldman had to go so far as to publicly withdraw their interest of the only sizable private commercial investment in downtown since September 11, because Pataki was sitting on his hands. Now he as the gall to say “You belong here” to Goldman? George, how about returning a phone call?
That’s the kind of wizardry we get from Albany. They can’t even get their press releases in synch. Pataki announces a that we will have in the coming weeks a new preliminary plan for the Freedom Tower, which is somehow supposed to incorporate Libeskind’s vision — and let’s save a special place in hell for Danny, who has descended into being a sycophant par excellence, one so bad that his mealy mouthed affirmations of “vision” undermine his reputation as a designer who could physically interpret historic events with grace and dignity — and then a day later the NYPD is ready to sign off on the revised plan.
Revised plan? Who designed that? In a week? If we could resolve the safety issues that were going to add over a year to the construction schedule in a week of furious sketching, why don’t we have a Freedom Tower design that is presentable to the public after two years of design?
And everyone keeps blathering about Libeskind’s plan, and its vision. I don’t want to be an fussy formalist, but maybe someone in Pataki’s office an dust off one of the boards and point to some element could actually be constructed at this point. The only one that would be even remotely plausible would be the “Wedge of Light”, except, whoops, that was never a physically feasible to begin with.
Maybe I’m a little too heated to make myself clear. The events of the past week are not the equivalent of the adulterous husband coming clean about his dalliance with the daughter’s college roommate, and we all trod off into the future braced by our learning from a moment of moral weakness. This is Dad confessing his sins and then marching off to the bar for hookers and blow.
We are actually hitting the red zone of how urban planning fails. This is all prelude to the massively offensive failure to come. It’s necessary to construct this narrative of crisis (which is not news to anyone who lives here) so that the callous, thoughtless “revisions” we will get shoved at us will be done so under the rubric of crisis management. Just keeping saying over and over: he was always in charge. He broke it. He cannot fix it.
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The Magic Truffle.
Some time ago I was eating with friends one of the more renowned establishments in town when we were presented with what one of them derisively called the ‘Magic Truffle’ trick. You’ve seen the scam. Server comes out and rattles off the impressive specials list, and at the end, in a particularly excited voice, shares a little tale about the chef, and maybe he was getting on the plane, when a gnome pressed a particularly impressive white truffle in his hand, as if truffle shopping was like heroin smuggling. And this truffle can be shaved on your risotto, or your toro, or your damn flan, for only fifty bucks a hit. And we are all supposed to ooh at our good fortune and pony up, when it is all an elaborate ruse from the word go.
Pataki pulled what was effectively the truffle trick this week, announcing with what I assume he hoped was proper gravitas, that we needed “a fresh commitment” (the Times interpretation) to fulfill our “solemn obligation” (his words). Are we all supposed to melt at his assertive leadership? Why is it that no one is bothering to point that he’s been in fucking charge for the past four years? Fresh start? That would be his resignation, not Kevin Rampe’s — who is hardly a scapegoat. Rampe made off with $300 million of the remaining block grants for his new gig raising money for the Memorial, which seems like the sort of ‘fresh start’ we are so desperately looking for: take the man in charge locally, who managed to drive the entire process into the bedrock on which it sits, and give him a job trying to recover a failing fundraising project (which, let us note, was formally started over three years after the attacks, even though it aims to raise three times more than any memorial fundraiser in history). If you want an abbreviated timeline of what an idiot Pataki is, let’s visit the wayback machine. Late last summer, Pataki came downstate to take a kayak ride, and after, announced that he would leave decision making on the West Street Tunnel to the local representatives (CB1, LMDC, etc.). Well, there has never been measurable support for the tunnel, outside of John Zuccotti (they kept doing phone surveys with local residents and changing the questions to drive towards approval ratings in the Bloomberg territory), but it kept trudging along. In the meantime, apparently both the NYPD and Goldman Sachs kept voicing concerns about security, all for naught. It was all tunnel tunnel tunnel, sounding like a damn Simpsons episode. Goldman had to go so far as to publicly withdraw their interest of the only sizable private commercial investment in downtown since September 11, because Pataki was sitting on his hands. Now he as the gall to say “You belong here” to Goldman? George, how about returning a phone call? That’s the kind of wizardry we get from Albany. They can’t even get their press releases in synch. Pataki announces a that we will have in the coming weeks a new preliminary plan for the Freedom Tower, which is somehow supposed to incorporate Libeskind’s vision — and let’s save a special place in hell for Danny, who has descended into being a sycophant par excellence, one so bad that his mealy mouthed affirmations of “vision” undermine his reputation as a designer who could physically interpret historic events with grace and dignity — and then a day later the NYPD is ready to sign off on the revised plan. Revised plan? Who designed that? In a week? If we could resolve the safety issues that were going to add over a year to the construction schedule in a week of furious sketching, why don’t we have a Freedom Tower design that is presentable to the public after two years of design? And everyone keeps blathering about Libeskind’s plan, and its vision. I don’t want to be an fussy formalist, but maybe someone in Pataki’s office an dust off one of the boards and point to some element could actually be constructed at this point. The only one that would be even remotely plausible would be the “Wedge of Light”, except, whoops, that was never a physically feasible to begin with. Maybe I’m a little too heated to make myself clear. The events of the past week are not the equivalent of the adulterous husband coming clean about his dalliance with the daughter’s college roommate, and we all trod off into the future braced by our learning from a moment of moral weakness. This is Dad confessing his sins and then marching off to the bar for hookers and blow. We are actually hitting the red zone of how urban planning fails. This is all prelude to the massively offensive failure to come. It’s necessary to construct this narrative of crisis (which is not news to anyone who lives here) so that the callous, thoughtless “revisions” we will get shoved at us will be done so under the rubric of crisis management. Just keeping saying over and over: he was always in charge. He broke it. He cannot fix it.