Lee Note 110 The Text of the David Rhodes Article

I received information from some people that they were not able to read the article from David, the nephew of Tom Rhodes. I thought it best to send it to everyone.

Kay

I moved away from New York for college and I thought I wouldn't come back. I spent time in Houston and in Los Angeles. For a brief time I learned to like driving to get from place to place instead of riding the subway.

But I came back for work, because for many people, even today, there is some work that can't be found anywhere else but New York City.

Hard to sell institutional fixed-income derivatives in Denver. Difficult to be a newly-arrived Guangdong Chinese and find a Cantonese-speaking insurance agency in Cleveland. No market for Torah scrolls in Topeka. Tough trafficking in postmodern art in Pittsburgh.

And impossible to take a crack at American network television without coming to New York. Which is why I came back home.

New York is a maze of little support networks for all those derivatives dealers, Chop Sue cooks, and news assignment managers. It's a warren of places that remind people of 'home' even though home is in fact where they happen to be standing right now.

For me, it's places I visited growing up in Manhattan. For some, it's Little Italy on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. Little Brazil on 46th Street. And if there are Chechens in town, now we have for them what looks like Little Grozny on Liberty Street, where the World Trade Centre stood.

After so much unspeakable violence, the skyline of lower Manhattan looks a little more benign than it did when the Dow Jones Industrial Average traded at 11000.

From some angles, the city looks a little more ordinary. Out the windows of Uzbekistan Airways or Tarumi Romanian or United or 90 other airlines' planes at JFK airport, there's not the recognizable figure of the twin towers welcoming the world to town.

In a way, skyscrapers were out of date before psycho killers started trying to blow them up.

Provincial American cities all boast the inevitable high-rise hotel with a revolving restaurant left over from some misguided late-60s/ early-70s urban redevelopment plan.

But big companies today prefer leafy suburban office parks - GE has headquarters on a campus in the southwestern Connecticut town of Fairfield.

Professionals and artists like funky, flexible spaces in old urban precincts - the dot-com companies of the late 1990s had headquarters in San Francisco's South of Market district.

But the clunky, unlovely World Trade Centre had been around just long enough to get captured in enough postcards and pictures to start looking urban-organic.

The Trade Centre made it into political metaphor, as when an emcee at a political fundraiser I attended in 1997 called to the stage today's disaster legends Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki, saying: "Let's give a big round of applause for the two men who brought down the Twin Towers of New York politics: David Dinkins and Mario Cuomo."

Rock stars sang about them, like the two heroes of Bruce Springsteen’s anthem Darlington County, who strike out from New York City and try to pick up some provincial girls with the line "Our pa's each own one of the World Trade Centers...For a kiss and a smile I'll give mine all to you."

I didn't own so much as a piece of them, but I did own a view of the Twin Towers. I moved into an apartment in Brooklyn three years ago because the roof deck had a view of the Manhattan skyline where the sun sets, of gritty city neighborhoods where the sun rises, and of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges and a maze of motorways and subway lines all around.

And peaking out from behind everything else were One World Trade Centre and Two World Trade Centre.

We'll have to rebuild them, or something like them. If bin Laden were a stock, New York would short it. And if New York were a stock, New York would be trying to get in on the ground floor.