When America Stopped Being Great by Nick Bryant

Author:Nick Bryant
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472985491
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

My New York commute to work takes less than 25 minutes, but skirts the broad outlines of almost 250 years of American history. After a short walk through the cobbled streets of Dumbo, I take the ferry that leaves from the wharf under Brooklyn Bridge, an engineering feat that was to the nineteenth century what the moonshot was to the twentieth. Then I cross the mouth of the East River, the swirling waters through which George Washington evacuated some 9,000 men, right under the noses of the British, when the Continental Army was reeling in the aftermath of the Battle of Brooklyn, an escape pivotal to the outcome of the Revolutionary War. On the port side of the ferry is the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the French to symbolise freedom and democracy and a beacon of hope for millions of arriving immigrants. On the starboard side, framed by the sturdy stone towers of the bridge, are the skyscrapers of Manhattan, those emblems of New World ambition.

From the ferry terminal in Lower Manhattan, I walk up Wall Street, passing Federal Hall, the site where Washington was inaugurated as America’s first president. Directly across from the general’s bronze statue is the New York Stock Exchange, where the market crashes of 1929 and 2008 spread such panic at home and around the world. The intersection between these two pillared buildings was the starting point for the Hard Hat Riot in 1970, when, days after the Ohio National Guard shot dead four unarmed anti-war protesters on the campus of Kent State University, construction workers beat up the hippies and school students protesting against the war in Vietnam, on the orders of their union bosses.

Across from Wall Street is the cemetery of Trinity Church, where one of the most storied founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, is interred. Then I turn right onto Broadway, with the gothic turrets of the Woolworth Building, which was once the world’s tallest tower, in front of me, and the Art Deco halo of the Chrysler Building shimmering in the far distance. A left takes me into Zuccotti Park, which in 2011 became the tent-strewn home of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Then I walk the final short stretch, to the edge of a busy but quiet plaza scattered usually with people talking in hushed tones. There, two square sunken reflecting pools mark the footprints of the Twin Towers.

Now the skyline of Lower Manhattan has been repaired. A new tower with a spire at its peak, One World Trade Center, soars to 1,776 feet, a bow to the year of the Declaration of Independence. Below ground lies a catacomb-like museum with unexpectedly sculptural exhibits – a wrecked fire truck, a burned-out jet engine, twisted girders, a concrete staircase used by survivors to flee – and the ‘In Memoriam’ tributes to the 2,983 lives lost on 9/11 and in the first attack on the World Trade Center eight years earlier. Inscribed with the names of the dead, the parapets of the sunken pools serve almost as altars.

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