AMY GOODMAN: The New York Times reports: “The mountains of ruin at ground zero have been reduced to smoldering dunes, the powdery ash has been rinsed from the streets and the stench has weakened. But at a memorial service yesterday that city officials said drew nearly 10,000 mourners, there was no mistaking the site for anything other than a mass grave.”

Over the years, the ground zero area has been many things. In the early 20th century, the area just south of ground zero was known as Little Syria, home to the largest Syrian population in New York. The Syrian Americans were displaced when developers built larger office buildings. Ground zero itself was home to dozens of small, diverse businesses which sold every conceivable kind of appliance, including the first radio and TV sets. The hackers of the day, the shortwave enthusiasts, bought their supplies out of barrels and bins in the streets. The area became a site of protest when political leaders and financiers, like the Rockefellers, decided to expand the Financial District into the area. The subsequent Twin Towers of the World Trade Center buried the so-called Radio Row over the objections of shopkeepers and community activists, and the excavations for the trade center were dumped on top of the Lower Manhattan piers.

Today, we’re going to take a look at the contested history of the World Trade Center. We’re joined by Eric Darton. I’ve spent the weekend reading his book on planes from North Carolina to Washington to here. It’s a really interesting book called Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York’s World Trade Center.

Welcome to The War and Peace Report.

ERIC DARTON: It’s good to be here, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. So, talk about how these towers ended up being erected.

ERIC DARTON: Well, after World War II, with the emergence of this tremendous military-industrial complex, what happens in New York is that there’s a fairly slow but clear shift in the economics of the city toward what will eventually be the service economy, dominated by finance, insurance and real estate. What happens is that other ports also on the East Coast become competitive with New York’s port and begin doing mixed-use development things in association with the ports. What all this leads to is a political leadership that begins to weigh the idea of having a trade mart of some kind called a world trade center in Lower Manhattan that will incorporate port functions with commodities exchanges, with all kinds of things like that, and, again, a mart on the — based on the Leipzig Fair, which was an ancient fair in Europe.

So, this idea gets kicked around, but nothing much really happens, until it’s very clear that the flight of small manufacturing from Manhattan, for a variety of different reasons, and from New York in general, has led to a new economic situation in which New York is no longer perceived as a job-generating machine. But now the political leaders are looking around for how they can keep New York well burnished into the later part of the century.

And among the people who are doing this are people who are very financially interested in Lower Manhattan, like David Rockefeller, who in the middle 1950s decides — he’s the chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, the family bank, and his family is very heavily invested in Lower Manhattan. Lower Manhattan’s real estate values have never come back up from the Depression. And in fact, there haven’t been any real modern buildings built in Lower Manhattan, not substantial ones anyway. So, David rolls the Big Jack for his family and for the development community as a whole and decides to build the first big modernist slab on superblocks down on Fulton Street, near Fulton Street, and he builds One Chase Plaza.

But because he’s a Rockefeller, he thinks in social terms. Now, his social terms may be real whacked-out social terms, but they’re social terms. And he always tries to do things in his interest that have, in some way, a presumed social good that goes along with him. And Rockefeller is also a big believer in what he called catalytic bigness, which is the idea that big is good, which was kind of, you know, nice. It’s a nice little turn — you know, turn of the phrase. And it was very much consonant with the dominant thinking of the time.

So, the idea here is to leverage land values throughout Lower Manhattan and to not leave his slab building kind of hanging out there like a sore thumb. What does he do? He proposes something in 1958 called the Billion Dollar Plan, and in those days the billion dollars was a lot of money. And the billion dollars that he proposed to raise from private sources would be matched by all sorts of federal and state sources. What he planned to do was level every 19th-century building south of Canal Street and build a gleaming corporate futuropolis here.

And his first foray at that was met with a great deal of resistance on the ground from local folks, even though it was widely endorsed by many politicos. He backed up and said, “Wait a second. We need a real public purpose here. The public purpose is going to be a world trade center. We’re going to create, you know, a place where we can bring together all these things: port functions, commodities. We’re going to really — this is going to be the center — the keystone of this is going to be a world trade center.” Well, that was just extremely exciting to the elites of the city, and they proceeded to go full ahead with this plan.

And one of the things that ended up happening was that David Rockefeller — I’ll use an American political metaphor here — he threw the football to his brother Nelson, who had recently been elected governor of New York state and who was in nominal control of the more powerful half of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. It was a bistate agency that had purview over the regional port.

I’m going to take one step back now and just say that for those of us who’ve experienced New York in the last generation, the idea that New York was once primarily a maritime city, that before the great skyscrapers of New York were moored in bedrock, that New York was first a fishing village, that in 1650 already spoke 18 languages. Then it was a port. And then, in the early 20th century, it was the Great Port. Now, most of us would not recognize that today. And the landfill, the excavations from the World Trade Center, literally buried the last Lower Manhattan piers. And the Port Authority built vertical piers. That’s what I call them, vertical piers.

AMY GOODMAN: Eric Darton, you describe very well in your book, Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York’s World Trade Center, the Lower Manhattan businesspersons group — 

ERIC DARTON: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — because all of these groups were being wiped out in this area — 

ERIC DARTON: Uh-huh, sure.

AMY GOODMAN: — to build the World Trade Center. And they got, what, eminent domain, Rockefeller, because they said — 

ERIC DARTON: Well, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — this was for trade.

ERIC DARTON: Well, what happened was the World Trade Center was originally planned for the East Side, where it was going to bury what is now the South Street Seaport. But what happened is, because it was being built by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, that ran into problems, because there was nothing in it for New Jersey. New Jersey said, “Hey, give me something.” So they said, “OK, we’ll slide it over west, and we’ll pick up the Hudson Tubes,” which was the bankrupt railroad running under the Hudson River, and it was the lifeline, to some extent, of New Jersey jobs to Lower Manhattan’s Financial District. So they slid the whole project over west, and it landed right on top of what was Radio Row, which was a very diverse merchant community. It was an area that also incorporated the wholesale market, the Washington Market, that was since moved, with such disastrous environmental consequences, up to the South Bronx. And it was a very amazing area. I used to bicycle through it when I was a kid myself, and my father also worked in the area.

AMY GOODMAN: And they waged a real battle for years.

ERIC DARTON: They did. Now, it’s funny, because these guys were very conservative merchants. They said things like, “Rocketfeller can’t just come in here and do this to us. You know? This is America. This isn’t Russia.” They said things like that. It was — it was almost sort of touchingly naive. They believed in the end that they would have to be exonerated, because they knew that there was no public purpose to the World Trade Center and that, therefore, the condemnations had to be illegal.

AMY GOODMAN: The condemnations of their property.

ERIC DARTON: Yes. See, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, being a bistate organization, it was in fact the first of many public corporations, the model for all the alphabet corporations that Roosevelt instituted in the 1930s. They had the power of eminent domain. They could come to your house and say, “Here, here’s pennies on the dollars for your house. We’re bringing in the wrecking ball next week. See you later. Nice knowing you. Because we have a public purpose.” These guys said, “There’s no public purpose. This is just a land grab.”

AMY GOODMAN: One of the touching parts in this book is when it became clear that they were inviting just companies from all over the world to do — to get space in the World Trade Center.

ERIC DARTON: Colonize our little — 

AMY GOODMAN: The organization of businesspeople set up a foreign minister or a foreign —

ERIC DARTON: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Right? Who wrote a letter to the different countries, to the presidents —

ERIC DARTON: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — of different countries, saying, “We will fight. You do not want to do this. We will fight you with” —

ERIC DARTON: Yeah, this merchant association from Lower Manhattan got very scrappy, and they actually sent out their own. Because, see, David Rockefeller believed — and he actually told this to Bill Moyers in an interview — that world capitalism was a great church, just like the Vatican, and that this was going to be kind of a — that Lower Manhattan was kind of the center of that. And these guys said, “OK, well, there’s a state for those guys. We have our own state, and we’re going to send out our own ministers.” And they tried to convince various people in various countries in the world that what was going on here was nothing more than a ferocious land grab, and there was no public purpose in it at all. It was great.

AMY GOODMAN: Who was the architect of the World Trade Center?

ERIC DARTON: Architect was a guy named Minoru Yamasaki, who really falls between the cracks of modernism and postmodernism. The only real book on him is one he wrote himself. And one of the fascinating aspects to me of the World Trade Center was that it was a hypervisible structure, which to some extent remained politically and historically invisible. It was one of the reasons I wrote the book, was because I went looking for a bibliography, and there wasn’t one.

AMY GOODMAN: And you wrote this book just after the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.

ERIC DARTON: I actually — I actually began it prior to the bombing in 1993. And then, when the bombing happened, I had one of those moments which you see in the horror movies where the kids are about to go into the house, you know, and the camera’s behind them, and you go, “Don’t go in!” But I went in, because I knew there was a story. I knew there was a real story underneath there.

AMY GOODMAN: And your reaction now, now that the World Trade Center towers have been leveled?

ERIC DARTON: Oh, I don’t know. You know, I — you know, I owe myself a really good mental breakdown. You know, I don’t — there’s a lot of martyrdom of buildings that’s been going on lately. And my sense of it is, you know, like, take the buildings and just, you know, give us back the 5,000 souls. You know, I have a lot of dreams of — 

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think —

ERIC DARTON: I’m a very materialistic guy, but I have a lot of dreams of, like, these souls just flying out of there. It’s very, very heavy for me.

AMY GOODMAN: And yesterday, the memorial — 

ERIC DARTON: For everyone, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — service of thousands, remembering the thousands that have died.

ERIC DARTON: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think this will be the death of this height of skyscraper in the future?

ERIC DARTON: Well, here probably. I mean, we might do something very reactive and very reactionary and say kind of like, “Well, we’ll build a taller building.” But the social moment that raised those towers to begin with is gone, certainly in North America. The big development of cities is in the Pacific Rim and south of the equator. So, what we’ve got here is, if we do it, it’ll be a very reactive moment. And my feeling is that with all the debate over what to do down there, my sense of it is it’s much more important for us at this point to be looking at what kind of city do we want to have, rather than what kind of buildings do we want to have right there.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us, Eric Darton, Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York’s World Trade Center.

ERIC DARTON: Thank you. It’s been a real pleasure.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you. And that does it for today’s program. Democracy Now! in Exile is produced by Kris Abrams, Brad Simpson, Miranda Kennedy, with help from Janice K. Bryant. Anthony Sloan is our music maestro and engineer. Errol Maitland is at wbix.org, where you can hear us, also at webactive.com. Special thanks to Downtown Community Television, Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno, and Pacifica station KPFA and affiliate station KFCF in Fresno and all the Pacific affiliates who are airing us around the country. We are Pacifica, broadcasting in New York at WFMU 91.1 FM and on Manhattan Neighborhood Network channels 34 and 56, Free Speech TV, channel 9415 of Dish TV satellite network, and CUNY Television. In exile from the embattled studios of WBAI, from the studios of the banned and the fired, the studios of our listeners, I’m Amy Goodman.

[end of Hour 1]

AMY GOODMAN: From Ground Zero Radio, this is Democracy Now! in Exile.

WILLIAM SMITH: I’m saying to the world, I’m saying to the radio-listening and American people, it is no mail worth a human being’s life.

AMY GOODMAN: As anthrax cases continue to spread, outraged postal workers go to court, demanding Manhattan’s main mail sorting center be shut down. Did anthrax spores have their origin in the Soviet Union? An island in the Aral Sea has become the largest anthrax dump in the world, left all but unguarded.

All that and more, coming up.

Welcome to Democracy Now! in Exile. This is The War and Peace Report, broadcasting just blocks from the first ground zero, Afghanistan being the second. I’m Amy Goodman.

The U.S. war in Afghanistan entered a fourth week yesterday with no sign of the Taliban crumbling and the mounting number of civilian casualties adding to pressure for a change of strategy. A U.S. bomb flattened a home in Kabul yesterday, blowing apart seven children as they ate breakfast with their father. The blast also shattered a neighbor’s house, killing another two children. Meanwhile, U.S. planes mistakenly bombed a village north of Kabul in territory controlled by the opposition Northern Alliance, killing another two civilians. Secretary of War Don Rumsfeld refused to comment on the civilian deaths. He said the campaign is “going very much as expected, it is going very much as predicted,” he said. “It’s not a quagmire.” The Taliban says U.S. forces have killed a thousand civilians so far.

The International Campaign to Ban Landmines this weekend urged the United States to halt the reported dropping of landmines in its military campaign against Afghanistan and called on other countries to join the protest. U.S. authorities have neither confirmed nor denied an October 11th report by The New York Times which said U.S. aircraft have begun dropping gator mines aimed at both vehicles and people on foot. Another group, Handicap International, urged the U.S. to respect the 1997 Ottawa Convention banning landmines, which Washington has not signed. The group also appealed to France and Britain, which have approved the Ottawa Convention, to support its efforts to see NATO adopt an edict forbidding the use of landmines in Afghanistan.

Unrest in Pakistan has severely escalated over the last few days. On Thursday, as Pakistani fundamentalists blocked the main highway to China, rolling boulders onto it and planting landmines, hundreds of trucks and cars remain blocked as authorities negotiate with protesters today. Meanwhile, hundreds of heavily armed Pakistanis seized local government offices in the northern town of Chilas and demanded Pakistan stop supporting U.S.-led strikes. Thousands of tribesmen, armed with rocket launchers, automatic rifles, swords and axes, are massing at the Afghan border to join the war against the U.S. On Friday, at least 50,000 people took to the streets of Karachi in the largest protest since the U.S. began bombing of Afghanistan three weeks ago. Protesters burned effigies of President Bush and the Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Another 20,000 demonstrated in Quetta. And yesterday, gunmen entered a Roman Catholic church in a Pakistani town and killed 18 worshipers. The New York Times reports worshipers had almost no chance. Blood went everywhere, forming large pools against the walls beneath shattered stained-glass windows. Most believe the killers were acting to avenge the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan.

And the Taliban reportedly assassinated a prominent Afghan opposition leader, Abdul Haq, on Friday. He entered Afghanistan to try to build an anti-Taliban coalition. While many analysts say his assassination is a major setback for U.S. post-Taliban plans, it appears that Haq actually had little support from the U.S. The United States refused to help him, offering him nothing more than satellite phones for his risky mission into Afghanistan. In recent weeks, Haq had criticized the U.S. bombing raids, saying they were backfiring and making it harder to turn the Pashtun tribespeople against the Taliban. Haq also argued repeatedly that the U.S., having sown the seeds of victory against the Soviets in the 1980s, would reap a whirlwind of hatred if it did not help cultivate civil society in Afghanistan. In a 1994 interview with The New York Times, Abdul Haq said, “For us, Afghanistan is destroyed. It is turning to poison, and not only for us but for all others in the world. If you are a terrorist, you can have shelter here, no matter who you are.” He predicted, “Maybe one day they will have to send hundreds of thousands of troops to deal with that, and if they step in, they will be stuck. We have a British grave in Afghanistan. We have a Soviet grave. And then we will have an American grave.”

And five Israelis were killed in two drive-by shootings yesterday as Palestinian guerrillas delivered their response to prolonged military raids into West Bank towns launched by Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Despite this, Israel bowed to pressure from the U.S. and began pulling its tanks and troops out of two West Bank towns, Bethlehem and Beit Jala, parts of which were reoccupied more than a week ago in the largest Israeli intrusion into Palestinian-run areas since the Intifada began.

And legislation authorizing Japan’s military to support the U.S.-led “war on terror” won final approval today, paving the way for Japan to send troops overseas. The change allows Japan’s military to transport supplies, conduct search and rescue missions, and dispatch medical teams in support of U.S. forces and their allies. Japanese units are restricted to areas where they’re not likely to face combat.