Start Spreadin’ the News

Nov. 9 - The documentary filmmaker Ric Burns moved to New York from Michigan in 1976 to attend Columbia University. He never left. Burns fell in love, like so many others before and since, with the promise and complexity of what he calls the “metropolis of America.” The final two installments of his 14-hour historical epic “New York: A Documentary Film,” were scheduled to air just weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center. They were released as planned on PBS in late September, but by then he knew the series was no longer complete. Burns and the company he founded, Steeplechase Films, had spent almost a decade on the project and are now working on another chapter related to the attacks. NEWSWEEK’s Gretel C. Kovach spoke to Burns about New York’s past and its post-September 11 future.

To what extent was the attack on New York an attack on America?

An assault on New York is an assault on the values of global culture. All the world is now like New York, all the world is a congested island in which people of every kind of nationality, religion, race and belief are thrown together. Just as New Yorkers for hundreds of years now have had to figure out how to make a common culture, how to weave together some cultural fabric that includes everybody, so at a global level that now has to take place. It is not a pattern of washing out all of our differences. It’s not a model for diluting everything that’s strange or different or unusual or even in conflict. It’s a model that says live and let live, that accepts and even revels in difference and otherness and unpredictability. That’s freedom. And New York has been, in its highly unperfect way, the capital of freedom for a very long time.

How has this experience changed us?

We’re deeply wounded, we are in mourning. But I think it is true to say we are stronger individuals, we are a stronger city as a result of this. Because we understand what matters to us. The biggest luxury of the good times is not the restaurants and the duplex apartments. It’s not having to define our priorities. We don’t have that luxury any more. Differences that seemed so important on Sept. 10 between people didn’t matter at all on Sept. 11 and still don’t. Who cares if you’re from a different class or work in a different part of the city or have a different religious background? Surely the only thing that matters is our common humanity and recognition of each other. All of us feel that in our bones. I feel it and everyone I know feels it in just the most basic, simple way, in the smallest transaction on the street, in elevators, in cabs. That is the unlooked-for gift in a catastrophe of this order. The clarifying of values that any crucible makes possible. And we’re in a crucible. This has been—this is a testing time, it’s not over. And the fires are very, very powerful. But, you know, we find out who we are and what we care for.

Have the people of New York ever felt this terrorized before?

“Both the objective and the psychic geography that has been New York’s destiny will continue to assert itself.” — RIC BURNS

I think this is really an unprecedented event. Certainly in the past New Yorkers have gone through epically traumatic episodes. Perhaps the most horrible thing that ever happened to the city before this was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911—in terms of the way an entire city was galvanized by the horror of an event, and changed by it. But in the end it was only 146 people who died in what was then called a skyscraper, which was 10 stories tall. Just the simple exponential increase in the size of the buildings is in a sense a metaphor for how large this (Sept. 11) catastrophe has been. All of us who are alive will spend the rest of our lives in some sense trying to metabolize what this means, how it could have happened, the sheer magnitude of the hole that’s been left in our hearts, in our sense of our ourselves as a people, as a city, as a culture.

September 11 may be unprecedented, but what lessons does history teach us about what comes next?

What cataclysm tends to do, and has certainly done in this case, it creates unity. That took place in the aftermath of the draft riots, it took place in the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire and it’s taken place even more strikingly now in the aftermath of this even greater disaster.

But weren’t people afraid in 1911 after the Triangle debacle of burning alive in a tall building?

There was a sense that our own technology and our own modernity had gone back on us. No question. Just as we now feel our own instruments of travel and our own symbols of success have turned against us. But the sky is New York’s natural destination. It has been tending upward for hundreds of years. And people understand that the reason the skyline is so powerful a metaphor is they understand it is a metaphor of aspiration and hope—and greed, to be sure—and ambition. A sense that there is no limit. This is a culture that is going to go infinitely high and infinitely wide.

So you think we will recover?

New York has more experience with unprecedented events than any other urban area of the world. New York has been on the cutting edge of the future for a couple centuries now. What that means is all the problems and all the possibilities of modern life have happened here. So if nothing else, New Yorkers are inured to unpredictability, and to change, and to the possibility that things that seem stable and secure could in the blink of the eye evaporate. I think there’s a kind of psychic mobility that New Yorkers have, which always makes them travel lightly.

Sort of an antihistory?

Very much an antihistory feeling. The history of New York has been the history of creating a future, for itself and much of the rest of the country, and the rest of the world. This is where, in so many simple ways the future came thrusting out of the ground. New York is used to having its buildings rise and fall and rise again. The fire of 1835 was one of the most galvanizing events in the city’s history, much like the Dresden fire bombings in the second world war paved the way for a kind of urban renewal in Europe. New York was rebuilt so quickly it made everyone’s head spin. Within a year or two after the fire it was like, “What fire?” We understand that we’re a city on the move. We will absolutely not forget this trauma, but we will process it, and begin after an interval of deep, deep mourning to understand how to move into the future.

Do we know what the next New York will look like?

September 11 has not yet revealed itself. Too many people, too many lives have been lost for us to think in any coherent way yet. The grief is too great. But believe me it will happen. By this time next year grief will have turned to anger, anger to creative action. New Yorkers and Americans in general will be on a holy mission to not just get back to business, but to rebuild lower Manhattan and take advantage of this horrible catastrophe to say, “We will build something here that is even more magnificent than what was here before. Rebuild it in a way that reasserts all the values for which New York has stood: inclusiveness, tolerance, ambition, glamour, upward mobility and a special cosmopolitan spirit.” New York has been the metropolis of America for centuries. Both the objective and the psychic geography that has been New York’s destiny will continue to assert itself.

But cities fall. This isn’t the case here?

No, absolutely not. Cities fall from within, not from without. Economic geographers have pointed out that if you look at Japan after the second world war, Tokyo, the capital city, was absolutely devastated. Kyoto, its rival and a potential capital, was left untouched. Surely with Tokyo burned and bombed to the ground, that would have been the time for Kyoto to supplant Tokyo. But within 10 years Tokyo was back in the lead, and Kyoto retained exactly its rank order in terms of prominence. The way in which people understand where the important places are, it’s not only because of the structures that are there. It’s because of something that’s in the air, because of something that’s in people’s hearts. Those are powerful forces deep in memory, deep in the geological foundation of the continent, that are deep in Western culture. There is no weapon large enough or powerful enough to permanently dislodge all those powerful forces which have converged for so long and held together this thing we call New York. New York in an important sense is absolutely untouched by this.

© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.