A Tall Order

By Kevin Lerner

The history of New York's World Trade Center towers combines political wrangling, city planning, architectural history…. There's a lot to cover really, and like all of New York City politics—especially construction politics—it's the sort of topic that a writer could never really get to the bottom of. Look at Robert Caro's doorstop about New York's planning dictator Robert Moses. That biography, The Power Broker, runs to more than 1200 pages, and the paperback is more than six inches thick.

Eric Darton's Divided We Stand, however, comes in at a fairly slim 256 pages. And this is not for lack of detail, or at least not the sort of detail that most readers are going to miss. Instead, Darton has crafted a book that emphasizes the poetry of the two towers, both for good and bad. And there is a lot of bad. In fact, the book becomes a sort of poetry itself, in part because it is exceedingly well written.

Darton does hit all the necessary points. He discusses the origins of the Port Authority, which built the towers. He talks about the neighborhood that the Port Authority destroyed to build them. He even takes a bit of a detour all the way back to the Dutch settlers who started lower Manhattan on the path to becoming what it is today. He makes interesting parallels between the recent bombing of the World Trade Center and earlier attempts to bomb buildings in New York's financial district. Most affecting are Darton's reminiscences of growing up in Greenwich Village and bicycling down to radio row, which has become a memory now. Darton begins all of his chapters with a second-person anecdote, which brings "you," the reader, directly into his memory.

And in this way, (and by the typographical pun of the two columns of text on the first page of each section), he humanizes the two towers that dominate the financial district, making the subtitle of the book suit its contents. This is not a history; it is a biography of a living piece of architecture.