Hasta La Ideas

Yesterday the currently-under-construction “Freedom Tower,” or One World Trade Center, grew to a height of 1,271 feet, edging out the Empire State Building to become the tallest building in New York City. As a native I’m kind of bummed that we didn’t rebuild the Twin Towers exactly as they were, but I realize property developers will not be swayed by bloggers pining away for the skyline of their youth.

Lost skyscrapers is nothing new to New York, as explained in architecture professor Max Page’s The Creative Destruction of New York. Once-iconic structures like the bell-shaped Singer tower and the original Grand Central Station were demolished and replaced with new structures in decades past. The conventional wisdom seems to be that when something that large is destroyed, there’s no point in rebuilding the exact same thing.

Unless, perhaps, it never got to where it was supposed to go. An Australian mining billionaire named Clive Palmer has announced he has commissioned a replica of, get this, the Titanic. And that he’s then going to have the thing sail from England to New York, icebergs be damned, in 2016.

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