When I first started filming and painting the rebuilding of the World Trade Center seven years ago, standing right in the massive footings that were being carved into the bedrock, I always dreamed of the day that work would start on the massive spire on top of Tower 1 … In what seems like the blink of an eye, years have gone by and that historic day has come!

By a strange quirk of timing the massive sections of the spire that had sailed from Montreal on a seagoing barge, arrived in New York on my birthday. After their long voyage we filmed them sailing under Brooklyn Bridge as they headed for the site around the tip of Lower Manhattan.

During several long nights in mid December the sections of the spire were unloaded from the barge at Pier 54 and amidst flashing lights and an escort of police outriders slowly headed for the site. There was something sacred and ceremonial about the unusual procession of trucks and construction workers moving down Greenwich Street, one of the smartest streets in TriBeCa. People stepped out of restaurants and bars to gaze at the spectacle and to be photographed in front of the giant sections, each of which looked like a radiant intergalactic spacecraft.

The past week has been very exciting and I have been filming the south raising gang on Tower 1 setting the sections into position. Each time it is called a ‘critical pick’ as the sections are extremely heavy and can only be lifted from the street level when there is no wind. Some of the sections require what is called a ‘tandem pick’. This means two cranes had to simultaneously lift the piece. Last week there were a couple of days of thick fog and seeing the huge sections appearing out of nothingness was awe-inspiring!

The ironworkers of DCM work in all conditions with military like precision and discipline to accomplish the delicate and dangerous task of setting each of the 18 sections that will complete the 408 foot spire. Some of them have worked all the way from the ground up to the top and setting the spire is the final crowning of their accomplishment.

For me it is an amazing once in a lifetime experience to be able to work closely with them and to film such a historic time in the transformation of the skyline of New York City.

For all this I have immense and heartfelt gratitude.

BY MARCUS ROBINSON

The two beams of light are a very powerful and timeless way of honoring the many people who died that day. And yet they are free from any form of dogma and are safe from ever being shackled by ‘meaning’! The beams of light are as pure and as free as a tribute can be, rising upwards to illuminate the darkness as occasional beautiful clouds drift by and become transcendentally radiant as they cross their path.

I realize more and more that for my spirit as a painter, inspiration comes from places that are both unexpected and often so subtle that you could easily miss them.

Often on the site, I find myself standing for hours at a time in one spot, as my time-lapse camera beside me takes one frame every 15 seconds. This gives time to contemplate and really look closely at my immediate surroundings which are often just an apparently random ‘snapshot’ of construction textures and general ‘stuff’.

As I look more intently at the pieces of wood and rusty metal that are lying around and see how the construction process has created beautiful textures and marks, it is as though this is revealing a coherent,  visual and tactile language that will inform and inspire my paintings. Some of the wood has pencil marks written by a carpenter, splashes of fluorescent colors from a surveyor, flecks and splatters of concrete from the concrete gang, a few rusty nails, a zig-zag line in a different tone where the wood has been used as a form to make a staircase, a burned in stamp from the original manufacturer of the piece of wood, a ripped off paper tag relating to the function of the wood, a couple of perfect circular holes cut through and some diagonal lines etched into the wood by a circular saw.   All very beautiful and inspiring!

By Marcus Robinson

– Arthur Golden

Over the past week, I have been filming the ironworkers of DCM at the top of Tower 1 as the raising gangs set the last remaining beams and columns of the structural steel.

Many of these guys have been working on the building all the way up from bedrock level, since they set the first column in December 2006. There have been many challenges they have faced along the way and have worked, often 7 days a week, in a very hostile, noisy environment buffeted by weather conditions of extreme heat and cold.

I am moved by the way they keep their focus and their sense of passion for the work they do. Despite being physically tired by the incessant rough labor and also on occasions jaded and demoralized by issues beyond their control whether it be political decisions that influence the site or perceptions in the media raising controversy about the site, they retain a total passion and commitment to their work and a belief that their work on this building is serving a greater purpose. They also keep a sense of humor and sharp edged tough banter that is perhaps inevitable in a job where one mistake can be fatal!

Their role in healing the wound to the skyline of New York City is something they take very seriously and they have shouldered this responsibility with honor since the rebuilding began. Although six years is not very long time, some of the youngest ironworkers for whom this is their first job have been chiseled and toughened by the demands of this tough environment and judging from how their faces have changed, are now older and wiser.

By Marcus Robinson

One of the legendary characters who figured in my childhood was my great grandfather William Henry Robinson.  Although he died long before I was born I felt as though I knew him. My father often spoke about him in an affectionate and loving way, regaling us with tales of William Henry’s voyages as a seagoing shipwright and how, despite having had no formal education, he taught himself the basics of several foreign languages and used these skills to speak with foreign ship captains when he was chief sanitary inspector of the Port of Belfast. What made the deepest impression on me was the fact that he had learnt to speak Esperanto. As a child I always loved this word. Its musical and mysterious resonance awakened in me a sense of great curiosity and conjured up a radiant Utopia where people of different cultures and backgrounds lived happily together and where barriers of language didn’t matter.

Esperanto was originally created in the late 1870s by the wonderfully named Dr. Ludwik Lazarus Zamenhof, also know by the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto. His motivation for creating the language, as a way to heal and diminish the sense of division created by different languages, is as urgent now as it was then. He wrote in a letter in 1895:

The place where I was born and spent my childhood gave direction to all my future struggles. In Bialystok the inhabitants were divided into four distinct elements: Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews; each of these spoke their own language and looked on all the others as enemies. In such a town a sensitive nature feels more acutely than elsewhere the misery caused by language division and sees at every step that the diversity of languages is the first, or at least the most influential, basis for the separation of the human family into groups of enemies. I was brought up as an idealist; I was taught that all people were brothers, while outside in the street at every step I felt that there were no people, only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews and so on. This was always a great torment to my infant mind, although many people may smile at such an ‘anguish for the world’ in a child.

—L. L. Zamenhof, in a letter to N. Borovko

It turns out that the radiant Utopia I dreamt of in my childhood imagination, is in fact New York City. Paradoxically, there are 800 languages spoken in this city, making it the most linguistically diverse in the world! And yet despite this diversity a more connected and unspoken language of community and humanity is the modern day ‘Esperanto’ or language of hope, that makes New York the unique and radiant place it is.

For me, the many years of work to rebuild the World Trade Center are a profound expression of the spirit of this city. My vision for the film ‘Rebuilding’, about the transformation of the site, is to create a timeless cinematic tale that draws from the spirit of Esperanto – with the intention of making an amazing and uplifting story told in a way that transcends all barriers of language, culture or ethnicity and reaches emotionally and spiritually beyond the new buildings themselves.