The Holy Train Station
NEW YORK—I’m standing in “The Oculus” on 9/11 and several thoughts are going through my mind.
Like, what the heck is an oculus?
I know it’s the Latin word for “eye,” but what I’m standing in looks like a frozen Swiss lake encased in the carcass of a whale that’s in the process of being gutted from the fourth to the 79th vertebra. They should have called it the Costa (Latin for “rib”) or the Ingentibus Costam (“giant rib”) or maybe the Ventre Piscis (“fish belly”) or even the Viscera Ceti (“whale entrails”). Nothing about it looks like an eye. Are they trying to scare us? I can imagine the voice of Vincent Price in a 1960s horror film awash in lurid orange tint: “The OCULUS is watching you!” Do they call it an oculus as a way of screaming, “Stop! My eye can’t take it!”
Because it’s true that you can’t take your eyes off the Oculus. You instinctively wanna look upwards instead of downwards, which is not necessarily a good thing in what was supposed to be a train station. I say “supposed to be” because even though the official name of the Oculus is the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, there is no place to sit, no place to buy a newspaper or a cheap coffee, and no signs telling you when trains arrive or leave. In fact, there are hardly any signs at all, in a space that’s designed to get people on and off trains and move them from one transit system to another. The whole thing has the feel of a sci-fi movie in which we, the Ant People, have been funneled into an enormous work of art and challenged to find our way out. But don’t track mud on the pristine marble floors or Vincent Price might have to smush you. I would say that it looks like an Apple Store except…it contains an Apple Store!
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There are, in fact, dozens of stores, and they’re not the sort of shops you normally find in a train station. The Oculus is the first subway station where people wonder, “Will I miss the 5:23 to Newark if I stop at Montblanc to get that $7,600 TimeWalker Dual Carbon Chronograph Automatic watch I’ve had my eye on?”
There’s a Hugo Boss, a Giorgio Armani, a Diane von Furstenberg, a Michael Kors, a Tom Ford, a Stuart Weitzman, a Tiffany, a Cartier, a Turnbull & Asser, and even a few stores that aren’t named after fashionistas who shuttle between Paris and Milan, like Tumi, Longines, and Sephora. There are 125 stores in all if you count the ones in World Trade Center Towers 1, 2, 3, and 4, which surround the Oculus.
Which brings me to the second thing I’m thinking about.
Why are we still calling it the World Trade Center?
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