supersquirrelWhat the ‘Footprint’ Forgets | Los Angeles Review of Books
What the ‘Footprint’ Forgets | Los Angeles Review of Books - Sopuli
> “No foot leaves a trace if it doesn’t rise,” she writes. “The print of the foot demands its absence.” By pushing against the stasis implied in the footprint metaphor, Subramaniam exposes the absences and leaves readers to wrestle with the erasures, willful or unintentional, that human movement inevitably causes. > One of the book’s most compelling sections demonstrates this method in a layered archaeology of Lower Manhattan in New York. Subramaniam uses the 9/11 Memorial & Museum to expose a history of serial erasures—each “footprint” in the area literally built on the obliteration of whatever preceded it. How and when was the concept “footprint” appropriated to describe buildings? Subramaniam traces how the word itself migrated from the body to the built environment, entering English in the 16th century as a mark of a foot or shoe, then in the late 1960s, as the World Trade Center was being designed, attaching itself to the ground-level outline of buildings. This lexicological shift cements the very metaphor that the book resists: a footprint became something fixed, massive, and architectural rather than something transient and human. > Every footstep, even those of buildings, creates absences. The Twin Towers’ footprint erased what had once been New York’s Little Syria, razed by Robert Moses in the 1940s to build the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, after which a commercial strip of electronic shops, dubbed Radio Row, spontaneously filled in the vanished neighborhood’s void. David Rockefeller, chair of Chase Manhattan Bank, and his brother Nelson, New York’s governor, had something more grandiose and more grandly profitable in mind: a “center” dedicated to “world trade,” whose sprawling footprint would not just occupy the ground but also alter the skyline. In describing these successive erasures, Subramaniam poignantly recasts the towers’ destruction. By falling, the Twin Towers leave twin voids, ghost “footprints” now memorialized to stand in for human bodies, which, in her reading, also stand for all the prior communities overwritten so the towers could rise in the first place. The footprint becomes a palimpsest. > What makes this section powerful, and also representative of the book’s method, is how Subramaniam allows pattern to emerge without insisting on equivalence. The reader recognizes, without being told, that Moses and the Rockefellers’ sweeping erasure of Little Syria connects with an episode from an earlier itinerary in the book, an encounter with the brutal conquistador Don Juan de Oñate, who tore through New Mexico, exacting tribute, slaughtering about 800 people in Acoma Pueblo, capturing hundreds more, and cutting off the right feet of two dozen male prisoners.
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