Culture
Bloomberg Declares New Rooftop Bar at Ground Zero Greatest Act of Defiance in American History
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
NEW YORK, NY. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg published an op-ed this week arguing that the most powerful response to the September 11th attacks has been the robust commercial redevelopment of Lower Manhattan, a thesis he supports with property values, restaurant openings, and a confidence that can only be described as fully untreated.
The piece, published Monday, is Bloomberg's most ambitious attempt yet to convert grief into a quarterly earnings report. In it, he argues that "bringing new life and vitality back to the site" is the greatest tribute Americans could pay to the 2,977 people killed that morning. He does not elaborate on whether the vitality needs to be mixed-use or whether residential alone is sufficient to defeat extremism.
Bloomberg writes that allowing Lower Manhattan to stagnate would mean "the terrorists win," a formulation that has now been applied to, in rough historical order: not flying, not going to the mall, not buying a house, and apparently not approving a 58-story residential tower with amenities on the former site of human catastrophe.
"What Michael is saying," explained a Bloomberg Associates spokesperson, "is that resilience is a form of resistance. What the numbers show is that per-square-foot valuations in the Financial District have increased 340 percent since 2001. We think those two things are connected."
They did not explain how.
The op-ed traces the revival of Lower Manhattan through several milestones, including the reopening of the PATH train, the completion of the 9/11 Memorial, and, in a passage that sources close to the editing process confirm survived three drafts, the arrival of a Whole Foods on Greenwich Street. "You cannot overstate what that Whole Foods meant," Bloomberg reportedly told an associate. "Symbolically. Geopolitically."
Critics have noted that the piece is structured less as a memorial reflection and more as a prospectus. It contains two mentions of "mixed-use development," one reference to Hudson Yards as an inspiration, and a paragraph about tax incentives that runs longer than the paragraph about the fire department.
The victims themselves, numbering nearly three thousand, appear in the piece primarily as a motivating abstraction. They are described as people who "deserved better" and "whose memory demands we act," with the acting in question being the approval of commercial zoning variances.
Not everyone in Lower Manhattan has received the op-ed as intended.
Denise Caruso, who lost her husband in the North Tower and has attended the memorial every year since, said she read the piece twice before setting it down. "I'm sure he means well," she said, from a bench near the reflecting pools. "I just didn't realize my husband died so that someone could open a rooftop bar with views of the site." She paused. "There is a rooftop bar with views of the site."
There are, in fact, four.
Bloomberg's office did not respond to questions about whether any of the rooftop bars are considered acts of geopolitical defiance, or whether they are simply acts of hospitality, or whether the distinction matters to anyone ordering the $24 cocktail.
The broader argument, that life must continue and that honoring the dead means rebuilding rather than retreating, is not new and is not entirely wrong. Cities do recover. Commerce does return. People do, eventually, open restaurants near terrible things that happened. This is true.
What is also true is that there is a version of this argument that sounds like comfort and a version that sounds like a press release, and Bloomberg's op-ed does not always know which version it is writing.
The piece ends with a call to "keep building, keep growing, keep showing the world what this city is made of," a sentiment that could be a eulogy, a campaign slogan, or the tagline for a real estate development firm.
It is, in fact, all three.
The Whole Foods closes at 10.
The story we are making fun of: https://nypost.com/2026/09/10/us-news/lower-manhattan-must-go-on-living-25-years-after-9-11-otherwise-terror-triumphs/