First Day Public Allowed Into 9/11 Memorial
Posted: September 13th, 2011 | Filed under: ManhattanWe got the opportunity to see the new September 11 Memorial yesterday. Short, Tweetable version (126 characters): “visually striking, emotionally distant & physically overwhelming, WTC Memorial pulls you in with its dark, almost bleak power”. Or something like that. I kind of hate Twitter.
It actually wasn’t too hard to get tickets — I just went on the website the morning they released them . . . wasn’t nearly as bad as, say, getting an online reservation at Momofuku Ko. And I don’t know if people reserved tickets and didn’t use them or if the organizers are being cautious about how many people they let into the site at one time, but it seemed pretty uncrowded; they could have packed in more people without it being uncomfortable to move around.
Anyway, after so many years, it was incredible to finally see what they did there. The first thing you notice — a fact in itself almost awe-inspiring — is that you’re actually standing in the World Trade Center site again. After ten years of it being off limits, it’s almost enough just to be able to walk around there. Like, Dayenu! There is no pit; you walk in from street level and just roam around. The first thing you do — the first thing I did, at least — was just look around to see what things look like from this perspective:
Since the memorial pools fill the footprints of WTC 1 and 2, the other thing that came back to me was where the towers actually stood; I remembered going to buy TKTS tickets at WTC 2 (probably the last time I went to the WTC, which wasn’t a space I went to very frequently) and could visualize walking up to the building after seeing where the pool sat. I don’t have many memories of the World Trade Center, but the vague ones I did have came back after seeing the position of the pools within the site. Go and see it; I think you’ll get what I’m talking about.
Like I said, you walk in at street level. Unless I’m mistaken, the old WTC site had a raised plaza, like the one at Lincoln Center (and like every other crappy 60s/70s “superblock” style). The memorial is nice in the way that the pools sit at street level. Not to get all Jane Jacobs about it, but this is the right thing to do — after things calm down, I hope the plaza will be connected with the surrounding streets and pedestrians will circulate through the area while they’re downtown. The other thing about the plaza being at street level is that it makes the approach to the South Pool that much more dramatic; the immense gap surprises you when you finally walk up to it:
The first thing you think: Wow, that’s a big fountain. The sound is soothing. It’s huge. There’s so much water there. They were big buildings. Really big buildings.
Then your eyes drop to the visual focus — the pit in the bottom. One thing you don’t understand from the aerial views of the pools — or at least I didn’t — is that you can’t see the bottom of the pit from street level. It almost looks like a CGI effect:
And then you start thinking . . . this is kind of a bleak way to memorialize 2700-plus people. The water, combed at the top to evoke the graceful lines of the towers and falling like white noise below, begins as a soothing effect . . . until it disappears silently into an abyss no one can see the bottom of. Honestly, it’s kind of fucked up and scary.
All of that points to the big mixed message with not only the memorial but the recent memorial service. The “guidelines” the Obama Administration released in advance of this past anniversary suggested expressing “a positive, forward-looking narrative”. Foreboding bottomless black pits seem off-message, to say the least.
That’s not to say that it’s not a fair reading of 9/11 — I can’t think of anything more bleak and senseless than brainwashed, sexually frustrated 20- and 30-something men flying planes into buildings and killing 2700-plus people; I don’t know where you’d even begin to “learn” from that. But as time goes on, the focus on memorializing 9/11 seems, for better or worse, to have some sort of “teachable moment” attached to it — stuff like tolerance or unity or whatnot. That part is missing in the pools, and in fact the pools seem to want you to dwell on the attack and sink down into the abyss with them. The feeling seems very 2003. Which of course makes sense, seeing that’s when the design was submitted.
A real-life example of this mixed message came on Sunday when Paul Simon apparently switched up songs at the last moment and sang “The Sound of Silence” instead of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” The former song is mopey and bleak. The latter seems more hopeful. Can’t find whether this was sanctioned or not, but people seemed to love it. Or at least a bunch of commenters on the NPR website, who seem intent wallowing in that narcotic self-flagellating feeling.
When you come across the North Pool, there’s another big thing you notice that you might not have really (no, I mean really) considered when you read about the plans: The fact that there are 2.6 million square feet of office space standing about 50 feet away from this giant death memorial:
One of two things will eventually happen — either people will be depressed having to spend 40-plus hours a week next to a death memorial or the death memorial will quickly cease to mean what it was meant to mean to as people get used to being around the site. Human beings being what we are, I imagine the latter will happen — not a great way to memorialize an event.
(And hey, correct me if my math is wrong, but if $24 billion was spent on Lower Manhattan since Sept. 11, 2001, couldn’t the federal government have just paid out the $4.55 billion insurance claim and made the whole thing a proper memorial site? Then we wouldn’t have toll takers being developers and all the other horrible stuff that Joe Nocera wrote about the other day.)
For now, however, everyone seems focused on what they’re supposed to be focusing on.
Speaking of which, the organization of the names of those who died during the attacks (including the attacks on the Pentagon, United 93 and the 1993 bombing) is interesting and they have little kiosks to help you find people — type in a name and a printout shows you where to go:
Finally, there’s this: I don’t know how deep the water is at the bottom of the pools, but I wonder how long it will take for some nitwit to jump in the fountain. There’s hardly any barrier preventing people from jumping over (and not in a suicidal way but rather in some kind of thrill-seeking manner):
And let’s be clear: I’m not saying anyone should do it, just that it looks like you could do it. Please don’t do it though; they don’t even want you throwing coins in there, much less you in your ratty skivvies.
