On May 29, 2014, the New York Times (
visit link) ran the following story:
"Finding Space for the Living at a Memorial
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Some fences have come down at the World Trade Center. The site isn’t finished yet, but there’s no longer the regime of barricades and snaking line to see the pair of matching fountains approximating the footprints of the former towers. The other morning, New York’s police commissioner, William J. Bratton, trailed by seconds, marched under the rows of swamp white oaks toward the newly opened Sept. 11 museum.
I’ve visited day after day. At all hours, there’s a friendly but heavy police presence. You’re meant to feel it. By noon, the tourists and school groups crowd the south fountain, snapping pictures. Comparatively few New Yorkers seem to go.
This is a place for remembrance, but it’s not like Arlington National Cemetery, Gettysburg or even the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, a postage stamp by comparison, which honors nearly 60,000 dead and missing veterans. The site of the Sept. 11 memorial is not singularly devoted to those who died. It also serves as the forecourt for an office development and as public space for Lower Manhattan. The neighborhood was a casualty, too, along with the rest of New York.
In the tortuous planning process, victims’ families and real estate interests needed to be reconciled with the interests of everyone else in the city, including those who live and work downtown. So far, I’m not sure it’s working.
The place doesn’t feel like New York. It feels like a swath of the National Mall plunked in downtown Manhattan: formal, gigantic, impersonal, flat, built to awe, something for tourists. One complaint about the former World Trade Center towers, with their windswept plaza, was the lack of human scale. This is different but little better.
The layout recalls the much criticized proposal from 2002 by the architectural firm Beyer Blinder Belle: a cluster of giant office towers on the north and east sides overlooking a memorial park left exposed to the broad, noisy highway that is West Street. Design logic dictates a screen of trees or a long building to shield the site on the west flank. Great open spaces in New York tend effectively to be surrounded on all sides. They’re outdoor rooms: Central Park, Washington Square Park, Madison Square Park, Bryant Park. An early proposal put the entrance pavilion to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum along West Street, as a buffer. That made sense. It was vetoed in the planning process.
Instead, two punky sheds for vents, garbed in slanting gray screens, barely separate the street from the memorial and make the long west side an uninviting no-man’s land. Visitors avoid it, and the memorial effectively peters out into multilane traffic.
The museum entrance was moved to an awkward spot between the two fountains. An above-grade pavilion, by the Norwegian architectural firm Snohetta, from which visitors descend to the displays, seems meant to look like both a gem and a heap. I admire Snohetta. Not this building, though: from the outside, a mirrored glass-and-steel jumble of tilting planes with a trapezoid roof, poorly detailed, presenting a cold face to the south fountain.
New York’s former governor George E. Pataki, dreaming of a run at the White House and alert to victims’ families, fixed on the giant footprints of the towers as the memorial. The architect Michael Arad came up with the idea of the twin pools or fountains. When he was mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, who focused on restoring the neighborhood and surrounding streets, landed in hot water by worrying aloud that the footprints occupied too much space. There were other ideas for a memorial, including beams of light, to evoke the lost towers.
Yes, the supersize fountains move many people. A big hole in the ground invariably drops jaws. The rushing, churning water, like the din that the fountains make, has been elaborately orchestrated. It’s hypnotizing. Smaller voids, cut into the floors of the larger ones, spare the fountains from banality, though the symbolism of the drain has always struck me as odd, the opposite of uplifting. I have watched hundreds of tourists linger over one fountain, reading the inscribed names. Few linger over both.
Perhaps that’s partly because the site has been given over to overly literal symbolism: fountains the size of the towers’ footprints; America’s tallest tower, with a fortified base; a museum underground with a pavilion that resembles a collapsed building. The place doesn’t do much to celebrate the city’s values of energy, diversity, tolerance openness and debate.
Proud workers in blue vests tend to visitors who have questions and keep an eye out for unwanted activities, of which there are many. The memorial permits no recreation, no loud noise, no “behaving in a way that is inappropriate,” according to the memorial’s online rules list. You can’t sing. At a site celebrating freedom and liberty, protests and demonstrations are prohibited.
Such complexities entwined, can't be untangled … I have not been to the site in person (not yet) but see the droplets of falling water as...
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I asked one worker whether people can eat or sunbathe and received a look akin to what an airline passenger in coach earns when venturing into business class for extra peanuts. The worker volunteered that a visitor may bring a snack or sandwich to the memorial but must dispose of the trash off site. There are no garbage receptacles — no vendors, either, and retail is forbidden in the adjacent towers that face the memorial site.
Even the seating is severe: square concrete blocks, low, backless, as if comfort violated the sanctity of the place. Peter Walker, the landscape architect, conceived a somber geometry of spare strips of grass, mostly at the corner where the memorial empties toward West Street. The strips thwart the natural flow of pedestrian traffic diagonally across the area. They align below military ranks of trees. Mr. Walker is an excellent designer, but it’s hard to imagine a more formal, less happy arrangement to dictate behavior.
Over time, of course, the rules may change, security concerns ease, the neighborhood gradually returns to something like normal.
But for many of those who grieve, I suspect just talking about the quality of this memorial as a public space desecrates the site. I lived for years in Berlin, where a Holocaust memorial in the middle of the city, designed by Peter Eisenman, consists of a checkerboard field of concrete plinths, a metaphoric graveyard. After it opened, the memorial became a magnet for young bicyclists and skateboarders who wove among the plinths, and sunbathers, German and otherwise, who tanned on top of them. Horrified authorities beefed up security.
A German neighbor and friend of mine went one day with his toddler son, who started to climb a plinth. A guard yelled, “Raus!” My friend is a Jew, the child of one of the few Jews to survive the war in Berlin; other family members of his died in the Holocaust. As he saw it, what his son was doing, like what the sunbathers and the bikers were doing, was not blaspheming the memorial: There can be no forgetting, he said.
My friend felt that his son, as a young Berliner, was denying the murderers the last word. Not everyone might agree, but life has a way of renewing a wounded city."