 |
|
The Bedrock of Ground Zero
September 2, 2002
by John Bloom
Scarcely a day goes by that I don't give someone directions to Ground Zero. They start coming up out of the downtown subways at the crack of dawn, clutching their New York City tourist maps, which are sorely deficient in Ground Zero information.
I always expect them to be disappointed--it's drab, it's ugly, it looks like an ordinary construction site, and there's not really anything to see there--but they never are. They stand by the chain link fence for a long time. They buy the picture books at the sidewalk-vendor stands. You can get one called "Day of Horror" and another one called "Day of Tragedy," but as it turns out, they both have the same 32 pages of color photos of the Twin Towers in flames. I guess it depends on whether you're an "it's so horrible" person or an "it's so tragic" person.
They eventually wander over to St. Paul's Chapel and file slowly past the memorials that have been fastened onto the wrought-iron fence by thousands of other pilgrims. There are banners from elementary schools in Iowa, poetic essays from distraught teenage girls in Maryland, wilted flowers, messages from fire departments in Texas, proclamations from town councils in the Australian outback. And candles, so many candles, which eventually melt into a multi-colored mess that runs along the bottom of the fence.
Early this year Mayor Michael Bloomberg was explaining why he was taking the refurbished Tweed Courthouse away from the Museum of the City of New York--his predecessor, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, had promised it to them--and using it for a new public school headquarters instead. "Downtown is not really a tourist area," he said.
Even the number one citizen can have a few blind spots about his city. It's not only a tourist area now, I can't imagine it ceasing to be a tourist area for at least a decade. When the architectural firms submit their new plans for the rebuilding of the Towers site on September 30--the first batch of plans was hooted into oblivion by an outraged public--they have specific instructions to somehow link the site of the attacks to the ferry port at the tip of the island where people depart for the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Apparently someone finally noticed: the number one tourist attraction in the city is a hole in the ground.
That hole goes all the way down to the bedrock, and the argument about what should be placed on top of that bedrock has been raging, both publicly and privately, for months. Technically there are four organizations with the power to say what's built there--the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the office of Governor George Pataki, and the office of Mayor Bloomberg. But there are three wild cards that guarantee every single decision even considered by those four offices will be controversial.
The first is Larry Silverstein, who owns the lease to the World Trade Center itself and wants to rebuild as much of it as possible. His space was previously worth $124 million to the states of New York and New Jersey--money no one can really do without.
The second is Mayor Giuliani, who has publicly stated that he thinks the entire 16 acres should be a memorial. He's virtually the only New Yorker who feels this way, though, and there's a nagging fear that he'll interrupt his worldwide speaking schedule and suddenly become the fly in the Ground Zero ointment.
And the third one is the families of the victims. There are so many victims, of course, that there isn't any one organization that speaks for all of them. There's the 9-11 Widows and Victims' Families' Association. There's an organization called September's Mission. There's one called Give Your Voice. There are family members who don't belong to any organization but still have opinions about what should be done.
And what they all agree on is that the bedrock itself is sacred. They were horrified to learn that the planning authorities have already agreed to build a massive train terminal--billed as a "downtown Grand Central"--with tracks that run under the site. They believe that the bedrock itself could possibly contain human remains. They've also been insistent that the "footprints" of the two Towers not be touched by anything commercial.
The most popular of the six plans unveiled in July had two one-acre green spaces approximating the footprints of the two buildings. It was the popular favorite of the six--until it was revealed that the green spaces weren't on the exact spots occupied by the towers. (And yet the twin beams of light, which memorialized the towers this spring, were actually several blocks away from the actual footprints, and no one seemed to care.)
As the debate has continued, it's become obvious that the two most extreme plans--either 16 blocks of memorial space, or rebuilding the 110-story twin towers--are both out of the question. The families have pretty much said they'll settle for nine acres of memorial. The planning authorities would like to get that closer to seven. Meanwhile, the previously silent City Council has weighed in with its own request--they want a produce and fish market on the site, similar to the one in downtown Seattle. (This is especially weird, given that the famous Fulton Fish Market, just a few blocks away, was moved to the Bronx just three years ago.)
Other community groups have suggested that there be museums on the site, an opera house, parks, plazas, a promenade, and even residential housing (not likely). The wackiest of all the ideas came from David Childs, Silverstein's architect, who proposed a 100-story tower, but with the top 40 stories left vacant, as a memorial. The more you listen to the planners--and to the people trying to influence the planners--the more you realize that no one really knows, after all this time, what's appropriate.
Is the bedrock really sacred? I never would have thought so, but with hundreds of tourists crowding around it, even in its current condition, it's starting to look that way.
But is a necropolis really the right thing for a city that is trying to commemorate, not just its grief, but its resilience?
If you took a poll of New Yorkers, most of them would say rebuild, and rebuild on a grand scale. But Ground Zero doesn't belong solely to New York. It really is a national property now, and the idea of the victims groups to turn it over to the federal government as a national park is not that far-fetched in theory. (As a practical matter, it's virtually impossible.)
What's disturbing to me is that most people can't make the leap from memorializing the actual ground to memorializing the people, who don't dwell in that ground, regardless of what particulate matter it might contain. If ever we needed symbolism, this would be the time. It's too bad that the authorities decided not to have an open competition among architectural firms, because the answer to all these competing interests could probably be found more quickly in the mind of an artist than that of a bureaucrat.
If I were doing it, I would want 50,000 architects from every country in the world considering the event, the site, and the meaning of it all, and sketching designs in their studios that would be submitted to a jury. Because the solution is likely to be something out of left field, something that no one has thought of, something that's not based on old models (the green market in Seattle, the downtown performing arts center like those in other cities).
If September 11th really did change us, then what emerges at Ground Zero should be something strikingly novel and unexpected, a mixture of blood, tears, hope, and faith. And when we saw it, we would know it. And we wouldn't argue about the bedrock anymore. We would have the dirge, but we would also have the wake. If you want to look to other cities for solutions, look to New Orleans. When people die, they mourn, but they also have a parade.
© Copyright 2002 United Press International and John Bloom