9/11 Memorials and Remembrance
From the earliest days following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the notion of remembrance has been a passionate cause and a touchstone for controversy. Only weeks after the attacks, Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, used an Op-Ed article in The New York Times to advocate preserving “the searing fragment of ruin”: the destroyed but still-soaring latticework tower-remnant that was ultimately dismantled at ground zero. Though that proposal was all but forgotten, six years later, the World Trade Center Museum announced that it would, in fact, display two of the buildings’ original tridents — 90-foot-tall blasted steel beams from the facade —at the museum-pavilion entrance.
The seemingly infinite varieties of remembrance have animated every aspect of the tragedy’s aftermath. There was the uproar that accompanied the choice of a World Trade Center Memorial, when 13 jurors were sequestered for six months to winnow 5,201 submissions. Then there was uproar: the sequel, when the memorial was downsized, to cut $160 million from its $672 million cost.
Later, remembrance helped transform the cultural future of the ground-zero site when Gov. George E. Pataki evicted the International Freedom Center from the site, because victims’ relatives asserted that its aesthetic dishonored their loved ones’ memory.
The commemoration of the lost has driven a years-long controversy over the preservation of the authentic column remnants, a concrete slurry wall and survivors’ staircase from the trade center; some of these elements will be enshrined at ground zero. Meanwhile, last year, the first visitors’ center at ground zero — the Tribute Center at 120 Liberty Street — opened to honor those who perished. There have also been running battles over the order in which the names of victims will be presented, with families of first responders battling, to no avail, to win a separate listing for those whose duty brought them into reach of the disaster.
In a starkly utilitarian, yet heartbreaking process, the calibration of remembrance drove the work of the federal Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, which awarded millions of dollars to families. Kenneth R. Feinberg, the fund’s special master, was tasked with the impossible: placing a dollar value on a life.
Other institutions maintained an archival imperative: the New-York Historical Society mounted 17 exhibitions on the tragedy, from 2001 through the most recent, sixth-anniversary show, the city’s first major retrospective on the event.
Still, the momentum of remembrance has generated a painful debate this year over the relevance of high-profile commemorations at ground zero. In the end, perhaps for everyone, remembrance is an intensely personal calculation: not only for New Yorkers (whose memories engender a raw slide-show of images and emotions), but also for those who recall where they were, and what they felt, on that horrific, cloudless day. - Glenn Collins, Sept. 7, 2007
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