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| Memorial Chic | |||||||
| What to do with Ground Zero? | |||||||
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| Jan. 22 — Anyone needing a fresh reminder of how difficult it’s going to be to design a World Trade Center memorial need only look at a controversy last week over a proposed memorial to New York City firefighters. |
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WHAT HAPPENED IS certainly a cautionary tale: A prominent New York developer, who owns the building that houses the city’s Fire Department headquarters, commissioned a memorial tribute to “New York’s Bravest” based on a well-known news photo of three firefighters raising an American flag — Iwo Jima style — at Ground Zero. In a spirit of inclusion, the developer, Bruce Ratner, wanted the statue to feature a black, white and Hispanic firefighter rather than the three white men in the photo. After all, he reasoned, there were black and Hispanic firefighters on the scene, too, even if they weren’t in the photograph. Now, in the spirit of Sept. 11, in which everyone is supposed to be on his best behavior, you’d think New York’s entrenched interests and venomous rivalries could be put aside for once. As we say in Brooklyn, perhaps you should reconsider. A thousand firefighters signed a petition demanding that the statue be halted. And even the newspaper that published the original photo threatened a lawsuit if its photo were altered in such a manner. So, in the end, Ratner abandoned his effort to put up a memorial to our brave firefighters. Now, magnify this controversy by a multiple of 1,000 and you have a close approximation of what it’s going to be like to design a suitable memorial for the World Trade Center. That process is already well underway. In one of his last speeches before leaving office, former mayor Rudy Giuliani said that the entire 16-acre site should be reserved for a memorial. Meanwhile, the World Trade Center’s leaseholder, Larry Silverstein, envisions four mini-towers that would restore all the office space lost in the attacks. And don’t forget the voice of the people. Judging from the letters to the editor columns in the city’s two tabloids, there’s also strong support for rebuilding the towers exactly the way they were as a show of defiance. Many believe that the hole in our hearts won’t be repaired until the hole in our skyline is. Hovering over the entire process are “The Widows,” which is the collective term that the local papers use to describe the relatives of victims of the Towers’ collapse. The Widows have intimidated local politicians (who wants to be seen as opposing a widow?) and wield their power like a cudgel, threatening to oppose any memorial design that doesn’t meet their approval (whatever that is). | ||||||||||||||||||
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Meanwhile, the nation’s top architects are indulging their wildest fantasies at a new exhibit at New York’s Max Protetch Gallery that featured 50 memorial designs. I went to the opening the other night and the place was packed — further evidence that Memorial Chic is alive and well. At the exhibit, three schools of design seem to be emerging: 1. The New Towers School. 2. The No Towers School. 3. The “Was the Architect on LSD?” School (I’m referring specifically to one architect’s plan for a 911-foot-deep pit for reflection. Listen, most New Yorkers don’t even like going into the subway; they’re not about to lower themselves into a 90-story hole just to pay their respects). | ||||||||||||||||||
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Architects who favor rebuilding the large towers seem to delight in rubbing their plans in The Widows’ faces. “Let’s not even consider remembering,” reads a proposal by a firm called Foreign Office Architects, whose plan calls for eight undulating spiral buildings clad in the same Gothic skin as the original World Trade Center. Oh, and their “Bunch Tower” would be even taller than the original World Trade Center. “We have a great site in a great city and the opportunity to have the world’s tallest building back in New York.” (Yeah, The Widows are going to love that!) Architect Hani Rashid offered up equally gargantuan towers clad in Titanium and looking vaguely like the coffin they put Spock in at the end of “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.” “We could bow to defeat and allow only ghosts or shadows of the great Towers to remain in place where they once stood,” Rashid wrote, “or we might take up the challenge again to build with the great confidence, vision and courage that compelled the original towers.” Just as Rashid makes restoring the World Trade Center an issue of courage, members of the No Towers school make it an issue of appropriateness, a word that changes meaning depending on who is using it. “Building tall would be inappropriate,” said architect Brad Cloepfil, whose design calls for a lattice of 30-story buildings with spaces for worship, reflection and performance. He also dismissed as “inappropriate” the notion of reserving the entire site for a memorial. “That’s absolutely absurd,” he said. “Why would you want negation rather than something positive? This memorial needs to be an affirmation and that means people — not just the people who make the pilgrimage to the site, but people working at that site. Work is a big part of what New York City is.” I asked Protetch what he thought the word “appropriate” meant in this context and he said that the only “appropriate” memorial would be a “great” building. Employing that old journalistic trick of letting a guy say something and then asking him to explain what he meant, I then asked Protetch for his definition of “great.” There was a long, uncomfortable pause. “By ‘great,’ I guess I mean a creative building that can speak to everyone,” he said at long last. Of course, Cloepfil and Protetch are getting at the central difficulty of designing memorials: Whose experience should they memorialize, the thousands of direct victims and their relatives’ or the millions of indirect victims who have seen their city ripped apart? | ||||||||||||||||||
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Beyond that, should memorials remember the dead or celebrate the living? Say what you will about the excellent memorial in Oklahoma City, but it remains dead space, a plot of land where people stroll through somberly and mourn. It is a celebration of death. New York has never been a city obsessed with looking back, especially when its dead are concerned. Scores died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. There’s a plaque downtown. More than a thousand German immigrants died when their excursion boat, the General Slocum, crashed and sank in the East River. There’s a small statue. Thousands of New Yorkers died in the Vietnam War. There’s a collection of glass bricks near the East River that no one ever visits. One design that didn’t show up in Protetch’s gallery was my idea for an appropriate World Trade Center Memorial: Restore the Towers exactly as they were — the ultimate show of defiance — but relocate the United Nations to the top 50 stories in both buildings. After all, no reasonable company would voluntarily relocate to what would be the world’s biggest bull’s eye, but putting the U.N. there would send a universal message that we are all in this together. This idea was first championed by me in a private rant. Unfortunately, I am not always so skilled in getting my private rants into print in a timely fashion, so the idea first appeared in the New York Daily News, where architecture writer Fred Bernstein suggested Twin Towers for the U.N. “Every day, representatives of 189 nations would occupy Ground Zero, physically and symbolically,” Bernstein wrote. “Nothing less than 111 stories will do. The U.N….needs to send a message.” Will The Widows agree? Probably not. But, as Protetch suggested, no memorial will satisfy everyone. “This is New York, after all,” he said. “There won’t ever be a consensus, but if we build something interesting, people will end up loving it. I mean, in the end, we all loved the World Trade Center, right?” Yeah, we did. It only took 40 years — and one day in September. Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His website is at http://www.gersh.tv © 2002 Newsweek, Inc. | ||||||||||||||||||
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