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 In the wake of the terrorist attacks, a look at remembering and reclaiming previous sites of tragedy. The Metropolis Observed December 2001
Of course more tangible memorials were erected across the city in the days after the event--small shrines bearing color copies of the missing--and Union Square emerged spontaneously as the epicenter of mourning. More than a week after the attack, as acrid currents still coursed through the overcast sky, Loteria and St. Michael candles still struggled against the rain, surrounded by ever more flowers, and a lone Buddhist monk banged solemnly on a drum wrapped in a plastic bag. "Peace" was scrawled across the statue of a triumphant George Washington astride his horse, and a variety of print, television, and radio reporters--seeming to equal the number of visitors--solicited commentary. Like the towers themselves, the park had become a symbol, a small ground filled with humble remembrances beamed to a larger world, a cathartic broadcast of suffering. Perhaps inevitably, it felt both powerfully real and naggingly artificial. The spontaneous memorial has become a familiar occurrence in the wake of tragedies on all scales--from Oklahoma City to Princess Diana to Littleton, Colorado--and one cannot deny the overwhelming human response to locate grief and build a kind of psychic architecture, giving a temporary sense of place to what might otherwise seem an abstract media experience. But what happens when the candles have gone out and the flowers wilted? Within days of the towers' collapse, there was already informal debate about what should happen to the space where the towers once stood; some suggested using a piece of the wrecked facade as a memorial, others wanted the entire plaza left empty, and many called for a tower higher than before. That this was happening even before the more than 6,000 reported missing and presumed dead had yet to be found speaks also to the healing power of memorials, of consecrating ground. And yet, as history shows, there is no standard form to the way memorials are constructed, nor even any assurance that a tragic event in itself will yield a memorial.
But Foote says there has in the last few decades been a discernible change in the way the country deals with topographies of tragedy. "The first memorial I can find to a mass murder is the one at San Ysidro [the California town in which a gunman killed 21 people at a McDonald's in 1984]. I think people are a little more prone to acknowledge these events now and erect memorials. Previously, even 15 or 20 years after some of these events, there would have been great resistance to doing anything of the kind. People just really wanted to be rid of them. People are now recognizing that doing something at the site can be a good way for the community to rally." The rebuilding of the Columbine High School library, the site of the 1999 shooting that resulted in 15 deaths, shows the intense emotional power a place can carry and thus the myriad complications inherent in its posttragedy reuse. As J. D. Nelson, an architect with Denver architecture firm Davis Partnership--which renovated Columbine High School in 1995 and subsequently designed its new library--recounts it, in the wake of the shooting a debate immediately ensued over the fate of the library, where most of the deaths occurred. "A group of parents got together when they saw that the district had no intent to get rid of the library," Nelson says. "The district intended to reuse the space as it was." The parents managed to stop the renovation of the existing library and erect a temporary structure, while in the meantime a variety of proposals were floated over what to do with the space. "There was a lot of community support for just tearing down the whole wing of the building," Nelson says. "I can understand the emotion of that, but the logic is hard to get around. What do you do--every time a tragedy happens, just tear it all down? That's one of the pieces we wrestled with. What do you do with all this stuff?" Davis Partnership eventually won approval for removing most of the floor (leaving some for structural reasons) between the library and school cafeteria, transforming the space into a two-story "atrium." Artist Virginia Wright Frierson volunteered to paint a mural of a Colorado Rockies arboreal landscape on the ceiling--and the result, as Nelson quotes one parent, is that "you can't help but look up." Even this proposal was not without controversy, however. "While the thing was under construction, one of the parents discovered that a piece of the floor was remaining where her son died," Nelson says, noting that the floor was of solid structural concrete pieces, and not easily partitioned. "She wanted that removed. So we went back and scratched our heads again, and redesigned the space to accommodate that." The psychic power of landscapes of tragedy was demonstrated in a much different vein earlier this year when a British hotel chain announced it would build a resort on Obersalzberg promontory in Bavaria, which during the 1930s was an alternate seat of power for the Nazi regime, crowned by Adolph Hitler's infamous Kehlsteinhaus (later translated incorrectly as the "Eagle's Nest"). The site has always been controversial--the British bombed it during the war, and most of the remaining buildings were later razed. In requesting the destruction of the ruins, the Allies were acknowledging the potential power of what had become a charged landscape (i.e., the very presence of the ruins might serve as a rallying point for a regrouped neo-Nazi movement). One critic of the hotel, Michel Friedman, deputy leader of Germany's Central Council of Jews, said in an interview that "the use of the site as a hotel masks the historical reality of the Obersalzberg. Such places should be preserved and not used for a completely different purpose--so that the younger generation can learn at the places where things happened." Many observers, however, defended the project on the grounds that the Obersalzberg had had inhabitants for some nine centuries--of which the Nazi tenure accounted for a dozen years--and that the recently opened Obersalzberg Documentation Center does enough to educate visitors of the region's notorious past. Volker Dahm, a historian and curator at the Documentation Center, feels that critics ignore the Obersalzberg's touristic tradition. "They say that this is a place that shouldn't be normalized, that tourism is inappropriate," he says. "But in my eyes that's crazy--because what should you do with this lovely landscape? It would be unconscionable to prolong Hitler's power on this landscape for decades or centuries." What these disparate cases point to are the complexities that emerge when we try to inscribe a cultural story upon a physical place. Do we give Hitler too much posthumous strength in cordoning off landscapes that he touched? Do the future students of Columbine High School need to be reminded that a tragedy occurred in their midst? Would deciding not to build on the site of the World Trade Center be itself a concession to terrorism? How can the events of September 11 be integrated into the urban landscape, and into history? The irony of the George Washington statue at Union Square is that it was probably noticed more in the weeks following the attack than in any number of previous decades, when it was, like most urban historical memorials, a blurred object in the city's backdrop. Now citizens and artists and politicians and developers will begin to think about what the appropriate future is for the World Trade Center site. The buildings that must be built, no matter how tall, will help the city to live again--to fill the "hole in the skyline," as the mayor puts it. The memorial that must be built will be asked to carry more weight than engineering could possibly provide--the sum of all loss and hope, the infinite volume of public memory, the commemoration of unbelievable courage in the face of unspeakable acts, the consecration of a death-tinged place where life must endure. This is as essential as it is impossible. |
