The National September 11 Memorial

On the footprint of each of the fallen Twin Towers is a "memorial pool" (one "North," one "South").

"I wept, but about what precisely I cannot say. Much to my amazement, after having done everything possible to shut out the ubiquitous maudlin press coverage that engulfed the tenth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, I visited Michael Arad's National September 11 Memorial in New York City -- which was dedicated exactly a decade after the disaster -- to find that it impressed me at once as a sobering, disturbing, heartbreaking, and overwhelming masterpiece."

-- Martin Filler, in "A Masterpiece at Ground Zero" in the Oct. 27 NYRB (unfortunately available free only in digest form for nonsubscribers)

by Ken

It's hard for me to evaluate "memorials" to things I find myself in no danger of forgetting. It occurs to me, though, that the enduring value of the National September 11 Memorial -- actually better-known in widespread signage in the area as just "9/11 Memorial" -- will be to those who didn't live through it.

That said, the memorial seems to me quite well done, and a good place to do whatever thinking, reflecting, remembering, and forgetting you wish to do, all the while observing the construction site that the onetime World Trade Center is at the moment, all these years after the fact. As architectural historian Francis Morrone pointed out on the eve of 9/11 in this year's edition of the Municipal Art Society tour he's been leading annually (one of the rare MAS tours that's members-only, and probably enough by itself to justify joining, even without all the other benefits), one thing that's immediately apparent is how much more efficiently both reconstruction and new construction have proceeded outside the actual WTC site than inside it.

This year, however, Francis noted that for the first time since he's been doing this tour, there's actually much to see on the site. At the northwest corner, just beyond the North Memorial Pool that occupies the space of the old North Tower, is the new 1 World Trade Center, the building we were originally told would be the Freedom Tower, but somehow no longer will be, hasn't reached its full 1776-foot height but is suddenly (at least for a lot of us it seemed a sudden development) tall enough, and much of its height finished-looking enough, to be a presence in the Lower Manhattan skyline. It's also turning out to be a considerably more conventional-looking building than we used to see in the renderings. (The only other major building on the site that has taken significant shape is the new 4 WTC, at the southeast corner. I'm not counting the weird-looking pavilion that will house the Museum expected to open next year as a "major building.")

Given the expected demand for access, and the presumably obvious need for super-security, the procedure for visiting is reasonable. It's free, but reservations are required, and you must have your scannable Visitor Pass, which you can easily print out yourself, or if necessary have printed for you the day of your visit, as long as you allow even more extra time. (You're advised to arrive no more than 30 minutes and no fewer than 15 minutes before your scheduled time.) It's easy to make a reservation online, and the site not only explains the ins and outs of making your actual visit but provides you with a lot of information (and links to more) to enhance the experience.

Once you get to the entrance, which is well to the south of the WTC itself, and outside the construction zone, there's a seemingly endless series of pass checks, inspections, scans, and whatnots, including of course a metal detector and X-ray screening (belts off, folks! but not shoes, though), in the course of which you have gradually made your way to the southwestern corner of the WTC site. Maybe it was just me, but when I passed the final obstacle, it took me a moment to realize I was actually on the memorial site.

I've included several views of the memorial pools to avoid having to describe them. The sound of the water flowing over the sides is, as many observers have reported, loud enough to drown out the surrounding sounds of the city, and I was pleased to discover that on a windy day you're quite open to being doused with mist from the falls. I thought that was a nice sign of ongoing life.

Let me quote one more paragraph from Martin Filler's New York Review of Books encomium:

Against all odds and despite tremendous opposition from all quarters, the Israeli-American Arad—an obscure thirty-four-year-old New York City Housing Authority architect when his starkly Minimalist proposal, Reflecting Absence, won the memorial competition in 2004—has created the most powerful example of commemorative design since Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial of 1981–1982 in Washington, D.C. It is not accidental that Arad’s scheme derives so directly in several respects from Lin’s epochal monument (she was a decisive voice on the jury that selected the September 11 memorial design, a commission that could have been hers for the asking but for which she did not compete), yet the congruities between the two do not in any way lessen Arad’s stupendous achievement.

I would encourage you to read the whole piece, to absorb the perspective of someone who was genuinely overwhelmed by the memorial. I'm certainly glad I did it, though. The one thing that really got to me was the occasional flower (suspiciously uniform, I noted) inserted in the cutouts in the brass displays of the victims' names -- or in once case a small American flag. They were stark reminders of the gap left in the survivors' circle of each of the victims.

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