Wait a minute, I have to get my flameproof gear on here . . . I'm about to write something really inflammatory, so be forewarned.
We got some very good news recently: There are 40 fewer people on the list of World Trade Center casualties than we thought. That's excellent. The number is still incomprehensible—2,752—but at least it's 40 fewer than we thought it was. Any reduction is miraculous, considering how many people were in the towers when they were hit and how many more rushed in to save those unable to rush out. The total is a little less than the number of people who will fit on two 10-car subway trains. Two rush-hour trains of the dead. About a third of the population of the podunk town I grew up in.
I follow the 9/11 tidbits in the news kind of obsessively, as I imagine most New Yorkers do. I check the Times every day, and for my job, I look at the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.'s (LMDC) site to see what's happening today with the World Trade Center site. It's not surprising that there's contention over the final design of the site, with so many competing interests down there. First off, the site's owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The buildings were leased to Larry Silverstein, who's still trying to collect the insurance money on them, as soon as the cheapskate insurance companies will fork over for two separate attacks, one on each building (their belief is that it was one attack and they only owe for one building; go figure). That's where most of the money for the new buildings is coming from. But there's also federal money coming in for the permanent PATH station to replace the temporary one that's there now, and for the new Fulton Street Transit Center that will link the PATH and all the subway lines near there, and for the repair and finishing of the section of Route 9A/West Street behind the towers that was damaged when they fell.
So you have the Port Authority, the Metropolitan Transit Authority/NYCT, NYSDOT, the feds, Larry Silverstein, the Governor, the Mayor, a council of business people affected by 9/11, architects, civic organizations, ordinary residents, developers, green building organizations—and the families of the victims. I've been writing about this train wreck of organizations and competing interests for work, which is how I know this stuff and I have to say it's amazing that it's gotten as far as it has with so many cooks stirring the soup. This seems to be due in part to the amazing powers of mediation being practiced by the folks at LMDC (for whom I do not work, in the interests of disclosure). They're doing an incredible amount of public outreach, of the kind never seen before for any kind of project in the city, as well as coordinating between all these agencies and the interests of the ordinary citizens who live down there.
What amazes me (here it comes) is how much power the families of the victims are wielding in what goes where on the 16 acres of what used to be the World Trade Center plaza. They've basically dictated that nothing will be built in the footprints of the towers themselves, including the existing PATH tracks that run beneath what used to be the south tower, regardless of expense. The footprints of those two buildings are basically being treated as grave sites, although they have been stripped and excavated almost to the bedrock and anything that might have been vaguely recognizable as human remains was carted off to Fresh Kills to be sifted through, and then returned to next of kin, if possible, or buried there. So if there are any remains that aren't ash or organic molecules, they're in Fresh Kills, across the bay, or trapped in the the ductwork of adjacent buildings, or blown across the river or in the lungs of thousands of people who worked there in the aftermath.
To qualify how harsh this sounds, let me say that I understand these people are grieving and that I can't possibly understand their depth of feeling, because I didn't lose anyone. I acknowledge that. I'll also be the first to admit that I have a complete lack of sentimentality when it comes to the remains of loved ones. When the spirit of life is gone from the body, so is whatever made that person who they were. What's left is a collection of organic chemicals best used for fertilizer or as organ donations, where possible. I'm sentimental about what they've left in objects, things they've said to me, my own memories, not about the bone house itself. That's not them, anymore, as far as I'm concerned.
But given that, those footprints are still not the final resting place of those people. If it's anywhere, it's Fresh Kills, where there's going to be a beautiful memorial mound built, as the landfill is transformed into a nature preserve (that's another ironic story altogether). Working around their requests isn't a hardship, for the most part, and Libeskind's done a beautiful job of it. I'm sure whoever wins the memorial competition will, too. It only becomes a problem when you get to moving the PATH train tracks or figuring out how to accommodate all those visitors and their buses, and where to find enough land to make the site pay for itself without having it become so incredibly dense with retail and commercial space that it's worse than it was before. Then it starts to seem . . . well, like there's a bit of "big fish in small pond" going on.
To give this a slightly different perspective, too, I'll bring up the African Burial Ground. This was ten years in the making, and while it did finally involve the abandonment of the building plans for the site, there were actual, physical human remains involved, not just an empty space. I would argue that the footprints are being treated very differently than these actual burial grounds. They are, at best, symbolic, and are being treated as literal graves. This seems really conterproductive to me as well as counterintuitive.
In some ways, this goes back to some of the issues I wrote about in "Owning 9/11": does proximity to the event grant one special rights to interpret it? As I said there, yes and no. There's no denying that the more intimate one's experience with the event was, the more sharply felt it's got to be, and the more unchallengable that personal experience becomes for people who were more distant from it. In a sense, the people inside that event own it. But that doesn't make any other experience of it less legitimate. But what kind of power does that "first right" of interpretation give people?
First, there's the question of whether being the victim's families gives these people the "first right" or not. I'm certainly not saying it doesn't give them a special status. It does. Their loved ones were innocent victims of a horrendous act of war. What they're doing is speaking for people who can't speak for themselves.
I guess what I'm really asking is should the victim's families, in light of the facts that (a) they, by definition, weren't there on site when 9/11 was happening, and (b) that the site itself contains only minuscule amounts of, if any, actual human remains have so much say in what happens to the site? 9/11 affected everyone in the country, to varying degrees. How do we decide who gets to say how that site is treated?
I don't have any answers for this, it's just a question I've been mulling over while watching the negotiations and finagling and back and forthing. The site is a giant turf war of competing interests and I don't know how anything will ever get worked out there. If you're interested in following it, here are a few good places to look, besides the links at the top:
Gotham Gazette's Rebuilding NYC
The Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York
Imagine New York
New York New Visions
Rebuild Downtown Our Town (R.DOT)
Green Ground Zero
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