Forecast
: The weather on this September 11th will be very much like the weather on last September 11th.
The hole
: An excellent suggestion for the 9.11 memorial at the World Trade Center on kuro5hin:
My idea is to focus on the “bathtub” in which the World Trade Center was constructed, the seven-story deep pit which covers most of the site (about 70%, on the Western side). As a result of the recovery efforts, the bathtub is now exposed, and it is visually striking. As one visitor commented, “The very vacantness of this space is a memorial in itself. The nothingness memorializes the people lost.”… To my eye, the walls of the bathtub are a more vivid reminder of the tragedy than any park could be. Therefore, I think the edge of the bathtub should remain visible in whatever redevelopment is done…. at least one full wall should remain open to the full depth, and there should be at least a one- or two-story drop around the rest of the edge. Access to any buildings on the site would be on short bridges from the perimeter….
What is beautiful about this idea is that from the bottom of the hole, you are forced to look up — just as we were forced to look up at the Trade Center towers. Only now, we look up at what is not there.
Yes, one could say that hole-in-the-ground memorials were done with the Vietnam memorial in Washington, but that does not bother me.
Our 9.11 memorial needs this kind of vision.
Rudy is wrong
: I became a big admirer of Rudy Guliani but I have to say that I think he is wrong about the 9.11 memorial. He says in Time that “Ground Zero is a cemetery…. If it were up to me, I’d devote the entire 16 acres to the memorial.”
But Ground Zero is more than Ground Zero. It is the World Trade Center. It is a place where people not only died but lived. It is a part of a city that lives on.
We must remember. We must remember with a fitting memorial. But we should not turn this key part of the city into a scar. Israel does not turn every corner where there has been an attack into a dead place. Russia did not turn Leningrad into full-city memorial to its dead. An appropriate memorial is not just about death and victimhood; it is about carrying on; it is about life, too.
