They'll always come. Wave after wave after wave of commuters. Will they all stop at the memorial, no. Will they think about it yes. Put the memorial in their path and make them walk around it (Yes, I'm one of the Jersey people that commuted through the WTC on the PATH so I know about the crowds and their traffic patterns.) The southeast corner of the original WTC site had the preponderance of commuter foot traffic in and out of the complex. The only change I would make to the current plan is to place the memorial in that corner rather than the southwest corner. I would even go so far as to have four separate memorials in each of the four corners.
The Civil War was fought on farms and fields. A field is an appropriate memorial. Pearl Harbor was a Navy installation and still is. The World Trade Center was an office complex and shopping mall. And that's what it should be again.
The crowdedness of this plan's buildings, stores and people means this will be a denser urban space than even Times Square.
Is this something new? Walk around the rest of downtown and you'll see dense urban space. The original format of the WTC towers provided lots of open space. What I can tell of the new plan does the same. Dense urban space is very relative in Manhattan and the author knows that.
New York's foot traffic is a rough force, which in time will erode and erase September 11... ...There is little talk of September 11 in New York City, an irrepressibly partisan place. The act of remembrance is now done by the visitors at the fence, looking in.
It is true that there is little talk of 9/11 in NYC these days. I don' t know if it just because it's hard for people to talk about or if they really have forgotten. I tend to believe more the former though the latter is there. I know when I have a customer meeting scheduled around the site, I get angry, and I don't like being there.
The low reason for building the current plan is that the site is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the Port Authority, the landlord-owner of the real estate, wants its rent flow back (some $120 million annually).
Why is this so low? Commerce is why NYC was attacked in the first place.
Remembrance in our time has become difficult. We are becoming a culture of short-term memory, with mass media creating inexhaustibly new experiences for us to have, discard and forget. The practice of deep memory, much less common memory, is becoming harder to maintain.
Totally agree. However, I don't think keeping the walls of the bathtub exposed would really change that.
They'll always come. Wave after wave after wave of commuters. Will they all stop at the memorial, no. Will they think about it yes.
This is true. When I worked down there, I used to walk by Alexander Hamilton's grave, every morning. It is two blocks away, in the courtyard of Trinity Church. I never saw anyone even pause to look at the gravesite except myself. NYers move on.