From the WSJ Opinion Archives
AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
Dying Large
The WTC site needs a memorial--but not a grandiose one.
I'm no expert in designing memorials, but having looked at some of the proposals for the site of the World Trade Center, I am not at all sure this task should be left to the experts. With the site almost cleared of debris, ideas have been pouring in. The papers have been full of debate over what to build--or not build--where the twin towers stood. There is considerable competition to come up with suggestions so eye-catching that they will stand out from the rest, dominating the field as the towers once commanded the city skyline.
But something here is amiss. What leaps out so far is mainly the gargantuan scale of the memorials proposed, and the oddly literal nature of the ideas behind them.
Last Friday, for instance, The Wall Street Journal ran a story on the debate over the site, illustrated by several proposed designs, courtesy of three architectural firms. The proposals were huge and awful, immense displays apparently based on the premise that the way to commemorate a terrible and vast event is to build something ghastly and very large. One, resembling twisted strips of a giant bathmat, would overwhelm the downtown skyline. So would another, seemingly modeled on enormous chunks of Swiss cheese.
There have been proposals for giant phantom towers of light, for immense buildings hollow in the top half, and--of course--there is the thought of simply rebuilding the towers as they were. There is the push to turn the space into a park. Most notably, there is Rudy Giuliani's parting exhortation that the entire site be given over to a memorial.
America is a country that likes to think large. That is what inspired the twin towers in the first place. But we are also a very young country, and in the matter of choosing an appropriate memorial, we could do with a little more perspective. People do not grow up here surrounded by monuments of the past millennium; the nation itself is just edging up on its 226th anniversary of independence. And in living memory, we have had very little experience of war within our own shores. In 1941, we suffered the attack on Pearl Harbor, and from then on we crossed the oceans for our wars. We are simply not much seasoned in commemorating domestic sites of war.
We also live in a time when history is not much taught, when all things too often seem to center on the next 15 minutes. That's not entirely crazy; this is also an age with so much to take in that it can require a major act of will to sit back, on occasion, and ask what it all means.
But in choosing the appropriate memorial for the World Trade Center, that is precisely what's needed, and part of this question involves asking where it might fit in not only for a generation but in the history of what one hopes will be a nation lasting many centuries beyond our own.
Here, we might look to countries that know far more, firsthand, of the kind of horror we witnessed on Sept. 11. In the week following the attack, Mr. Giuliani compared the bravery of New Yorkers to that of Londoners during the blitz. The bravery I would not contest. But the blitz was worse. For months in 1940 and 1941, German warplanes bombed not only London but a slew of British cities, burying people in the rubble of their own homes and setting off firestorms in the streets. More than 40,000 civilians died.
The British built memorials. But they also rebuilt their cities, and they built anew; they did not keep the damaged areas frozen in time; they did not wall them off as dedicated strictly to the memory of war. They went forward. Much the same happened across Europe. In Rotterdam, where bombing reduced the center of the city to rubble, the Dutch built a statue of a man with his heart ripped out--but they also rebuilt the center of their vital, busy port city.
Given the scale of such attacks in World War II, probably there was no other choice. One could argue that in New York, all we are talking about is a 16-acre site. Were it a rural battlefield, dedication of such space would require almost no debate--it would be obvious. But one ancient truth about real estate is that location really does matter. Part of the problem with this part of the debate is that the term real estate comes loaded with banal connotations--it is a cold, unlovely phrase. What we are talking about, however, is land that in a busy city--given the chance--can serve over the generations as home to an immensely rich universe of human experience.
In Manhattan, 16 acres is an enormous amount of space, especially in the financial district. This is a neighborhood in which commerce--fast, exuberant and very much alive--is not only the custom but part of the city's soul. That is precisely why the towers were built there.
What keeps getting lost in the current discussion is that memorials are metaphors. They are a way not of fossilizing what we feel we must honor and remember but of symbolizing it. The site of the World Trade Center invokes many things--the grief and loss and incredible heroism of that day--but underlying all of these is the enormous vitality that marked the place before it was attacked.
Summing that up will take true art, and there it helps to remember that art rarely works best when it turns literal. There are better ways to honor those who died on Sept. 11 than to commandeer for memory the entire site--an act that right now might seem far too small, but as the years go by might begin to look less like the lovely memorial we want it to be and more like a monument to the ego of our times.
We do not know yet what wars our children may be forced to fight; we do not even know yet what this one will bring next. Surely, with enough care, we can make a memorial in lower Manhattan that does honor to the dead but leaves room for the living.
Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."
