From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
Local Heroes
Never mind the government's stalled efforts. Visit a neighborhood memorial on Veterans Day.
A day for remembering the dead, Veterans Day is also an occasion to reflect on how America recalls catastrophe. A memorial is supposed to be, among other things, a place for individual contemplation in a civic setting. As designer Maya Lin said of her Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington: "Death is, in the end, a personal and private matter, and the area contained with this memorial is a quiet place, meant for personal reflection and private reckoning."
Four years after 9/11, New Yorkers have no memorial for personal reflection at Ground Zero--and no prospects for one. Saying in late September that the project had aroused "too much opposition, too much controversy," New York Gov. George Pataki canceled plans to build an International Freedom Center at the World Trade Center site. But, he added, "we must move forward with our first priority--the creation of an inspiring memorial to pay tribute to our lost loved ones and tell their stories to the world." No one seriously believes this will happen anytime soon.
It's a good thing, then, that neighborhoods all over New York have ignored such official efforts and simply built their own. In a scale unprecedented since World War I, thousands of memorials have sprung up in parks, cemeteries, front yards, firehouses, schools and churches all over the five boroughs.
A wall in Greenwich Village, set aside and protected by St. Vincent's Hospital, is emblematic. Full of the messages, mementos, small belongings and photos of the missing that were posted in the hospital's emergency room in the days after 9/11, it vividly memorializes the event, offering a display that is at once primitive and uplifting.
Like the wall, most neighborhood memorials list names, either permanently or informally. Niches or boxes hold photographs, biographies or poems. Flowers and trees, representing beauty and life, often surround the site. Catholic churches frequently display crosses, some fabricated from steel from the World Trade Center. A particularly powerful example can be seen on the beach at Breezy Point, Queens: two rough steel girders etched with the date 9.11.01, where the familiar INRI (the initials for the Latin title that Pontius Pilate had written over the head of Jesus on the cross) would usually be found.
Queens, Staten Island and Brooklyn have erected borough memorials on waterfront sites alive with symbolism. These are the vantage points from which residents of the boroughs gathered in 2001 and watched the Trade Center burn. "The ocean renews," said the designer of the Queens site. "This is a place of life."
If it seems so obvious to ordinary people what the content of such memorials should be, why can't officials build a simple memorial on downtown's sacred ground? Historian Cal Snyder, a Marine Corps veteran who fought in Vietnam and whose book on New York's war memorials ("Out of Fire and Valor") has just been published, says that the failure to build a common, central 9/11 memorial fits a historic pattern.
Government typically sets out to create a major memorial after a catastrophic event, gets bogged down in years of infighting and acrimony, and then builds nothing at all, or something shockingly trite, while neighborhood groups either raise money to build their own memorials or do so without new funds. The angels, infants, eagles, horses and plaques in city parks and public spaces, which are thought of today as works of art, were most often put up by groups of citizens, not by government. Grieving mothers erected the doughboy in Park Slope, Brooklyn. An Irish regiment paid for the statue of Father Duffy (a First Lieutenant and chaplain of the legendary Fighting 69th Infantry during World War I) in Times Square.
It seems government always makes the same mistakes. The representatives of the Freedom Center, for example, spoke of democracy and common values but in an abstract way that had little to do with 9/11. The current debacle is almost a carbon copy of what happened after World War I, when the city tried to create a magnificent memorial and then found itself stalled by political disputes.
The mayor's committee, selected from the "usual cast of luminaries and numbering over 200," says Mr. Snyder, "argued endlessly with the City Council and everyone else over an ever-changing range of schemes." Then, as now, many of the proposals were grandiose and self-serving. For instance, there was the immense plaza (called "God's Thumb," for its dominating height) proposed for the bluffs above the Hudson, that would present a tableau of heroic industrial workers alongside destitute women and children victimized by war.
New York had sent 370,000 men to the battlefields of Europe, nearly one-sixth of all Americans who served. Yet not until Nov. 11, 1923 (five years after Armistice Day, the forerunner to Veterans Day), did the city manage to open the Eternal Light Memorial Flagpole in Madison Square Park. Aloof and impersonal, the flagpole would be meaningless today without the words "Somme Offensive."
One might argue that Ground Zero is especially difficult to memorialize because lives were lost there but battles, as such, weren't fought. This was an event without analogy. It wasn't Verdun or Pearl Harbor. The country has never before sustained a bombing of its civilians at home by a foreign entity. As a result, officials pushed the Freedom Center away from the particular to the general, proposing to take visitors on a "journey through the history of freedom," both its successes and its failures, including genocide. The advocates said that they wanted to put the tragedy into "context."
But that is precisely what the neighborhood memorials don't do. Rather, they focus on particular names, particular photographs and particular stories. Setting aside a unique place to reflect on a single event is a way of pulling the memories out of the continuum of history and into our foremost thoughts.
Of course, the problem with the proposed memorials at Ground Zero is not simply that they are the products of large, impersonal bureaucracies. It is also that many of New York's elites are reluctant to discuss what really happened on 9/11: an attack on American citizens--an act of war. Some of those involved in shaping the future of Ground Zero so far have filed an amicus brief on behalf of Jose Padilla (an al Qaeda recruit currently being detained here as an enemy combatant) and made public statements equating the 9/11 attack with the Abu Ghraib scandal.
Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that when Mr. Snyder tried to arrange book signings in Manhattan, he found that a number of booksellers regarded the memorials he describes (spanning from the American Revolution to the present) as tributes to war-mongering. As one representative of the Upper West Side's Barnes & Noble explained, the store didn't want to endorse a book that "has to do with militarism."
Discouraging as this attitude is, it is comforting to know that the victims of the 9/11 attacks are being remembered in neighborhood nooks and crannies if not in grand, government-designed tributes. And when it comes time for New York officials to get serious about Ground Zero, they have three centuries of memorials to call on for example. Like the bronze tablet at the Young Men's Hebrew Association on 92nd Street, which reads: "Their bodies are dead but their spirit must live, and we must keep their memories fresh in order that we may ever be reminded of what we still must do."
Ms. Vitullo-Martin is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
