A WEEK IN NEW YORK - PART TWO : GROUND ZERO

APRIL 4, 2025

                A BIRD ALIGHTS AT GROUND ZERO

This week I would like to show a small set of images from my first trip to Ground Zero. I was determined to visit the museum and memorial, even though I knew it would bring up very unpleasant memories. Fran and I decided to devote most of a day there, and I am very glad that we could spend the time, and that we were lucky (smart?) enough to go on an ordinary day without the crowds of a Summer weekend. Here are my thoughts on the memorial and the museum, warts and all.

It still grates that the museum was not made part of the Smithsonian. Our decade in D.C. taught us that museums, especially those that memorialize a key point in our nation’s history, should be free to the public. I would recommend that you purchase a special pass that allows “free” admission to a few NYC sights, so that at least you won’t have to stand on line and fork over $30.00 or so to get in - you can pretend that your government can sustain the memorial and the museum without you having to chip in.

                                                                   THE TOP FLOOR OF THE MUSEUM BUILDING WITH THE FREEDOM TOWER BEYOND.

We arrived a few minutes earlier than our appointed admission time, and I found the initial layout of the site very disorienting. We emerged from the subway at one of several stations that are fairly close to the site, and soon realized that we had entered a precinct that was part of the city, but separate at the same time. We crossed the first street, and found that it was mostly utilized by the police vehicles that were still ubiquitous at the site. Then we confronted the Oculus, Calatrava’s gigantic sculpture masquerading as a train station. It is breathtaking and at the same time looks like it was dropped down in Manhattan from outer space, with no real relationship with the present day memorial site or with my memories of the former site of the Twin Towers.  Fran remarked that it looked like it might even crash into it’s closest neighboring tower.

Across another empty street and we arrived at the museum building, which was a fairly opaque two-story parallelogram with its own arbitrary placement on the site. At least the entry plaza, which had enough snaking lines to handle thousands, was actually empty, and we counted our blessings.

                                                                   THE LAST STRUCTURAL PIER THAT LEFT "THE HOLE" WITH SIGNATURES OF THE VARIOUS WORKERS AT GRAND ZERO IS ONE OF THE FEATURED ARTIFACTS IN THE GRAND SPACE WAY UNDERGROUND.

This building was designed totally from the inside, and successfully allowed the crowds to be uplifted to the second floor with a sloped roof that directed views toward the site and the Freedom Tower across the ponds that marked the original towers. The building’s sequence almost disguised the fact that we were about to plunge a good three or four stories below grade to confront the original foundations of the towers destroyed on September 11th.

Anyone alive on that day has a special relationship with the events. Our experience was unlike that of those waking up on the East Coast. I liken the “tape delay” to watching the Super Bowl, when West Coast residents realize how our day differs so much from the vast majority of Americans who still cling to the Atlantic coast. As usual my son Benjamin woke up his dad to drive him to school, but this time with a confusing story about a plane having hit the World Trade Center. I tried to comfort him with my knowledge that a bomber had barely scratched the Empire State Building during World War II, but as we turned on the television I realized that something was very wrong. And then we watched with horror as the second plane turned and hit the other tower. For the next hour or so we watched New York and Washington under attack, all occurring live on TV before we went school

                                                                  A DETAIL OF ONE OF THE REFLECTING POOLS IN THE MEMORIAL.

A few months before September I had stood in the plaza wondering if I should bother to take the elevator up to the top of the tower before deciding that I could always come back, and since it was a nice day, I might as well walk across the Brooklyn Bridge instead. A little more than a month after September 11th, Benjamin and I went on a preplanned surprise trip for my Mother’s birthday on an empty plane to an empty Kennedy Airport, while Ground Zero still smoldered.

The museum experience was just what you might expect. It didn’t take much twisting of the knife before I was nearly bawling. Each turn on the way down to the bottom provided another small reminder that would hit each person differently. And even though I knew that the journey of the second doomed plane was right around the corner, I could barely control myself when it eventually showed up. But I had two overwhelming emotions as we journeyed down to bedrock. One was that the museum was nearly empty, with no real attempt to tell a story besides “being there” and exhibiting a few giant artifacts from the site. The second was that Fran and I were not the oldest people there, but that most of the visitors were not reliving memories, but seeing this story from their history books

                                                                  ONE MEMORIAL POOL AND A FLIGHTLESS BIRD BEYOND.

The museum in my opinion suffered from the same problem as most of the museums that came after the Guggenheim. It is arranged absolutely backwards. While the sequence downstairs is actually handled quite well, and the ending space under the original towers is large and impressive, this weird “entry lobby” is as empty as any main space that attempts to mimic the power of the Guggenheim's main space. The power of the Guggenheim is that the main space is an empty gesture, with no relation to the art on exhibit all around it. But the art is not hidden, since it is always in an uneasy relationship with that space. All of it’s successors try and fail to come up with as powerful a grand space, but then in various degrees divorce the art in ordinary rooms beyond and separated from the great space.

                WHAT A SCULPTURE! TRY TO IMAGINE WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE FROM THAT CORNER OFFICE THIRTY FEET AWAY.

The separation here was almost total, compounded by a way-finding problem made almost impossible by a total lack of signage. As an architect, I relied on faith that there had to be exhibits somewhere, but only this instinct finally led me to the main exhibit hall underneath the second tower. It was only there that Fran and I found a museum so comprehensive that we barely got through it in more than the three hours we spent there holding back tears. I would submit that you wouldn’t have to be a total doofus to miss the entire thing - that’s how badly it was hidden.

                                                                  EXTERIOR DETAILS CRY OUT FOR INVESTIGATION.

We emerged outside to the memorial, which I liked better than Fran, who thought that the water dropping into the pools was just way too loud. I thought that the design was quite successful in dealing with the fact that we were overlooking a giant graveyard. Just like at the Vietnam memorial, the names were overwhelming in both their variety and normalcy. The act of adding a carnation to the names denoting that today was their birthday was a reminder that everyone named had died on the same day at this place.

                                                                  THE INTERIOR IS AS OVERWHELMING AS IT IS DIVORCED FROM FUNCTIONAL CONCERNS.

The biggest disappointment of the entire site was Calatrava’s Oculus building. It is an incredible sculpture by an architect/engineer whose work continues to amaze even when you know what is coming. The photographs that I managed to take in a few minutes only scratch the surface. It is one of those buildings that is so photogenic that a photographer struggles to say anything new even while he or she realizes that it will take many visits to even realize when you are getting a good shot rather than just another ordinary one. It’s just so beautiful while being completely arbitrary. It makes the Guggenheim look like it completely fits in to the Upper East Side - the concrete spaceship has been superseded by a white bird of prey in Lower Manhattan. The ribs invite detailed and abstract images that have as little relation to the actual building as the building has to the site itself.

                                                                  LIGHT AND SHADOW PLAY AMONG THE RIBS.

The Oculus is supposedly a train station that serves the PATH trains to New Jersey and connects to myriad subway lines as well. We entered the building, were overwhelmed by the space, and realized that while 250,000 thousand people might actually travel though here every day, the train station was so hidden beyond what was really another mall that the entire building was called into question. In fact the Oculus’s only reason for being should have been as the main entry space to the museum. It should have been the Museum and Memorial in one, and then this incredible space would have had some justification. Maybe someday.

                                                                   THERE IS ALMOST NO LIMIT ON THE ABSTRACT COMPOSITIONS THAT YOU CAN CREATE OUT OF THIS SCULPTURAL SPACE THAT DEFIES ANY RELATIONSHIP WITH ITS SITE OR ITS FUNCTION AS A TRAIN STATION, OR EVEN WORSE AS A MALL IN THE MIDST OF A MEMORIAL SITE.