Opening of the week: New York’s September 11 Memorial

If just a week ago you viewed the new 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero in New York, you might have judged it “a visual bore,” said Blair Kamin in the Chicago Tribune. Ten years after nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks on the twin towers, the former footprints of those skyscrapers have been marked by two vast granite-faced pits. The low, broad railing that surrounds each void bears the roll call of the dead one might expect, given that “rows of victims’ names have practically become a cliché” in our public memorials. But the “painfully austere” site that I visited before the official opening exists no more. This Sept. 11, a switch was hit, and veils of water began cascading down all four sides of each dark hole. The falls add animation and delight to the memorial, and even, when the mist is struck by sunlight, a few small rainbows. “A happy discovery,” architect Michael Arad says of that crowning effect.

“But more than beauty is required of a memorial,” said Witold Rybczynski in Slate.com. There’s no doubt that the waterfalls themselves will sparkle on sunny days, and their hushed roar will help make the surrounding plaza a place for quiet contemplation. But for contemplating what message? The memorial itself is “black as death,” and “there is nothing comforting” about gazing across an empty 65-yard space watching water fall endlessly onto a dark plateau and then again into a smaller, seemingly “bottomless” void at its center. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., has also been called gloomy, but that site, by forcing visitors to ascend a gentle slope after they’ve confronted the names of the American war dead, succeeds in lifting spirits too. At the September 11 Memorial, “the strongest sense I came away with was hopelessness.”

Give this place some time, said Paul Gold­berger in The New Yorker. It’s a difficult trick to strike a balance “between commemorating the lives lost and re-establishing the life” of a commercial neighborhood, but the memorial begins to do that. It will be years before the rebuilding of the World Trade Center is complete. An underground museum and four new skyscrapers have yet to be finished. But largely because of the trees and benches that surround the voids, you can already imagine lunching office workers being attracted by the plaza’s singular sense of “dignity and repose.” When you stand at Ground Zero today, you experience two profound truths: The victims of 9/11 will never come back, but “the life of the city has to.”

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