New York Stories Vol. 11: The 9/11 Memorial

I’m not writing much here because anything you can say about September 11 seems to have been said, or shouldn’t be.

I visited the towers of the World Trade Center once, on Saturday, March 18, 2000.  It was the Saturday morning concluding the NCTE Spring Meeting in New York.  It snowed on St. Patrick’s Day, the day before.  I walked from my hotel on 49th and 1st down the length of Manhattan, my first of many such pointless walks.  I was naive and didn’t realize that since it was a Saturday, the area around the World Trade Center would be basically empty.  I just remember being surprised at all that space down there.

Space is a visual theme of the Memorial, the negative space of the two huge fountains where the buildings used to stand.  I remember feeling uncomfortable about the design when I had first heard about the idea.  And some discomfort is, I think, an okay thing for a site memorializing an event like September 11.

One of the two massive memorial fountains, with names of the dead etched on the stone perimeter, detailed below.

Other entries in the New York stories series:

• Vol. 10: The Lower East Side Tenement Museum
• Vol. 9: The Highline
• Vol. 8: Dinner in Patrick Berry’s hood
• Vol. 7: Subway History
• Vol. 6: June 2009 trip highlights
• Vol. 5: Some historical sites
• Vol. 4: Eating in the city
• Vol. 3: The Brooklyn Bridge
• Vol. 2: Green spaces in the city
• Vol. 1: Central Park