Fabb
March 13th, 2003, 05:06 AM
January 25, 2002
Downtown, a Necropolis Is Flourishing
By JOHN TIERNEY
Is there a Lycian syndrome developing in Lower Manhattan?
This is an awkward question for several reasons, starting with the fact that most New Yorkers are unacquainted with the glory that was Lycia. Its entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica doesn't take up much room. Lycia is described as a district along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey inhabited in the first millennium B.C. by people about whom relatively little is known, although they are noted for their "distinctive type of funerary architecture."
Lycia is called "the land of tombs" because its ruins consist mainly of hillsides covered with elaborate sarcophagi and funeral chambers sculptured from stone and carved into cliffs. The workmanship can be exquisite, but by the time you visit your fifth Lycian necropolis and contemplate your 200th tomb, you may suspect that there's a simple explanation for the Lycians' obscurity. While their Greek neighbors were creating art and literature, the Lycians were building memorials to the dead.
Even before Sept. 11, the proliferation of memorials in Lower Manhattan was causing some people to wonder if the neighborhood was becoming too necropolitan. Already there were memorials to fallen police officers and victims of the Holocaust, and a memorial was being built to victims of the Irish potato famine. Now Rudolph W. Giuliani and some relatives of the Sept. 11 victims have proposed turning the entire 16-acre site of the World Trade Center into a memorial.
Some of the relatives consider any commercial development a desecration of hallowed ground. Their feelings are understandable, and no politician wants to argue with a grieving widow. But there are many other widows of other crimes and accidents who are getting no monetary compensation or memorial of any kind. If the relatives of the 40,000 people killed in car accidents each year made similar demands, the country's road system would be shut down.
That's not to say that Sept. 11 was the equivalent of 3,000 traffic accidents. It was a singular tragedy that deserves a singular memorial. But a lovely memorial, like the towers of light under consideration, could be built without turning the whole site into a funerary park. Preserving the footprints of the towers would be enough.
Turning the whole site into a memorial would leave downtown looking less like New York than like the Mall in Washington — an open space that's occasionally useful for public events but more often feels empty and dreary. The proposed 16-acre memorial would actually be big even by the standards of Washington, which is honoring the veterans of World War II with a memorial on the Mall less than half that size (and even that has been criticized as too big).
HUGE monuments to the dead belong in museum cities like Washington and Rome and Xanthus (the principal city of Lycia), not in a commercial hub. Lower Manhattan attracted the victims of Sept. 11, like millions of immigrants before, because it was so crowded and active and changeable — the tip of an island that kept adding shoreline to accommodate new people and new businesses. They came here from old cities with grand memorials and ancient cemeteries because the streets of New York offered so many opportunities to the living.
Some of the victims' families will never be reconciled to seeing new commerce on the site, but there are some who see no sacrilege in it. "We need a memorial, but I'm not one of those who thinks it has to take up the whole site," said Patricia Perry, who lost her son John W. Perry, a police officer, on Sept. 11. "We have to rise above the tragedy and rebuild. We have to go on with life."
Whatever size the memorial turns out to be, it could do more than mourn the victims of Sept. 11. A depiction of firemen raising a flag over the rubble (which created a controversy over the race and ethnicity of the men) would be inadequate no matter what the men looked like, because it would be a copy of the Iwo Jima memorial without the power of the original. The raising of the flag at Iwo Jima was a celebration of heroism and victory by soldiers who had conquered that island. Why mimic that image for an act of mourning at a place of defeat?
There was heroism at the World Trade Center, but it was embodied most clearly by the firefighters who rushed up into the burning buildings on Sept. 11, not by the ones who stood afterward on top of the rubble. A memorial showing firefighters going into the towers, or helping people escape, would be a better tribute than a flag flying over their remains. Leave the funerary monuments to the Lycians.
March 13, 2003
Memorials Proliferate in Crowded Downtown
By JULIE V. IOVINE
On Monday in Lower Manhattan a lone figure, hooded against March winds, stood at the glass-block wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, warmed by the reflected sun and a cigarette.
Several blocks to the north and west, there was no one at the Irish Hunger Memorial to hear the lilting Irish voices emanating from a recording beneath its imported sod roof. At Battery Park, however, a dozen people lingered by the Koenig Sphere, a sculpture recovered from the World Trade Center Plaza that, along with an eternal flame, is as temporary memorial to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
It takes only a lunchtime stroll to pass these and dozens of other monuments that, with increasing frequency, are finding homes in Lower Manhattan. The Museum of Jewish Heritage, at the southern edge of Battery Park City, is adding a wing and a memorial made of gigantic granite boulders sprouting trees. In late February officials at the African Burial Ground, at Duane Street and Broadway, announced that five finalists were competing to design a memorial to be completed next year.
And of course the early stages of planning a significant memorial at the World Trade Center site are getting under way. All this has prompted discussions among residents, urban planners and historians about the potential effect of so many monuments to death and loss on a living neighborhood, as well as concerns about the influx of roughly five million tourists once the memorial is built. Today the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is expected to release its mission statement for the World Trade Center memorial.
"All the issues about memorial mania come together in Lower Manhattan," said Michele Bogart, an art historian and vice president of the Art Commission, a New York City agency that reviews and approves all artwork, architecture, landscaping and street furniture proposed for city property.
These issues are sometimes contradictory, concerning the need for spaces that are commemorative of tragic events but also optimistic, respectfully apart as well as integrated into the community. In one camp are those who welcome the traffic and business that tourists would bring. They say memorials are an honored subset of the larger cultural enrichment of a neighborhood. Fears that accumulating memorials will turn the neighborhood into an institutionalized Washington Mall of the North are exaggerated, they add.
But others are less welcoming, and it is not just neighborhood residents, who take a no-memorials-in-my-backyard stand. Planners and architects caution that emotionally freighted memorials can create urban spaces that residents do not want to use.
"That's part of the challenge of downtown," said Wendy Evans Joseph, president of the Architectural League of New York, who has designed several Holocaust memorials. "How much can an area sustain that's not part of the city fabric?"
After the opening of the Irish Hunger Memorial in July, the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote in Newsday that while uptown had a Museum Mile, downtown had the Misery Mile. Downtown residents have since become increasingly adamant about keeping their neighborhood free of additional memorials.
"They're taking up every last bit of open land," said Helene Zucker Seeman, a founder of Battery Park City United, a residents' group. She complained that the abundance of memorials was uninviting to families with children, who want more space devoted to recreation. "While everyone's crying out for open space, we're building memorials and parks just for the elderly to walk through," she said. When the Koenig Sphere was about to be relocated from the World Trade Center site to the end of a cherry-tree-lined circular park on Liberty Street, Ms. Seeman joined other residents in threatening acts of civil disobedience if it was placed in any residential neighborhood downtown. The sphere was moved instead to the Battery, which was already home to more than 20 other memorials, which honor people from the explorer Giovanni da Verrazano (1909) to American merchant mariners (1991). These memorials are soon to be reorganized (some will be moved) to create a Heroes Walk and a bicycle path along the waterfront.
Adrian Benepe, the parks and recreation commissioner, whose city department oversees the Battery, is mindful that this tranquil setting, so ideal for monuments and meditating, could become overloaded. "The city is conscious of not wanting to overwhelm Lower Manhattan with memorials," Mr. Benepe said, noting that 9/11 memorials are being distributed throughout the five boroughs.
In January the Parks Department and the Battery Conservancy announced that the Battery would be the location for a 10,000-square-foot perennial Gardens of Remembrance, designed by Piet Oudolf, a Dutch landscape artist. "But that is not a traditional memorial," Mr. Benepe said. "It will create a contemplative space and four seasons of beauty."
Another 9/11 memorial, the Battery Labyrinth, 1,148 granite blocks shaped into seven rings that was dedicated on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, is between the Korean War Memorial and West Street.
Downtown is where Manhattan began, and the narrowing point of the island makes its maritime past feel pungent and alive. The 23-acre Battery and Battery Park City, though densely designed, add a bucolic sweep of green on the west side with inspiring views of the Hudson River. Affording views of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and Castle Clinton, "downtown is a national triangle of sorts and a magnet for other memorials," said James E. Young, the author of "The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning" and a historian of memorial architecture and planning.
By the 19th century Lower Manhattan was consciously reserved for memorials celebrating the Dutch-British relationship as well as American explorers and inventors, immigrants and soldiers. To safeguard Central Park, long the other ideal site for memorials, the landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted stipulated that most memorials be tucked away to make sure that those erected by special-interest groups did not overrun the park.
Over time the plaques, statues and fountains commemorating historic figures and events downtown have faded into the fabric of the city, that assimilation being the hallmark of a successful urban monument, according to residents and planners.
"I love the Police Memorial," David Stanke, a member of the World Trade Center Residents Committee, said of the fountain in Battery Park City dedicated in 1997 to officers killed on the job. "It's peaceful. I walk by it every day. Some days I think about it. Some days I don't. That's how a memorial design needs to be, integrated in a way that keeps the city alive, without creating any blockages."
Mr. Stanke is one of many residents who worry that if the World Trade Center memorial includes the remains of victims, as some families want, then it will be too much like a cemetery to ever become part of the daily rounds of neighborhood life.
Anita Contini, a vice president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation who is overseeing the competition for the trade center memorial, said that incorporating unidentified remains would be part of the plan, but that there would be no room for individual remains.
The development corporation recently hired a team of architects and landscape designers to re-evaluate all public spaces, including memorials, to clarify their relationships to one another through design, signs and landscaping.
Noting the paradox that most memorials become invisible within 20 years, Mr. Young said: "Compulsive memorializing doesn't fit in with the American personality. And even if we now have a tragedy to look back on, we're still mostly a forward-looking society."
Copyright 2003*The New York Times Company
Downtown, a Necropolis Is Flourishing
By JOHN TIERNEY
Is there a Lycian syndrome developing in Lower Manhattan?
This is an awkward question for several reasons, starting with the fact that most New Yorkers are unacquainted with the glory that was Lycia. Its entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica doesn't take up much room. Lycia is described as a district along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey inhabited in the first millennium B.C. by people about whom relatively little is known, although they are noted for their "distinctive type of funerary architecture."
Lycia is called "the land of tombs" because its ruins consist mainly of hillsides covered with elaborate sarcophagi and funeral chambers sculptured from stone and carved into cliffs. The workmanship can be exquisite, but by the time you visit your fifth Lycian necropolis and contemplate your 200th tomb, you may suspect that there's a simple explanation for the Lycians' obscurity. While their Greek neighbors were creating art and literature, the Lycians were building memorials to the dead.
Even before Sept. 11, the proliferation of memorials in Lower Manhattan was causing some people to wonder if the neighborhood was becoming too necropolitan. Already there were memorials to fallen police officers and victims of the Holocaust, and a memorial was being built to victims of the Irish potato famine. Now Rudolph W. Giuliani and some relatives of the Sept. 11 victims have proposed turning the entire 16-acre site of the World Trade Center into a memorial.
Some of the relatives consider any commercial development a desecration of hallowed ground. Their feelings are understandable, and no politician wants to argue with a grieving widow. But there are many other widows of other crimes and accidents who are getting no monetary compensation or memorial of any kind. If the relatives of the 40,000 people killed in car accidents each year made similar demands, the country's road system would be shut down.
That's not to say that Sept. 11 was the equivalent of 3,000 traffic accidents. It was a singular tragedy that deserves a singular memorial. But a lovely memorial, like the towers of light under consideration, could be built without turning the whole site into a funerary park. Preserving the footprints of the towers would be enough.
Turning the whole site into a memorial would leave downtown looking less like New York than like the Mall in Washington — an open space that's occasionally useful for public events but more often feels empty and dreary. The proposed 16-acre memorial would actually be big even by the standards of Washington, which is honoring the veterans of World War II with a memorial on the Mall less than half that size (and even that has been criticized as too big).
HUGE monuments to the dead belong in museum cities like Washington and Rome and Xanthus (the principal city of Lycia), not in a commercial hub. Lower Manhattan attracted the victims of Sept. 11, like millions of immigrants before, because it was so crowded and active and changeable — the tip of an island that kept adding shoreline to accommodate new people and new businesses. They came here from old cities with grand memorials and ancient cemeteries because the streets of New York offered so many opportunities to the living.
Some of the victims' families will never be reconciled to seeing new commerce on the site, but there are some who see no sacrilege in it. "We need a memorial, but I'm not one of those who thinks it has to take up the whole site," said Patricia Perry, who lost her son John W. Perry, a police officer, on Sept. 11. "We have to rise above the tragedy and rebuild. We have to go on with life."
Whatever size the memorial turns out to be, it could do more than mourn the victims of Sept. 11. A depiction of firemen raising a flag over the rubble (which created a controversy over the race and ethnicity of the men) would be inadequate no matter what the men looked like, because it would be a copy of the Iwo Jima memorial without the power of the original. The raising of the flag at Iwo Jima was a celebration of heroism and victory by soldiers who had conquered that island. Why mimic that image for an act of mourning at a place of defeat?
There was heroism at the World Trade Center, but it was embodied most clearly by the firefighters who rushed up into the burning buildings on Sept. 11, not by the ones who stood afterward on top of the rubble. A memorial showing firefighters going into the towers, or helping people escape, would be a better tribute than a flag flying over their remains. Leave the funerary monuments to the Lycians.
March 13, 2003
Memorials Proliferate in Crowded Downtown
By JULIE V. IOVINE
On Monday in Lower Manhattan a lone figure, hooded against March winds, stood at the glass-block wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, warmed by the reflected sun and a cigarette.
Several blocks to the north and west, there was no one at the Irish Hunger Memorial to hear the lilting Irish voices emanating from a recording beneath its imported sod roof. At Battery Park, however, a dozen people lingered by the Koenig Sphere, a sculpture recovered from the World Trade Center Plaza that, along with an eternal flame, is as temporary memorial to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
It takes only a lunchtime stroll to pass these and dozens of other monuments that, with increasing frequency, are finding homes in Lower Manhattan. The Museum of Jewish Heritage, at the southern edge of Battery Park City, is adding a wing and a memorial made of gigantic granite boulders sprouting trees. In late February officials at the African Burial Ground, at Duane Street and Broadway, announced that five finalists were competing to design a memorial to be completed next year.
And of course the early stages of planning a significant memorial at the World Trade Center site are getting under way. All this has prompted discussions among residents, urban planners and historians about the potential effect of so many monuments to death and loss on a living neighborhood, as well as concerns about the influx of roughly five million tourists once the memorial is built. Today the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is expected to release its mission statement for the World Trade Center memorial.
"All the issues about memorial mania come together in Lower Manhattan," said Michele Bogart, an art historian and vice president of the Art Commission, a New York City agency that reviews and approves all artwork, architecture, landscaping and street furniture proposed for city property.
These issues are sometimes contradictory, concerning the need for spaces that are commemorative of tragic events but also optimistic, respectfully apart as well as integrated into the community. In one camp are those who welcome the traffic and business that tourists would bring. They say memorials are an honored subset of the larger cultural enrichment of a neighborhood. Fears that accumulating memorials will turn the neighborhood into an institutionalized Washington Mall of the North are exaggerated, they add.
But others are less welcoming, and it is not just neighborhood residents, who take a no-memorials-in-my-backyard stand. Planners and architects caution that emotionally freighted memorials can create urban spaces that residents do not want to use.
"That's part of the challenge of downtown," said Wendy Evans Joseph, president of the Architectural League of New York, who has designed several Holocaust memorials. "How much can an area sustain that's not part of the city fabric?"
After the opening of the Irish Hunger Memorial in July, the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote in Newsday that while uptown had a Museum Mile, downtown had the Misery Mile. Downtown residents have since become increasingly adamant about keeping their neighborhood free of additional memorials.
"They're taking up every last bit of open land," said Helene Zucker Seeman, a founder of Battery Park City United, a residents' group. She complained that the abundance of memorials was uninviting to families with children, who want more space devoted to recreation. "While everyone's crying out for open space, we're building memorials and parks just for the elderly to walk through," she said. When the Koenig Sphere was about to be relocated from the World Trade Center site to the end of a cherry-tree-lined circular park on Liberty Street, Ms. Seeman joined other residents in threatening acts of civil disobedience if it was placed in any residential neighborhood downtown. The sphere was moved instead to the Battery, which was already home to more than 20 other memorials, which honor people from the explorer Giovanni da Verrazano (1909) to American merchant mariners (1991). These memorials are soon to be reorganized (some will be moved) to create a Heroes Walk and a bicycle path along the waterfront.
Adrian Benepe, the parks and recreation commissioner, whose city department oversees the Battery, is mindful that this tranquil setting, so ideal for monuments and meditating, could become overloaded. "The city is conscious of not wanting to overwhelm Lower Manhattan with memorials," Mr. Benepe said, noting that 9/11 memorials are being distributed throughout the five boroughs.
In January the Parks Department and the Battery Conservancy announced that the Battery would be the location for a 10,000-square-foot perennial Gardens of Remembrance, designed by Piet Oudolf, a Dutch landscape artist. "But that is not a traditional memorial," Mr. Benepe said. "It will create a contemplative space and four seasons of beauty."
Another 9/11 memorial, the Battery Labyrinth, 1,148 granite blocks shaped into seven rings that was dedicated on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, is between the Korean War Memorial and West Street.
Downtown is where Manhattan began, and the narrowing point of the island makes its maritime past feel pungent and alive. The 23-acre Battery and Battery Park City, though densely designed, add a bucolic sweep of green on the west side with inspiring views of the Hudson River. Affording views of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and Castle Clinton, "downtown is a national triangle of sorts and a magnet for other memorials," said James E. Young, the author of "The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning" and a historian of memorial architecture and planning.
By the 19th century Lower Manhattan was consciously reserved for memorials celebrating the Dutch-British relationship as well as American explorers and inventors, immigrants and soldiers. To safeguard Central Park, long the other ideal site for memorials, the landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted stipulated that most memorials be tucked away to make sure that those erected by special-interest groups did not overrun the park.
Over time the plaques, statues and fountains commemorating historic figures and events downtown have faded into the fabric of the city, that assimilation being the hallmark of a successful urban monument, according to residents and planners.
"I love the Police Memorial," David Stanke, a member of the World Trade Center Residents Committee, said of the fountain in Battery Park City dedicated in 1997 to officers killed on the job. "It's peaceful. I walk by it every day. Some days I think about it. Some days I don't. That's how a memorial design needs to be, integrated in a way that keeps the city alive, without creating any blockages."
Mr. Stanke is one of many residents who worry that if the World Trade Center memorial includes the remains of victims, as some families want, then it will be too much like a cemetery to ever become part of the daily rounds of neighborhood life.
Anita Contini, a vice president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation who is overseeing the competition for the trade center memorial, said that incorporating unidentified remains would be part of the plan, but that there would be no room for individual remains.
The development corporation recently hired a team of architects and landscape designers to re-evaluate all public spaces, including memorials, to clarify their relationships to one another through design, signs and landscaping.
Noting the paradox that most memorials become invisible within 20 years, Mr. Young said: "Compulsive memorializing doesn't fit in with the American personality. And even if we now have a tragedy to look back on, we're still mostly a forward-looking society."
Copyright 2003*The New York Times Company