One person's view of the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum

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Hollowed ground
Steve Cuozzo

9/11 Memorial leaves our critic empty — though it may eventually transcend its bleak design
Last Updated: 10:44 AM, September 11, 2011

Seven years since its design was unveiled, and $700 million in public and private funding later, the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum is at last upon us. Following today’s ceremony exclusively for victims’ families, part of the site will open to everyone starting tomorrow with an online reservations-only policy.

I howled over the Memorial plan in 2004 and 2005: “It stinks.” I recoiled from its “morbidity, “open storm drains,” and “earth-hogging mediocrity.” The design seemed to ignore that 9/11 was defined by selflessness and heroism as well as by loss. My impression was based on drawings and models. Now that it’s a granite reality, what will you find?

It may depend on the weather — although not in the way you might expect. It took an awful afternoon of teeming rain and wind to make this austere, coldly beautiful monument to our dead come alive for me. What a pity that to experience anything like catharsis a visitor must be willing to get drenched.

I was fortunate to lose no one on 9/11. But I lost no one in Vietnam, either, and Maya Lin’s famous Washington wall made me well up. At the World Trade Center, site of mass murder far more recent than the war, I expected more than a dispassionate rekindling of sorrow that’s muted by the passage of 10 years.

If anything made me want to cry, it was the process that led to the designation of the design by gifted architect Michael Arad, who was later partnered with landscape architect Peter Walker to soften Arad’s original bleak vision. Arad’s “Reflecting Absence” was chosen in a blind competition by 13 judges appointed by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. (Yes, the same LMDC that took nine years to demolish the Deutsche Bank building.)

As New Yorkers know from renderings, the centerpiece of Arad’s scheme — on nearly half of what was once called Ground Zero — is the pair of square, reflecting pool waterfalls set within the Twin Towers’ footprints. Their scale is eye-popping: two cataracts, on each side as long as a city block.

But while they’re bound to be insanely popular with tourists, they suggest less the heartwrenching dispatch of souls to oblivion than massive industrial runoff.

The Memorial has engaged New Yorkers’ hearts more than any of the World Trade Center site’s other elements. Former Gov. George Pataki decreed it the “centerpiece” and forbade building on the “hallowed ground” of the Twin Tower footprints. Because the project is weighted down by so much political and emotional baggage, it was regarded as impolite — even impermissible — to criticize it too bluntly, as if to do so were to speak ill of the terrorist attack’s victims and their loved ones.
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