February 17, 2007

There is still time to rethink the design of the Freedom Tower. Or so says yet another expert as he weighs in on the long-delayed construction project that is set to replace the unconscionable, beguiling, perpetual emptiness that inhabits the site where the World Trade Center once stood.

Even all these months, seasons, years after September 11, a “hold-on/not-just-yet” attitude was voiced in an Op-Ed in yesterday’s New York Times. Guy Nordenson is entitled to his opinion, surely. He’s a structural designer and a Princeton architecture professor. And his reservations sound valid, even prudent.

Nordenson writes: “Despite reports that Gov. Eliot Spitzer has now decided to back [the latest plan for the Freedom Tower], the fact is that with a little time it is still possible to rethink the tower and make it both secure and welcoming without setting back the overall ground zero construction schedule. [The current design, with its] 20-story fortified wall around the base of a 1,776-foot tower, hardly evokes freedom – rather, it embodies fear and anxiety.”

Delay, you say? My vote, not that it matters a whit, is quite the opposite. I say quit the re-re-re-thinking and get on with it. Five and a half years after terrorists obliterated the World Trade Center, there is still nothing resembling an even begrudging consensus about what should rise in its place. But there is an agreed-upon blueprint, finally, and the new governor has endorsed it. And most of the constituencies effected by the decision have had their say. This impulse of eleventh-hour reassessment, coming on the heels of years of civic stasis, not only embalms the would-be building, it also impedes the creation of the World Trade Center Memorial that will some day honor the memories of the nearly 3,000 who died that day, and the many who continue to suffer (and, due to ailments among those who helped in the recovery effort, continue to perish) in the long shadow of September 11.

We must move on. And moving on means settling for a plan, however imperfect, and following through with it.

As a student of history, I must admit to being even more concerned about the memorial itself than I am about the Freedom Tower. I recognize the pivotal role that such a hallowed space (meant for reflection and mourning, for commemoration, for education) will play in determining how future generations understand the impact and meaning of the attacks and their aftermath.

In a similar way, a portion of the last chapter of Watching the World Change describes the early struggle, in 2001, to plan the construction of a much less ambitious but singularly important memorial: one intended to honor the memory and valor of the September 11 firefighters.

Ivan Schwartz was the director of the Brooklyn design studio hired to begin work on an ill-fated statue – originally conceived to be based on the famous photograph by Thomas Franklin showing three firemen raising the American flag at Ground Zero. But the design for the statue was defiled by “overthinking” at its earliest stages when the Fire Department brass and the real-estate developer/patron behind the project came up with the idea of having Schwartz alter the figures – changing them from three Caucasian firefighters, resembling the actual men who had had the gumption to hoist the colors in the first place, and replacing them with a Caucasian, an African-American, and a Latino firefighter. The men rendered in the statue’s prototype, explained an Fire Department spokesman, were “composites, intended to symbolize the entire FDNY.... The artistic expression of diversity supersede[s] any concern over factual correctness.”

The unveiling of a large mockup of the statue created a firestorm. Members of the public – and of engine and ladder companies across the city – called the monument an example of “political correctness run amok.” A petition drive conscripted many of the FDNY’s rank and file, who clamored for the project to be quashed. Pundits joined the pile-on. Conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg asked, “Why not [convert the figures into] a Muslim woman in a floor-length burqa, a Chinese guy in a wheelchair, and a whole passel of midgets of various hues and nationalities?”

Eventually, the statue was scrapped, quite literally. The model, which had sat in the foundry for months, was destroyed.

As noted on page 314 of Watching the World Change: “Schwartz says he warned about the consequences of erecting too literal a memorial. The statue would be derivative of not one but two famous images [the 9/11 flag-raising photo and the Iwo Jima flag-raising photo, which it echoed], both of them known for sparking intense emotions. Perhaps [the powers-that-be should have considered] a more metaphorical statue. Perhaps they [should have] slow[ed] down the project and arrive[d] at a more cautious consensus. ‘The main Civil War memorials,’ he now reflects, ‘didn’t emerge until roughly fifty years later, once the veterans were dying off.’”

With this in mind, I recommend a look at six books that might help guide those who are thinking about the eventual World Trade Center Memorial. The first is Hal Buell’s new work, Uncommon Valor, Common Virtue, which explores the enduring effect of the Iwo Jima image (shot by AP photographer Joe Rosenthal in the waning days of World War II).

It is a companion to the popular Flags of Our Fathers – a truly rewarding read (made into a truly mediocre film) about how our public desire to memorialize ended up compromising the lives of the three surviving Iwo Jima flag-raisers. Also worth studying are The World War II Memorial: A Grateful Nation Remembers (by my friend and fellow Vanity Fair colleague Doug Brinkley) and World War II Memorial: Jewel of the Mall by photographer Stephen R. Brown (with an introduction by Robert Dole), which visually surveys our newest Washington monument.

PHOTO (c) STEPHEN R. BROWN

Another vital book is Wall: A Day at the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, now out of print, a photo-driven volume from my longtime journalistic cohort Peter Meyer, which grew out a story from the pages of Life magazine. And then, this Memorial Day, National Geographic Press will publish Where Valor Rests: Arlington National Cemetery, by Rick Atkinson and Rich Clarkson – a moving, glossy keepsake (if I can judge by having looked through the galleys before they went on press).

IN RESPONSE, TIM SUMNER WRITES...
David:
See TakeBacktheMemorial.org.
What we are asking for is not much. Bloomberg intends to build a memorial
without memory.
-- Tim Sumner
[Tim also praises this site on www.FreedomTower.com.]

STEPHEN BROWN WRITES:
There's another book by Nicolaus Mills on the WWII Memorial [Their Last Battle: The Fight for a National World War II Memorial] which details the politics [behind it]. Even today, people from the various "Save the Mall" coalitions come up to me at book signings and tell me how much they hate the WWII Memorial. I admit to bias but I rather like it with the fountains and it seems to pull the monuments together and if nothing else, it was simply "about time."