THE NEW
GROUND ZERO
By JAMES
SANDERS
FROM the very start of serious planning, it was clear that the
Sept. 11 memorial at ground zero would face a host of obvious and largely
unprecedented challenges. As the design effort has proceeded, however, a less
obvious challenge has begun to make itself felt. It arises from the fact that
the commemorative ground sits right in the heart of Lower Manhattan, amid the
busy streets and soaring towers of the downtown business district. It is the
challenge of creating a memorial in a city that, for most of its history, has
abhorred the very idea of memorials.
This aversion to memorials ó and in a larger sense to monuments of
any kind ó is an instinct so deep-seated and pervasive that it is built into
the city's structure. The instinct can be traced to the origins of the modern
city and to a pair of decisions, made two centuries ago, that helped determine
the essential shape and character of New York.
The first came toward the end of a long and momentous dinner at
Thomas Jefferson's house on Maiden Lane on June 20, 1790. Over a glass of
Madeira (at least according to legend), Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander
Hamilton struck a historic political deal. Linking the resolution of the
nation's outstanding war debts to the location of its capital, the three men
worked out a swap. To Hamilton's satisfaction, they federalized the states'
debt, thereby setting America on a course of fiscal stability and vigorous
economic growth. And to Jefferson and Madison's joy, they removed the United
States government from Manhattan (where it had begun operations a year earlier)
and sent it southward, first to Philadelphia and ultimately to a new city to be
built on the banks of the Potomac.
At the time, many regarded the government's departure as an
immeasurable loss for New York. But later historians came to appreciate it as a
liberation of sorts, which freed the city to pursue its true vocation ó to
become America's commercial, financial and cultural center ó without need for
the ponderous ceremonial trappings of an official capital. Unlike the new
federal city, the bustling metropolis on the Hudson could follow its own
destiny without external encumberment, free always to look forward, not back.
The spatial consequences of this historic schism grew clearer two
decades later, when a trio of state-appointed surveyors published their
sweeping proposal for the development of Manhattan Island. The Commissioners'
Plan of 1811 gave enduring expression not only to New York's remarkable
ambition ó its expansive grid of streets providing room for a million people,
10 times that of the existing city ó but even more so to its intense commercial
focus. Two thousand rectangular blocks (the most economical and easiest kind to
build on, the commissioners noted) would be linked by 12 arrow-straight avenues
and 155 parallel streets, speeding the flow of traffic up and down the island
and between the rivers. The commissioners deliberately chose not to set aside
any special blocks for public buildings or monuments, nor to provide any
ceremonial boulevards, grand axes or focal points that might lend themselves to
commemorative purposes. In their eyes, nothing should be allowed to interrupt
the commercial bustle of the city, the purposeful sweep of vehicles and
pedestrians along its streets and sidewalks.
Needless to say, the 1811 plan could not have been more different
from the classical grandeur of Europe's capitals, with their imposing array of
public edifices. Closer to home ó and more to the point ó the plan stood in the
sharpest possible contrast to Pierre Charles L'Enfant's grandiose Baroque
layout for Washington, a scheme that carried the instinct for the monumental to
extremes, filling the capital city with scores of radial avenues, ceremonial
circles, landscaped malls and countless other sites for monuments and memorials
of every sort.
In the years to come, the civic character of Washington would come
to be defined, to a great degree, by its collection of marble and granite
monuments, fountains and sarcophagi. Their dignified, somber presence ó
wonderfully successful in creating a revered national shrine ó tended (in the
opinion of many) to smother or dilute the urban vitality and excitement of the
city itself. Its neighbor to the north, by contrast, never paused for
reflection. Far from memorializing the past, New Yorkers seemed intent on
erasing every trace of it, ruthlessly destroying their most treasured mementos
if they happened to get in the way of progress.
In the early 1810's, Federal Hall ó the very building in which
George Washington had taken the first presidential oath of office and the
federal government had set up shop ó turned out to be placed a bit too far into
the path of Wall Street's traffic. It was dismantled and sold for scrap. A few
decades later, Columbia College decided that its original building on Park Place ó which dated to the
institution's earliest years before the Revolutionary War and had managed to
survive the terrible conflict ó sat on land too valuable to be reserved for
academic use. The trustees sold off the venerable structure, moved uptown and
called in the wreckers. And so it went, throughout the 19th century and into
the 20th. No touchstone of the past was so precious, so poignant, so
meaningful, that it wouldn't be promptly eliminated if it stood in the way of
"the future," the city's commercial expansion.
As it came into maturity, to be
sure, New York became one of the most monumental cities in the world,
especially in terms of its scale. But it was a city whose monumental structures
were almost invariably functional in nature: not hollow memorial obelisks like
the one in the center of Washington, but towering steel-frame skyscrapers
crammed with office workers; not symbolic triumphal arches like that in Paris
but soaring suspension bridges carrying floods of traffic and linking the
city's boroughs. In New York, as nowhere else, the monumental instinct was put
to work and made to pay ó and thus seamlessly integrated with the commercial
energy and vitality of the rest of the city.
Of monuments and memorials in the
traditional sense, though, very little was erected in New York. What little
space was available tended to be a result of a single variation in the
Commissioners' Plan: a pre-existing path was preserved, as Broadway, and
allowed to meander northward, producing a series of triangular
"squares" where the diagonal street intersected the rectilinear grid.
These plots, too small to be developed, were often turned over to commemorative
purposes, from the tomb of the Mexican War hero Gen. William J. Worth at 25th
Street, to the figure of Father Duffy presiding over Times Square, to the
statue of Christopher Columbus perched atop Columbus Circle. Respectable
artworks, in some cases, but hardly defining elements of the metropolis.
It was revealing that the only New
York environments that did become popular for monuments were, in a sense, not
in the city at all: the parks. Their original recreational purpose was soon
overlaid (to the deep dismay of park designers like Frederick Law Olmsted) with
a secondary function as repositories of civic memory, from Grant's Tomb
towering over Riverside Park to the modest tablet in Tompkins Square Park
recalling the victims of the General Slocum disaster, from the superb
Saint-Gaudens figure of Admiral Farragut in Madison Square to countless lesser
statues sprinkled through Central, Bryant and Battery Parks.
In a similar manner, New York's
greatest monument, a towering iron-and-copper structure of entirely symbolic
purpose (created, significantly, not by New Yorkers but by the French, whose
instinct for the grand allegorical gesture remains unmatched) was placed in the
middle of the harbor, where its classical countenance and figure, rising atop a
massive, tomblike Egyptian-style base, would always remain isolated from the
ordinary flow of city life. Whether intentionally or not, the greenery of the
parks and the waters of the harbor both served to buffer these precincts of
memory from the intense, day-to-day energies of the city and, along the way,
helped preserve the integrity of each.
Indeed, by the start of the 21st
century, after 200 years of urban growth, the division in New York between
sacred places of memory and the flow of daily life remained as sharp as ever. A
number of memorial pavilions and sculptures (for Irish who died in the famine,
Jews who died in the Holocaust, policemen who died in the line of duty) had
been added to the new blocks of Battery Park City. But the older blocks of the
city still offered few, if any, places where a major site of commemoration
directly abutted the bustling streets ó except perhaps Trinity graveyard on
lower Broadway, which existed only because the burial ground predated the financial
district that rose around it.
And then came Sept. 11 ó a disaster
so immense, so searing and so unspeakably tragic that the city's instinctual
aversion to the funereal would have to be overcome, and one, furthermore, that
would obviously have to be commemorated in situ. Yet as the location and
boundaries of the proposed memorial were announced, questions began to be
raised ó with the deepest possible respect ó about how the isolated seven-acre
site would affect efforts to restore the urban vitality of the area. In
particular, how would it affect the attempt to establish a dense and lively
network of streets, to reweave the surrounding communities to each other and to
Battery Park City?
Beyond these immediate issues could
be heard the echoes of a deep and ancient antipathy. Its resolution ó if indeed
it is resolved ó will represent a significant step in the evolution of the
city, as New York, for so long dedicated to life and energy and worldly
pursuits, at last accepts and even embraces the mortal, the otherworldly, and
the eternal.
James
Sanders is an architect and the writer, with Ric Burns, of the PBS documentary
series ``New York.'' The final episode, on the history of the World Trade
Center, will be broadcast Sept. 8.