The World Trade Center Memorial

Another anniversary. Another visit to the scene of an atrocity.

The attack fourteen years ago today was this generation’s Pearl Harbor. Most of us still know where we were and what we were doing when it happened. As a native New Yorker who worked for a few years in lower Manhattan, I remember when the Twin Towers were built. That was the concluding image and recollection in my ten-year anniversary post in 2011.

Last year, the event was remembered with images from the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial. Another stunning memorial is now in the place of the World Trade Center.

New Freedom Tower Under Construction (4 October 2009)

Other buildings have gone up around the site. The Twin Towers were not the only buildings that fell that day. It took quite a few years to reverently clean the site and prepare it for what came next. The negotiations between the developers, many governments and the victims’ families delayed progress further. This image, taken eight years later, shows the new tower’s steel finally rising above ground.

In 2012, we were in the Big Apple to celebrate Becky’s birthday and noodle around Manhattan. The Memorial had opened a few months earlier after the tenth anniversary commemoration. The museum was far from complete at that time and didn’t open until May 2014. The overwhelming physical features on the site are two enormous pools.

South Tower Fountain, 

World Trade Center Memorial (23 March 2012)

The water installations are huge and outline the actual footprints of the Towers. They are now the largest man-made waterfalls on the continent. After the water cascades down the black walls to the pool, it disappears through an even darker central opening. One can’t see the bottom of that space. It’s like the flow of water and the lives it represents are lost in that dark abyss. Not very uplifting and heaven-like but gravity can limit one’s opportunity for design expression.

Names as Far as the Eye Can See (23 March 2012)

The names of the nearly 3000 victims are actually cut through the bronze parapets around both pools. This allows the viewer to see the water through the letters. This must look spectacular at night when the fountains are illuminated.

In the background is the pavilion and entrance to the National September 11 Memorial Museum. The museum itself is deep underground, in that vast, multi-story space that New York City has carved out of the bedrock since the 19th century for utilities and transportation.

Cascade, 9/11 Memorial (23 March 2012)

This is a big space. Even more so in the tight confines of lower Manhattan where skyscrapers rise on narrow, colonial-era streets. Sometimes, the ‘less-is-more’ rule works and a nice image can result from zooming in on just a portion of the scene.

It was an early spring day. The many new trees around the area had yet to leaf out and construction activity was still evident in all directions. But this was Ground Zero. Visitors and residents have made this area a priority and it’s hard to imagine our collective interest ever fading.