https://www.911memorial.org/
I gave a talk on Henry Ford on Monday afternoon at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. The Museum is located as far south on the tip of Manhattan Island as it’s possible to go without starting a swim to reach the Statue of Liberty. Down deep in Battery Park. That part of the city is almost suburban; there are abundant parks, a community garden, and the condo buildings that, while omnipresent, don’t scrape the sky as they do uptown.
The Financial District is less than a 10-minute walk from the MJH. One encounters the National 9/11 Memorial almost as if by accident. It’s open 24/7/365 and is set into the neighborhood (a vibrant urban neighborhood was destroyed in the late ’60s to build the World Trade Center, but I digress). Everything that collapsed or was damaged has long since been rebuilt or repaired, and if the Memorial weren’t there you’d never know anything catastrophic happened. The footprints of the Twin Towers are recessed into the ground. The barrier that keeps you from falling into the fountain that runs water along all 4 walls is studded with the names of everyone who died on September 11, 2001, and the six who died in the car attack of Feb. 26, 1993. It is a somber place. It feels like a cemetery. Which is what it is, essentially. That’s why the families of the lost fought so hard to prevent the construction of new buildings on the site. It is hallowed ground. Speaking of Lincoln (“We cannot hallow this ground”), no politician could possibly improve on the Gettysburg address. In the months and years after September 11, they didn’t try. Pataki, Guiliani, and New York state Democrats: in those early days of 9/11 anniversary services, they just recited Lincoln and hoped they skirted the line between commemoration and politicization.
As I approached the memorial that sits on the south tower site, I saw a couple of young men in baseball hats taking smiling selfies in front of the memorial. It was jarring to witness. I couldn’t imagine what they thought there was to smile about while standing at that spot. It’s akin to taking a selfie at the Vietnam War Memorial, looking happy in front of the representation of thousands of your dead countrymen and women. Possibly these two tourists were not from the U.S., which I mention not to excuse them but to extend a smidgen of charity.
I suppose the hordes of security/police that line the 9/11 park day and night see this happen all the time. (Huge police presence, by the way; NYPD cars were parked on the roads on both sides of the park.) The cops take a laissez-faire approach to behavior that is inappropriate but not illegal. The selfies were improper, but only people who saw them being taken were affected. Probably that category included only me and my travel companion. More about her in a bit. So who is doing the public education that was needed in that place at that time? How can the ethics and/or etiquette of behavior at national memorials be communicated? I’m reminded of the signs posted at my local Little League park conveying instructions to parents that boil down to: chill out, please. The problem is that the open-to-all nature of the park lacks a single entrance and exit. No obvious place to catch the public’s attention, unless it’s at the kiosks that sit further away from the memorials that have maps of the park and the tower footprints. In short, it could be done.
Perhaps I’m overthinking this. Every single detail of that park and the Museum that sits between the two footprints was the subject of long and contentious negotiations between the families and the 9/11 Memorial Commission. Is it now somehow overzealous to remind visitors, gently, that they are at a sacred place?
Certainly the 9/11 museum should do that. The damaged vehicles of the first responders, the infrastructure of the lost buildings, a necklace and earrings worn by a victim on her wedding: from the gigantic to the intimate, the museum conveys the scale of what was lost and makes the devastation the focal point of every exhibit. If I think about this as a social scientist, I need empirical data. I wonder what a before/after poll would show. What do the 9/11 memorial and museum teach about not just the event but about its historical context? The friend who came to New York with me was my best friend from graduate school; we’re both legal historians trained to think that nothing happens in a vacuum. For us the main purpose of such a place would ideally be not just to show what happened but also to explain the context that produced the event. And how we responded, as a nation, which is not alluded to, much less depicted, anywhere.
So my “after” response to the question of what I learned from my visit is that we’re still not comfortable with being asked to connect 9/11 to American foreign policy. Instead, we treat this physical representation of mass murder as a backdrop for Insta content. I came, I saw, I took a picture.
