culture foundations.
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reading_1.pdf
A B S T R A C T In this article, I examine the narratives and
meanings that have been projected onto the space
of Ground Zero in New York City since September
11, 2001, how they have been deployed for various
political agendas, and how they have informed the
ways in which the site will be rebuilt and
memorialized. I investigate the changing meanings
attributed to the dust and the footprints of the
World Trade Center buildings and the debates over
architectural designs and the proposed memorial.
[cultural memory, place, mourning, memorial,
architecture, tourism]
T here was a moment on September 11, 2001, when the World
Trade Center in New York City became Ground Zero, perhaps at
the moment when the towers collapsed downward, spewing out
a cloud of debris that, as some witnesses said, ‘‘chased’’ down
the surrounding streets. Within a few hours, the media had found
the new name and it stuck.1 Ground Zero is a name pulled from history,
its origins inextricably tied to the destructive power of nuclear bombs; it
began as a term used by scientists to designate a bomb’s point of
detonation, hence, its site of ultimate destruction. Ground Zero implies
a kind of nuclear obliteration in which the barren earth is the only thing
that remains.
The term ground zero also conveys the idea of a starting point, a tabula
rasa. Architect Michael Sorkin’s book about rebuilding New York is entitled
Starting from Zero (2003). And, as Amy Kaplan writes, ‘‘We often use
‘ground zero’ colloquially to convey the sense of starting from scratch, a
clean slate, the bottom line,’’ a meaning that, she says, resonates with the
‘‘often-heard claim that the world was radically altered by 9/11’’ (2003:56).
The idea of ground zero as a blank slate thus enables a set of narratives
about September 11—both the narrative that the site of lower Manhattan is
the symbolic center of that event and the narrative that September 11 was a
moment in which the United States lost its innocence. Throughout most of
the nation’s history, U.S. self-image has remained firmly wedded to a kind
of isolationist innocence, so that virtually every traumatic event of 20th-
century U.S. history, from Pearl Harbor to the Vietnam War, has been
characterized as the moment when that innocence was lost. As Mike Davis
writes, New York, like the United States, had previously held a ‘‘messianic
belief in its exemption from the bad side of history’’ (2001:34). This sense of
historical exceptionalism hovers behind the nomenclature of lower Man-
hattan as Ground Zero—not only in disavowal of the original meaning of
the term but also in the belief that history itself was transformed on
September 11, 2001.
In the months and years since September 2001, Ground Zero in lower
Manhattan has become a site of destruction and reconstruction, of intense
MARITA STURKEN
University of Southern California
The aesthetics of absence:
Rebuilding Ground Zero
American Ethnologist, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 311 – 325, ISSN 0094-0496. A 2004 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.
emotional and political investments, a highly overdeter-
mined space. It is a place inscribed by local, national, and
global meanings, a neighborhood, a commercial district,
and a site of memory and mourning. The narratives that
have been layered on Ground Zero reveal the complex
convergence of political agendas and grief in this space, as
if, somehow, the production of new spatial meanings will
provide a means to contain the past, maintenance the
grief, and make sense of the violent events that took place
there. The narratives and meanings produced at Ground
Zero matter at the local level precisely because they have
impacted in profound ways the redesign of an enormous
area of a densely populated city and because they reveal
the problematic relationship between urban design and
the commercial interests that govern a metropolis such as
New York. These meanings and narratives matter at a
national level when they are deployed in the service of
national agendas, within a broader global context in which
images of the United States are exported with political
consequences. Ground Zero is a site where practices of
memory and mourning have been in active tension with
representational practices and debates over aesthetics, a
place, one could say, defined and redefined by a tyranny
of meaning.
Dust
The towers of the World Trade Center were made of steel,
concrete, asbestos, wood, plastic, and glass, they were
filled with desks, computers, tables, and paper, and, yet,
they crumbled into dust. In one of the most notable lines
of the documentary film 9/11 (Naudet et al. 2002), a New
York City firefighter who was on the scene says, ‘‘You
have two 110-story office buildings. You don’t find a desk,
you don’t find a chair, you don’t find a computer. The
biggest piece of telephone I found was a keypad and it
was this big. The building collapsed to dust. How are we
supposed to find anybody in this stuff? There’s nothing
left of the building.’’ There was an unbelievability to the
transformation of such formidable buildings into particles
of dust. How could so many material objects be reduced
so quickly to dust? My niece responded to news that her
father’s office in the South Tower had been destroyed by
asking about the fate of her drawings that had been on
display there—what had happened to them? Initially, I
thought this response exemplified the narcissistic world
of a six year old, but then I wondered if she was not
asking the very question that was the most difficult to
understand—the question of materiality. How could
those buildings, those objects—those people—suddenly
be gone?
Images of the immediate aftermath of the towers’
collapse show a cityscape coated in dust. It lay everywhere
like a few inches of snow, transforming the outline of
debris into a strange, layered set of shapes. In one well-
known image by Susan Meiselas, a figurative statue sitting
in a park is blanketed in dust and debris, looking like a
businessman frozen in time (Figure 1). The owner of
Chelsea Jeans, a clothing store that eventually closed down
a year later for lack of business, kept preserved in a
window rows of pants coated with the dust (Kimmelman
2002); an image of a tea set covered in the dust was
featured in the New York Times (Archibold 2002); Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani refused to clean the shoes he wore on his
first trip to Ground Zero, which ‘‘were caked with the gray
glue-like substance that sticks to everyone when they wade
through the debris’’ (Ferer 2001: A21). People’s experience
of the trauma of that day was gauged in terms of their
proximity to the dust—those who wandered the streets
coated in it, who went home with it on their clothing, in
their hair, on their faces.
The dust of the collapse of the World Trade Center
acquired many meanings in the months after Septem-
ber 11. It was initially a shocking substance. Something
otherworldly, unexpected, uncanny, yet also strangely
familiar. Some of it contained recognizable scraps—
papers, remnants of the ordinary business of life before
that day, now transformed. Balance sheets from financial
firms, previously objects of mundane business transac-
tions, were transformed into historical objects, materials
of poignancy and loss. It is easy to remember today that in
the first few days after September 11, there was an urgency
to find any survivors in the rubble, ultimately, a doomed
mission. What is often forgotten is that the city also had an
urgent need to clean up the streets of lower Manhattan
near the New York Stock Exchange, so that the exchange
could reopen the following Monday. Even as the shock of
what had happened was still being registered, the city
deployed an army of sanitation trucks to begin scouring
away the dust. Thus, dust was initially understood as a
substance that had to be cleaned away so that life could
continue, as an impediment to moving forward. It was also
quickly experienced as a form of contamination, clogging
people’s lungs. (And it was contaminating—record num-
bers of New York City firefighters now suffer from respi-
ratory diseases. It remains to be seen over the next two
decades how many will develop more serious diseases
from their exposure to the dust.)
Soon, though, the dust was imbued with new mean-
ings. Once it became clear that very few people had
survived the cataclysmic collapse of the two buildings,
the dust was defined not simply as the refuse of the towers’
destruction, but also as the material remains of the bodies
of the dead. Processes of grief often involve a need for
a material trace of the dead. Throughout history, when
people have mourned in the absence of remains, they have
substituted ritualized objects (empty coffins, flags, photo-
graphs, or headstones) as touchstones, material artifacts
American Ethnologist n Volume 31 Number 3 August 2004
312
that can provide some kind of corporeal presence to
mediate the absence of a loved one. At Ground Zero, this
need transformed the dust into a new kind of substance,
one freighted with significance. As Patricia Yaeger writes,
this transformation revealed the ‘‘impulse to convert this
detritus into something hallowed and new’’ (2003:187). In
October 2001, Mayor Giuliani set up a procedure through
which each of the families of the dead received an urn of
the dust from the site for a memorial ceremony. This dust
(which was otherwise being hauled from the site to the
Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island) was gathered into
55-gallon drums, blessed by a chaplain at Ground Zero,
and given a police escort to One Police Plaza.2
There, officials scooped the dust into bags, which
they held in gloved hands. Each family was then given a
five-inch urn of dust with ‘‘9-11-01’’ engraved on it,
wrapped in a blue velvet bag (Waldman 2001: B11). Here
the dust was transformed into a substance that was
understood to be sacramental and ceremonial—moved
from drums (indicating refuse) to urns (indicating indi-
viduals, ashes, the remains of life)—yet also official (ac-
companied by police escort).
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This phrase implies a
distinction between dust and ashes. Ashes are unique,
corporeal, whereas dust is more general. In her analysis
of rubble as archive, Patricia Yaeger describes how some
family members took comfort in thinking of their loved
ones as part of the rubble, in ‘‘a sense of detritus as a space
that gathers corporeality, of rubble as a site where bodily
trauma passes through’’ (2003:190). It is one of the ongoing
shocks of modernity that bodies can be simply obliterated
through modern technological violence, that they can be
vaporized, leaving nothing behind. Yet this shock is medi-
ated by contemporary beliefs in technology and science, in
the ability of science to provide definition and naming
through high-tech identification. In New York, the forensic
technique of DNA analysis was used to identify the dead,
and the media reported regularly on the grim, yet heroic
labor of the scientists and technicians who spent many
months testing remains (and who had the agonizing duty
of reporting the identification of each new body part to
family members). In this context, science is understood to
provide a concrete narrative of the status of the lost body,
even if just for a fraction of a body. The announcement
Figure 1. Sculpture in park near World Trade Center, New York City, September 11, 2001 (photograph by Susan Meiselas, A 2001 Magnum Photos, reprinted with permission).
The aesthetics of absence n American Ethnologist
313
that unidentifiable remains will be preserved as part of the
September 11 memorial thus serves both as an affirmation
of science (the preservation holds the promise that scien-
tific advances will make identification possible in the
future) and as a reinscription of the mystery of the body
as an indicator of the uniqueness of an individual.
Yaeger writes that the detritus of the World Trade
Center towers is disturbing precisely because its status is
unclear—‘‘Is it rubble or body part?’’ Because of its ambi-
guity, I would argue, the dust can be seen as a polluting
substance, in Mary Douglas’s terms. It coated surfaces
with specks of life, death, body, paper, and building. The
dust needed to be scrubbed away precisely because of its
liminal status—as both refuse and body. And it was re-
moved, thoroughly and efficiently, along with the larger
chunks of building debris, to the Fresh Kills landfill. There,
body parts were still sought, but the debris had already
been transformed through its relocation into the category
of rubbish.
Yet, even after it was relegated to the dump, the dust
of Ground Zero continued to haunt precisely because its
status was not that of trash. Dust is not, as Carolyn Steed-
man argues, about refuse or rubble so much as it is about a
cyclical materiality. It is a reminder of continuity, a vestige
of what was that continues to exist. The dust in the archive,
she argues, evokes the material presence of the past—a
‘‘not-going-awayness’’ and an imperishability of sub-
stance. She writes,
This is what Dust is about; this is what Dust is. . . . It is not about rubbish, nor about the discarded; it is not about a surplus, left over from something else: it is not about Waste. Indeed, Dust is the opposite thing to Waste, or at least, the opposite principle to Waste. It is about circularity, the impossibility of things disap- pearing, or going away, or being gone. Nothing can be destroyed. [Steedman 2002:164]
In Steedman’s terms, dust symbolizes the cyclical nature of
material existence, both the reduction of material objects to
dust and the gathering of particles into new forms. Attempts
to preserve the dust are interventions in this cycle of
materiality; as such, they are attempts to hold the moment
of crisis in arrest and to charge it with meaning.
Sacred ground
As the realization took hold soon after September 11 that
many bodies would never be recovered, the ground on
which the towers had stood was declared by many to be
‘‘hallowed’’ or ‘‘sacred.’’ The concept of ‘‘sacred ground’’
enabled many things at the site and has been a particu-
larly powerful discourse both at Ground Zero and in
national politics.
What does it mean when sites of violence are declared
sacred? The term sacred implies a religious meaning, and
it has been the case that many religious figures have
performed ceremonies at Ground Zero. In fact, it is re-
markable how quickly the site became Christianized, not
only through the presence of priests who performed
services for those working in the recovery operation, many
of whom were Catholic, but also through the preservation
of a cross constructed of two steel beams, which remains
visible there. Yet the discourse of sacred ground at Ground
Zero comes not from the blessings of priests but, rather,
from the loss of life that took place there. Traditionally, in
U.S. culture, ground has been considered sacred when
blood has been spilled on it. When Abraham Lincoln
famously conferred on the cemetery at Gettysburg the
status of sacred ground, he did so in the name not only
of the men who had died there but also of those who
fought and lived: ‘‘But, in a larger sense, we can not
dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—
this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who strug-
gled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to
add or detract.’’
Not all battlefields are considered sacred, nor are all
places of violent death. Gettysburg was an exception both
because, at the time, it was understood to be an important
turning point in the Civil War—an opportunity for the
war’s resolution—and because the intense violence there
resulted in great numbers of dead. Yet the concept of
‘‘sacredness’’ at Gettysburg was from the beginning—and
in Lincoln’s speech this was quite explicit—related to the
nation. It was the nation, ‘‘conceived in Liberty,’’ that was
under threat, and the work that Lincoln proposed for those
who were present to hear him speak was that of ensuring
that the ‘‘government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not perish from the earth.’’ When death is
transformed into sacrifice and made sacred, it is almost
always deployed with such political intent.
Thus, in U.S. culture, the concept of a ‘‘sacred place’’
has been almost exclusively secular and national rather
than religious. U.S. battlefields have most often been
experienced, according to Edward Linenthal, as ‘‘sacred
patriotic spaces’’ visited by ‘‘those who seek environmen-
tal intimacy in order to experience patriotic inspiration’’
(1991:3). The connections made between Gettysburg and
Ground Zero explicitly infer patriotic meaning on the New
York site. Indeed, when faced with the difficult task of
choosing a text to read at Ground Zero on the first
anniversary of September 11, Mayor Michael Bloomberg
chose the Gettysburg Address, a move that explicitly situ-
ated the September 11 dead within the history of the
sacrifice of soldiers who have died for the nation.
The status of Ground Zero as sacred ground is highly
contested, precisely because of the potential limitations
and broad effects such symbolic meaning has. Sacred
American Ethnologist n Volume 31 Number 3 August 2004
314
ground is charged with meaning. It implies not daily life
but worship, contemplation, and a suspension of ordinary
activities. In a sacred space, all activities have meaning, all
are transformed into rituals. Sacred ground cannot be, for
instance, a neighborhood, which is defined by the ongoing
everydayness of life, work, commerce, and public interac-
tion. Indeed, one could argue that it is precisely a kind of
mundane everydayness and routine that defines the famil-
iar sense of a neighborhood. Thus, notions of Ground Zero
as sacred ground are antithetical to the stakes held by
residents of lower Manhattan in their neighborhood and
have been a constant source of concern for them. As Setha
Low (this issue) writes, the relationship of the residents of
lower Manhattan to their neighborhood has been dramati-
cally disrupted; not only have the physical markers of
familiar space been destroyed, but there has also been a
huge change in the composition of who actually lives
there. For residents, retrieval of a sense of the quotidian
is crucial, something that is explicitly in contrast to pre-
vailing notions of sacredness. Nevertheless, even though
the residents’ contention that they ‘‘don’t want to live in a
memorial’’ (Low, this issue) has provided a powerful
intervention in the debate about how lower Manhattan
should be transformed, their needs have been largely
ignored and usurped by the city’s favoring of commercial
interests at the site. The dominance of commercial inter-
ests in reimaging Ground Zero has created a complex
negotiation of space dedicated to memory and that dedi-
cated to businesses and retail.
The inscription of sacred ground at Ground Zero has
been so emphatic that it seems necessary to note that
places of violence and loss of life do not automatically
produce feelings of sacredness. In cities where violence is a
factor of everyday life, there is often an insistence on life
going forward rather than on inscribing a multiplicity of
spaces of loss. The epic quality of September 11 and the
immensity of destruction and loss of life there have neces-
sitated its specialness, yet history offers many examples of
cities that have been destroyed and rebuilt and in which
only small areas have been designated sacred places in
which to mourn, the vast majority of space having under-
gone renewal. Important consequences attend the amount
of space at Ground Zero that has been designated as sacred
in relation to the amount being reclaimed for everyday life.
The pile
The inscription of Ground Zero as a sacred space has
generated conflict not only with regard to the site’s rela-
tion to the surrounding neighborhood, but also in the con-
text of its initial clearing. The massive amount of debris
left at the site of the World Trade Center transformed
it into a construction and engineering puzzle, which
construction companies and crews had to undertake to
‘‘unbuild’’ in a huge excavating task. In the nine months
from September 2001 to May 2002, Ground Zero was a
demolition site, divided into four quadrants, each of
which was the province of a different construction com-
pany. The whole project was overseen by a formerly
obscure department of New York City, the Department
of Design and Construction.
In his book American Ground: Unbuilding the World
Trade Center, William Langewiesche writes that ‘‘at the
heart of it, under the skeletal walls rising to 150 feet above
the street, the debris spread across seventeen acres in
smoldering mounds. It was dangerous ground, of course.
Workers at the site called it simply, ‘the pile’ ’’ (2002:11).
Langewiesche’s book, which has received significant at-
tention as the only firsthand account of the recovery
operation, describes the ways that the various groups
involved in that operation—the firefighters, the police
officers, and the construction workers and engineers—
fought constantly over the meaning of the pile and how
it should be treated. The firefighters were angry at the
construction workers, who, they felt, used their enormous
machines callously, as if the ground were not littered with
the dead. The construction crews, for their part, were
angry at the firefighters because they perceived them to
be treating their dead differently than the civilians who
died there. Langewiesche writes,
There was resentment by the police, who had lost plenty of their own people, and by the construction crews, who took it upon themselves to remember the far greater number of civilian dead. These tensions flared especially over the differing treatment of human remains—on the one extreme, the elaborate flag- draped ceremonials that the firemen accorded their own dead, and on the other, the jaded ‘‘bag ’em and tag ’em’’ approach that they took to civilians. . . . It was a surprisingly ganglike view, and it encouraged a gang mentality among others on the pile. [2002:70]
Langewiesche’s depiction of firefighters as less than
heroic has been the source of tremendous controversy.
His book has been embraced as a relief from the emo-
tionalism of Ground Zero hero worship and condemned
as an account that renders individual firefighters invisible
next to heroic engineers.3 The book’s (now qualified)
charge that firefighters participated in looting produced
a particularly volatile debate because the sanctification of
the firefighters has been so powerful. Yet it could also be
argued that American Ground was inevitably controversial
precisely because it situates Ground Zero within dis-
courses other than that of sacredness. The book defines
Ground Zero in unsentimental terms as an engineering
problem—the problem of hauling away massive amounts
of debris, steel beams, concrete slabs, and crushed
vehicles and of rebuilding infrastructure.
The aesthetics of absence n American Ethnologist
315
The operation to remove the rubble not only conflict-
ed with the desire to see the site as a sacred repository of
the dead, but it was also relentlessly about clearing away,
scouring clean, and wiping out the physical debris of
September 11. Langewiesche’s book ends with a scene in
which the steel beams from the towers are loaded into a
beat-up foreign tanker that will take them to China and
India, where they will be melted as scrap. In the hurried
context of unbuilding Ground Zero, there was little time
for debate about what to leave behind. People occasionally
suggested that certain parts of the ruined towers should be
retained for a memorial; for instance, a few weeks after
September 11, Metropolitan Museum Director Philippe de
Montebello (2001) suggested that the ruin of the gothic
skin of the towers that hovered over the site should be kept
for a memorial. It is worth noting that throughout history
ruins have often been incorporated into memorial sites to
evoke the destructive power of hatred. Some of the most
effective memorials of World War II, for instance, use the
shell of a building, a ruin arrested in its deterioration, to
convey the shock of violence and act as a cautionary in the
present. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Coven-
try Cathedral in England both incorporate ruined struc-
tures to evoke a sense of the destructive forces that
changed the meaning of those places. As Lisa Yoneyama
(2002) writes, the question of what to do with the ‘‘vast
remains of destruction’’ is always fraught with controversy.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which
has jurisdiction over Ground Zero, retained approximately
seven hundred artifacts from the site, which now sit in a
hangar at JFK Airport (Lipton 2003), and the New York
State Museum organized a traveling exhibition called
‘‘Recovery: The World Trade Center Recovery Operation
at Fresh Kills,’’ which includes over 50 objects. In addition,
the city handed out a large number of artifacts from
Ground Zero to municipalities and organizations around
the country for some of the many small memorials to
September 11 that have sprung up, some of them in
unlikely places (Hampson 2003). Plans to include a me-
morial center at Ground Zero are now under way to ensure
that these objects—which include police cars, fire trucks,
steel columns, and part of the television antenna from the
top of the South Tower—will be transformed from refuse
into artifacts of history (Dunlap and Lipton 2004). Al-
though plans for the memorial center are not yet defined,
this will probably be a museum at Ground Zero where
these objects will be on exhibit.
The status of the refuse from Ground Zero and its
relationship to the merchandising of memorabilia at the
site demonstrate the complex ways in which memorializa-
tion and history-making intersect with tourism and the
production of kitsch and curios. At first, the clearing away
of the pile was designated an emergency and carried out
away from the view of the public. Lower Manhattan was
initially a restricted area, blocked off from view. Looking
was discouraged and photographs forbidden, and the
presence of the curious was frowned on by the police
who guarded the perimeters. Marianne Hirsch (2002)
writes that, initially, police told people at the site to ‘‘show
respect’’ by putting their cameras away. By December,
they had become more accommodating to the crowds; as
one officer told me, ‘‘People have the right to look.’’ In
January, a well-designed viewing ramp was constructed
adjacent to St. Paul’s Chapel, and tickets were awarded
for the view. By the spring, the New York Times and
other publications were running travel features on where
to eat downtown after visiting Ground Zero, effectively
constructing the site as a tourist destination. When the
recovery operation was declared finished in May 2002,
and on each anniversary of September 11, ceremoniesFigure 2. View of Ground Zero, January 2004.
Figure 3. View of Ground Zero from the PATH train, January 2004.
American Ethnologist n Volume 31 Number 3 August 2004
316
have been held at the site, each declaring it to have been
transformed. Today, the deep hole in the ground is easily
viewed from designated areas along its perimeter, where
tens of thousands of people go to observe it every day
and where local merchants sell World Trade Center post-
cards and merchandise (Figure 2). People can now ride
through Ground Zero on the PATH (Port Authority Trans-
Hudson) train, which resumed operation in November
2003. This commuter train to New Jersey, which existed
long before the building of the World Trade Center and
always operated at the lowest level of the site, several
stories below even the subway, now seems a strange
combination of both determined business-as-usual public
transport and a Disneyland monorail – like tour through
a strange and barren landscape (Figures 3 and 4). Ground
Zero is no longer ‘‘the pile’’ but an enormous, gaping hole
in the ground, a glimpse into the city’s infrastructure. It
is a reminder that in this place, as in most of Manhattan,
the city is as complex a metropolis underground as it
is above.
The emergence of Ground Zero as a tourist site also
redefines it as a commercial site. The underground mall in
the trade center complex was, in fact, one of the most
successful shopping malls in the United States. The de-
mand to rebuild the site with commercial space equal in
amount to that in the World Trade Center, conceiving of
the space in terms that will maximize future profits per
square foot, has been stipulated by real estate developer
Larry Silverstein, who acquired the lease to the buildings
right before they fell. This demand has usurped not only
the demands of local residents but also the many ways of
rethinking the neighborhood that have been advocated by
urban planners (Sorkin and Zukin 2002). Architect Mi-
chael Sorkin writes that the process of redesigning lower
Manhattan has thus been one of betrayal, one that, under
the guise of openness, has failed the public in the servic-
ing of commercial and real estate interests. He argues that
the process
has been corrupted by a meagerness of vision and a vanishing and over-aestheticized sense of loss. There is something nauseating about the celebratory atmo- sphere that has surrounded this act of ‘‘closure,’’ about the haste of it all, and about the wheeling and dealing that led up to it and continue as various parties vie for control of the site . . . what a waste of energy and imagination! [Sorkin 2003:12]
The new economy of Ground Zero is unlikely to
replicate the kinds of businesses that once filled the
towers, as lower Manhattan is being reconceived through
paradigms of tourism. Ground Zero is now a place where
trinkets, souvenirs, and commodities are sold, the major-
ity by street merchants who work the area as part of the
complex informal economy of street vending in New
York. The proliferation of commodities includes FDNY
hats and T-shirts, NYPD dolls, and crystal replicas and
innumerable photographs of the twin towers. Yet the
transformation of Ground Zero from a place of emergency
to a place of tourism is not in conflict with the desire to
see it as sacred ground. Tourist locations, like sacred sites,
are places of pilgrimage. Most people standing on the
viewing platform the first year after the attack responded
in ways that evoked both mourning and tourism—they
looked shocked, they cried, and they took photographs of
what they saw. Today, the site can evoke awe for the
massive size and depth of the excavation. Yet its hold as a
site of tourism is also the result of a kind of compulsion to
look, the desire to see a place that is defined as being
charged with meaning.
The footprints
The destruction of the World Trade Center was massive. It
affected an entire area of the city, not only the five build-
ings of the trade center itself but also other buildings in the
immediate area. The towers fell, surprisingly, inward, yet
their debris covered a wide area, and people were killed
not only in the towers but also in the surrounding area.
Yet, within this wide area, certain parts of Ground
Zero are now considered more symbolic than others.
Primary among them are the footprints of the two towers.
New York Governor George Pataki promised the families of
the dead early on that he would not allow buildings to be
erected on the footprints of the towers, and, from the
beginning, the many different design proposals for the site
treated the footprints of the towers as a special location.
The master plan for the site, by architect Daniel Libeskind,
and the memorial design, Reflecting Absence, by MichaelFigure 4. Temporary PATH station at Ground Zero, January 2004.
The aesthetics of absence n American Ethnologist
317
Arad and Peter Walker, fully inscribe this hierarchy of
space, with the footprints designated as solemn and
unique spaces, voids in a public plaza (Figure 5).
The importance placed on the two footprints of the
towers is deeply ironic when one considers how the World
Trade Center complex was experienced when it stood. The
complex was notable for all the myriad ways, now seem-
ingly forgotten by those who mourn it, that it did not
integrate into the surrounding neighborhood. Individuals
primarily experienced the complex from two vantage
points: from high up in the towers themselves, looking
down on the city, and from the underground complex of
shops and public transportation on which the two towers
sat. French philosopher Michel de Certeau once referred to
the view from the World Trade Center as a god’s eye view
of the city, one that fulfilled ‘‘a lust to be a viewpoint and
nothing more’’ (1984:92). He contrasted this view to the
many meaningful acts that take place at street level,
the ‘‘speech acts’’ of pedestrians that make meaning of
the city’s landscape. Yet, within the trade center complex,
there was no street level and no speech acts that mattered.
The plaza of the twin towers was notorious as a badly
designed area, one that was not conducive to public
gathering and, for most people, was not even the primary
entry point to the towers. (Most people entered the towers
from the underground complex that was connected to the
subways and PATH train.) It is thus fairly safe to say that
the foundations, or footprints, of the buildings were truly
unremarkable while the towers stood. Indeed, in terms of
their actual structure, the towers never had actual foot-
prints on the ground. They reached upward to the sky from
the underground mall into which they were integrated. To
look at Ground Zero now is to see the footprint of that
underground complex, from which any imprint of the
towers has been erased.
Given that the concept of the ‘‘footprint’’ is unlikely to
have emerged from people’s personal experience with the
World Trade Center complex prior to its destruction, one
must ask how it has acquired such important symbolic
meaning. The idea of a building’s footprint evokes a sense
that a structure is anchored in the ground. This concept
was used in the design of the Oklahoma City National
Memorial to designate the part of the memorial that pays
tribute to the individuals who died there. The Oklahoma
City memorial features bronze chairs, each inscribed with
the name of one of the dead, that stand in rows within the
area where the federal building once stood, and the foun-
dation of the destroyed building was left exposed at the
edges of this part of the site. Hence, the Oklahoma City
memorial deliberately renders the land where the building
stood and where people died a more meaningful place to
mourn the dead than the surrounding area.
The fetishizing of the footprints of the two towers
demonstrates a desire to situate the towers’ absence within
a recognizable tradition of memorial sites. The idea that a
destroyed structure leaves a footprint evokes the site-
specific concept of memory in modernity and the concrete
materiality of ruins. In the case of Ground Zero, one could
surmise that the desire to reimagine the towers as having
left a footprint is, thus, a desire to imagine that the towers
left an imprint on the ground. Their erasure from the
skyline was so shocking and complete that there have
been constant attempts to reassert them into the empty
sky—in the images initially posted around the city that
reinserted the towers into views from which they were now
gone, in the proliferation of World Trade Center postcards,
photos, and paraphernalia, and in the many proposals that
the towers be rebuilt. The desire for the buildings to have
had a footprint could thus be seen as a kind of working
through of their absence.
Yet, ironically, the evoking of the footprints in Libe-
skind’s plans and in Arad and Walker’s memorial design
means that they will have to be created out of the hole in
the ground. Created, not re-created, given that, as I noted,
they never actually existed in the ground. There is, in fact,
a serious debate about whether or not commercial areas
should be located under the footprints or if commercial
development must occur around them (in other words,
designating as sacred the space underneath the memorial,
as well). Where will the dirt for this symbolic place come
from? The dust and debris that filled it are now gone.
Clearly, the dirt will not come from the Fresh Kills landfill.
(Actually, soil excavated from the site to make way for the
construction of the World Trade Center was used as
landfill to create nearby Battery Park City.) In other words,
the reconstruction necessary to re-create the footprints
Figure 5. Tower footprints in World Trade Center Site Memorial Reflecting Absence (reproduced with permission, Lower Manhattan Development
Corporation).
American Ethnologist n Volume 31 Number 3 August 2004
318
would seem to render their status as a sacred space deeply
ironic. There have already been several hairsplitting
debates about whether or not the memorial footprints
can fit exactly into the space where the tower structures
stood, given the restrictions necessitated by infrastructure,
such as transportation (Dunlap 2004b).4
Although the desire to see the footprints as sacred is
part of a modern desire to attribute specific and concrete
meanings to a part of the site of Ground Zero, they will be
inevitably postmodern in their reconstruction. The desire
to render them sacred, and to imagine them as demarcat-
ing the place where those who died still remain, is not
unlike the desire to preserve the dust from the buildings.
Each impulse provides a framework for thinking about the
destruction of the towers in tangible, comforting forms.
Through this reinscription and reconstruction of space, the
unimaginable destruction and the arbitrary aspects of who
lived, died, and suffered that day are placed within a
framework of symbolic space as ordered meaning.
Architectures of grief
While they stood, the presence of the twin towers over
lower Manhattan was overpowering. It was often remarked
that they had created such a discrepancy in scale in
relation to the other buildings in lower Manhattan that
their construction had permanently altered the New York
skyline. As a consequence, their absence has spoken more
loudly, and with more resonance, than their presence ever
could have. From the moment that the towers fell, there
were calls that they be rebuilt—architects lined up before
the news media to declare that they should be recon-
structed, and politicians immediately claimed that to not
rebuild them would be seen as a sign of weakness. The
towers were imbued with a poignancy in their absence that
would have been unimaginable while they stood un-
touched. Since September 11, there have been innumera-
ble design proposals to rebuild the towers in some form
(Lindgren 2003). Indeed, it was relatively late in the design
decision process that their rebuilding was finally ruled out.
It is easy to think of this response as reflecting a kind
of naı̈veté about architectural design, economics, and
history. The World Trade Center towers were built at a
time in architectural history when the modern skyscraper
was fading from fashion—one could even argue that there
had to be two towers, to compensate for their banal
modernism. They were funded by public monies from
the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and were
first imagined as providing office space for businesses
concerned specifically with the port activity of New York
harbor. Yet, by the time they were completed, the down-
town market for office space was already oversaturated.
The trade center represented an earlier, industrial model
of urban planning, which called for businesses in the
transportation and financial industries to be densely
located near each other in order to compete. By 2001,
enabled by new technologies and postindustrialization,
these same companies had regionalized, and office space
in lower Manhattan had a high percentage of vacancies.
Beyond these kinds of economic reasons, there are, of
course, numerous psychological reasons why rebuilding
the two towers would constitute a kind of folly, not the
least of which would be the justifiable fears of potential
tenants that such structures would inevitably be targets for
future terrorism.
Although they will not be rebuilt, the towers continue
to haunt New York City through the constant reassertions
of their forms. On the six-month anniversary of September
11, two blue streams of light reached from near Ground
Zero into the night sky. The Tribute in Light was envisioned
by several artists and architects immediately after Septem-
ber 11 and was intended to pay tribute to the dead.5 But
one could not help feeling that it was really the loss of the
towers that the light memorial mourned. Just like the
towers, it was designed to be seen from a distance, and
its scale succeeded in overpowering the surrounding build-
ings. More surprisingly, in July 2002, when the New Yorker
magazine asked a group of artists to reimagine the space,
the artists produced a series of ironic, oddly humorous,
ambivalent, and whimsical proposals that almost all repli-
cated the towers in some form (Tomkins 2002). What was
so remarkable about this project was how its avowed
intention to use humor and cynicism to intervene in the
hypersentimentalization of the site became, instead, an
exercise in reimagining twin structures, two buildings,
figures of two. Nancy Rubins inverted the towers with a
proposal for two 110-story underground structures, and Art
Spiegelman proposed 110 one-story buildings. Vitaly
Komar and Alex Melamid, who are well-known for their
avant-garde work on issues of aesthetics and taste, pro-
duced a comical proposal for a farm on lower Manhattan,
with the Cortland Street subway station surrounded by
cows and fields. Yet, the two silos of the farm are unmis-
takable references to the two towers, hovering over the
bucolic rendition like a shadow of the past.
Many of the proposals that have been put forward
over the past two years by highbrow architects have also
attempted to replicate the form of the twin towers in
some fashion—for instance, strange forms suggestive of
hollowed-out towers, or curving, twisted paired forms.
That many of these designs have been taken seriously,
and, for instance, been given the cultural imprimatur of
such publications as the New York Times (which, at one
point, took it upon itself to solicit a whole set of propo-
sals, as if it were the city government) should prompt
observers to see them as part of a kind of cultural work-
ing through rather than as indicators of innovations of
architectural design. The design proposal that failed
The aesthetics of absence n American Ethnologist
319
most spectacularly on the sensitivity scale was Peter
Eisenman’s proposal for an office building complex that
was designed to look as if it was in a state of perpetual
collapse.6 The New York Times remarked of Eisenman’s
design, ‘‘The buildings would echo the devastation
wrought on 9/11 and offer a striking memorial to the fallen
towers; at the same time they would provide three million
square feet of new office space’’ (Muschamp 2002: sect. 6,
53). This design was so strangely inappropriate, and so out
of proportion to the grief and pain that surrounds Ground
Zero, that I think it can only be read as an indicator of
unprocessed aspects of grief. Indeed, one can read in the
numerous designs proposed for the site an almost obses-
sive desire to fill it up, to imagine it as something other
than it is, a wound in the cityscape. In the days after
September 11, only architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo
Scofidio remarked on the power of the skyline’s transfor-
mation as the most important and lasting message of the
change produced by September 11: ‘‘Let’s not build some-
thing that would mend the skyline, it is more powerful
to leave it void. We believe it would be tragic to erase the
erasure’’ (2001: 81).
The role of high-profile architects in reimagining lower
Manhattan has been paralleled by a populist rethinking of
the area, which has taken place not only through grassroots
campaigns but also through various news outlets, such as
CNN, which created public forums for people to submit
their own designs. The debate about the site thus became
framed for a period of time as one of elitism versus
populism and of aesthetics versus mourning, in which
architects were accused of subjecting a sacred site to
an architectural ‘‘beauty contest.’’ Leon Wieseltier, of the
New Republic, declared in a debate with Libeskind that
‘‘there is something a little grotesque in the interpretation
of ground zero as a lucky break for art. Lower Manhattan
must not be transformed into a vast mausoleum, obvious-
ly, but neither must it be transformed into a theme park
for advanced architectural taste’’ (Boxer 2002: B1). Wie-
seltier’s views are echoed in many of the statements that
have been made by the families of the dead, for whom any
aesthetization of the site is in conflict with its sacred
status as the final burial place of their loved ones. Here
the words of Theodor Adorno are worth reiterating. When
Adorno declared that ‘‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is
barbaric’’ (1981:34), he meant that cultural production
was irrevocably changed in the wake of the Holocaust.
His was a cautionary warning about the potential aesthet-
ic pleasure afforded by such representations and about
the subsequent narratives of redemption that they can
provide. The debate over rebuilding Ground Zero is a
reminder that, in moments of trauma, aesthetics almost
always are understood as antithetical to processes of grief.
The degree to which his design will survive the
complex negotiations over the ownership and rebuilding
of lower Manhattan is unclear, but Daniel Libeskind can
be said to have won the design competition precisely
because of his ability to negotiate this terrain fraught with
aesthetics and mourning. In sharp contrast to the six
proposals with which he competed, Libeskind presented
his proposal, which was chosen in spring 2003, not as a
reconstruction of lower Manhattan so much as a memo-
rialization of the site. In fact, his proposal was named
Memory Foundations (Figure 6). Libeskind initially left
Figure 6. Memory Foundations design study by Daniel Libeskind (reproduced with permission, Lower Manhattan Development Corporation).
American Ethnologist n Volume 31 Number 3 August 2004
320
part of the slurry wall of the pit of Ground Zero exposed in
his design, to pay tribute not only to the ‘‘bathtub struc-
ture’’ of the foundation of the trade center, which keeps
the water of the Hudson River at bay, but also to the
experience of Ground Zero itself. Not one to leave any-
thing to the imagination, Libeskind has also given sym-
bolic names to elements throughout the design, such as
‘‘The Park of Heroes,’’ ‘‘Edge of Hope,’’ and ‘‘Wedge of
Light,’’ this last a triangular plaza where the sun will reach
from 8:46 a.m. to 10:28 a.m. each year on September 11.
Libeskind’s triumph was to present himself not as an
architect but as a mourning citizen, and this presentation
resonated not only with the families of the dead but also
with the public at large. He was the sole architect in the
competition who wrote autobiographically when present-
ing his design. Libeskind, who was born in Poland, grew
up mostly in New York, and at the time of the competi-
tion had lived for 15 years in Berlin (he has now moved
back to New York), presented himself as an intensely
patriotic New Yorker: ‘‘I arrived by ship to New York as
a teenager, an immigrant like millions of others before
me, my first sign was the Statue of Liberty and the
amazing skyline of Manhattan. I have never forgotten that
sight or what it stands for. That is what this project is
about.’’ It is important to note that although Libeskind
has knowingly deployed the narrative of the immigrant to
great effect, his particular immigrant narrative serves to
screen over other such stories. Libeskind is the grateful
refugee, the immigrant who has even greater patriotism
than those who preceded him. Indeed, the piece de
resistance of his design, which has been much fought
over, is his ‘‘Tower of Freedom,’’ which at 1,776 feet will
be, nominally, the ‘‘tallest building in the world’’
(depending on what standard one uses) and is intended
to echo the Statue of Liberty across New York Harbor.
Some see the building’s height as a defiant response to
terrorism, others as a crafty way to prevent the World
Trade Center developers from reducing the tower’s ex-
pensive size. Libeskind’s immigrant persona thus over-
powers other immigrant stories that have circulated
around September 11—of undocumented workers at the
Windows on the World restaurant, whose families in
Mexico did not even know the name of the place where
they worked, and of the eager, young, first generations
who worked as traders in the scrappy, low-level financial
firms placed on the higher floors of the towers.
Libeskind, who has a charismatic larger-than-life
quality, thus evokes a set of historical meanings as a
culture figure—a Jewish refugee, a patriotic immigrant,
and, not least, as the architect of the Jewish Museum in
Berlin, one of the primary interpreters of Jewish history
and cultural memory. Libeskind’s presence in the process
of rebuilding Manhattan has thus been coded as a re-
demptive one. Indeed, having been forced to work with
Silverstein’s architect, David Childs, and having already
compromised on many design elements, Libeskind is often
depicted as the aesthetic visionary at war with the crass
commercial interests of real estate developers. Neverthe-
less, his proposal was at the center of an aesthetic contro-
versy before it was chosen. New York Times architecture
critic Herbert Muschamp wrote a now-notorious attack
on the design, condemning it as ‘‘astonishingly tasteless’’
and ‘‘emotionally manipulative,’’ a design that was bland
and smacked of ‘‘kitsch’’ (2003: E1). The debate about the
aesthetics of memory is not likely to fade easily as the
reconstruction process moves forward. At its heart is a
highly contested issue: To whom does the site of Ground
Zero belong—to the city, the Port Authority, the develop-
ers, the families of the dead, the architects who reenvision
it, the tourists, the media, or the nation?
The rush to memorialization
The events of September 11 took place at a time in U.S.
history that is characterized by a preoccupation, one
might even say, an obsession, with memorialization. A
huge number of memorials have been built during the
last two decades, some of them related to conflicts long
passed and others built quickly to commemorate con-
temporary events. The Oklahoma City National Memorial
was built in the record time of five years. It seemed as if
the urge to speak about a memorial in New York was
almost instantaneous—by the next day, even as the
names and number of the dead remained unknown, there
was discussion of a memorial. In some ways, immediate
discussion of a memorial allowed people to begin to
construct narratives of redemption and to feel as if the
horrid event itself was over—containable, already a
memory. Yet the rush to memorialize will have a pro-
found impact on the way in which lower Manhattan is
rebuilt, on the kind of neighborhood and commercial
district it becomes, and on the ways in which the
meaning of September 11 is inscribed within the history
of the United States and within the landscape of New
York City. In this impatient atmosphere, the real debate
over what it means to mourn cannot take place.
Under significant pressure from the victims’ families,
New York politicians, and the rapidly proceeding commer-
cial redevelopment of the site, the Lower Manhattan
Development Corporation ran a memorial contest, which
began less than two years after September 11 and that
resulted in the awarding of the commission to architects
Michael Arad and Peter Walker in January 2004. In many
ways, any memorial design had already been usurped by
Libeskind’s master plan for the site, with its discourse of
memorialization and its framing of the footprints as the
memorial’s location. In addition, the design contest pro-
duced a debate (much of it taking place in the pages of the
The aesthetics of absence n American Ethnologist
321
New York Times) about populism versus elitism and the
politics of mourning.
The memorial competition was an open contest in
which over 5,000 entries were submitted from around
the world. In November 2003, the Lower Manhattan
Development Corporation placed the design proposals of
eight finalists on display in lower Manhattan, where they
were subject to public debate and significant criticism.
Most observers felt that the eight proposals were unex-
ceptional, minimalist, timid designs that looked more
appropriate for a corporate plaza than a memorial. The
contestants had been encouraged to ‘‘convey historic
authenticity’’ by including ‘‘surviving original elements,’’
although none of the finalists did so. There were numer-
ous calls for the competition to be scrapped and started
over and for the city to abandon its pose of populism and
to commission a design from a well-known architect. For
instance, New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman
condemned the finalists’ designs in an elitist polemic,
asking, ‘‘Does anybody today care that the pope did not
hold an open competition for the Sistine ceiling?’’ (2003:
sect. 2, 1).7 Kimmelman advocated that the city commis-
sion a design from a well-known architect. For others, the
primary concern was the dominance of modernist mini-
malism in the designs, which was perceived as signaling a
rejection of representation and was attributed widely to
the presence of architect Maya Lin, the designer of the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, on the jury. Although the
jury included a contingent of political appointees and
representatives from the victims’ families, many artists
and curators were also members. Lin was hardly the sole
representative of modernist aesthetics, although she was
the best known outside of art circles.8 Ironically, the New
York debate has repeated practically word for word the
debates that took place over Lin’s now-iconic Washington,
DC, memorial, which resulted in the construction of two
representational Vietnam memorials in addition to Lin’s
minimalist wall of names (Sturken 1997).
As in that earlier debate, the dominance of modernist
tendencies in the September 11 designs was understood as
a rejection of codes of heroism and as an embrace of an
antimonument style (Leigh 2003). For instance, Dennis
Smith, a former firefighter who wrote a book about the
recovery effort (Report from Ground Zero, 2002), noted that
in the finalists’ designs, ‘‘the universal elements—air,
water, earth and light—are celebrated. Nature is celebrat-
ed. Nowhere is there a representation of a human being’’
(2003: A29). Yet, if anything, the debate over the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial demonstrated vividly the problematic
aspects of figural representation as a means to mourn the
dead, because each figural statue raised issues of exclu-
sion. In fact, a similar controversy was reenacted around a
statue designed to replicate the now-famous photograph
of three firefighters erecting a flag at Ground Zero. When
the sculptor proposed to make the three figures white,
black, and Latino, rather than depicting the three white
men in the photograph, the design was rejected as express-
ing a form of political correctness (Flynn 2002).
Inevitably, this debate reenacts traditional concepts of
high and low culture and taste, in which high art is
equated with modernism and figural representation with
the masses. Reportedly, the jurors were astonished by
what they considered to be the ‘‘tastelessness’’ of some
of the entries (Collins and Dunlap 2004a), all of which are
now posted on the Web (www.wtcsitememorial.org) and
some of which have since been subjected to public deri-
sion. The designs include an oversized question mark, two
airplanes in a park, and a glowing apple on top of a spire
(Dunlap 2004a).
The estimated cost of realizing the final design,
Reflecting Absence, is an extraordinary $350 million (not
including an additional $175 million to build its ‘‘plat-
form,’’ which will be 70 feet above the site’s foundations as
a means of preventing commercial space beneath it; Col-
lins and Dunlap 2004b). The design consists of an open
plaza with trees into which two ‘‘voids’’ with reflecting
pools dip down into the space of the towers’ footprints.
Visitors will be able to walk down ramps to contemplative
memorial spaces below the voids (Figure 7). The names of
the victims will be arranged ‘‘in no particular order,’’
according to the designers, around the pools, although,
at least, at present, plans call for those who worked for
‘‘uniformed services’’ to be designated by individual
shields (Collins and Dunlap 2004b).9
Emptiness, in the form of contemplative spaces and
voids, is a primary aesthetic of the memorial design. Thus,
although intended as a memorial to the people who died,
its aesthetic of absence seems primarily to evoke the
absence of the towers. Much of the criticism of the design
has fixed on this quality, calling it ‘‘void of honor, truth,
emotion and dignity’’ (Molinaro 2004: A18). The widow of
one September 11 victim wrote to the New York Times that
‘‘ ‘Reflecting Absence’ is an appropriate name for this
design. It truly represents absence—the absence of any
reminder of what it is supposed to memorialize!’’ (Gabri-
elle 2004: A32). The voids that demarcate the footprints of
the towers in the memorial design replay the presence –
absence of the twin towers. One could argue that the desire
to rebuild the towers and the designation of voids where
the towers once stood are essentially the same.
It is difficult to predict in advance whether or not the
Arad – Walker memorial will work—it may be that it will
succeed in providing a contemplative space that will allow
for a broad set of practices by the people who visit the site.
But the vast area that has been given over to the memorial
(a decision that preceded the design) indicates in many
ways a failure to reimagine the space of Ground Zero. The
huge area of the memorial design, encompassing the two
American Ethnologist n Volume 31 Number 3 August 2004
322
footprints as well as the space around them, and the plans
for a memorial center at the site dictate that it will be a
place ruled by memory rather than a vital, rebuilt neigh-
borhood that incorporates a space for mourning and
reflection. Some of the most effective memorials and
tributes to loss have been small and contained (the Viet-
nam Veterans Memorial to over 57,000 dead is tiny com-
pared to the September 11 memorial design). The politics
of remapping Ground Zero meant that the relative size of
the area dedicated to the memory of September 11 was
highly politicized from the start. Yet, because of the power
given to commercial interests in the redevelopment, it may
only be through this designation of space as memory that
there will be public areas in the rebuilt Ground Zero.
Ultimately, the recoding of the space of Ground Zero
is about the ways that the events of September 11 will be
experienced as a moment of U.S. history and as such, it is
also a project of pedagogy. The space is now marked
permanently as a site of tourism (indeed, some of the
redesigns of the site have tried to take into account the
estimates that there will be over 150 tourist buses coming
to the site every day), where particular concepts of the
city and the nation will be produced, performed, and sold.
The memorial will play a key role in this production of
meaning, as will the now-planned memorial center.
Charles Griswold has called memorials a ‘‘species of peda-
gogy’’ (1986:689), in that they construct narratives about
the past and how it should be understood. It is important
to note, however, that memorials are essentially ineffective
as forms of political pedagogy. They pay tribute to the
dead, but they cannot speak in more than simple terms to
the complexity of history. This poses what Geoffrey White
has called ‘‘the tension between honoring the dead and
educating’’ (this issue). Here, again, Oklahoma City forms
a powerful precedent. The Memorial Center at the Okla-
homa City National Memorial is notable for its failure to
address and adequately explain the political context that
resulted in the bombing that killed the victims there—
precisely because any discussion of why the bombing took
place was perceived as giving voice to its perpetrators. One
can only imagine how this will be enacted in a memorial
center at Ground Zero.
One of the most ironic aspects of the rebuilding,
recoding, and reconstruction of Ground Zero is the trans-
formation it represents from the 1960s visions of a World
Trade Center, which displayed an idealized view of cosmo-
politanism and an optimism about the future, to the patri-
otic and, ultimately, provincial discourses that increasingly
define present-day New York City as a place wounded and
defended, a place that looks backward toward its moment
of trauma, a place ruled by memories of the past.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Thanks to Geoffrey White and Setha Low for
inviting me to write this article and to Thomas Csordas, Rubie
Watson, Lisa Yoneyama, Virginia Dominguez, and several anony-
mous readers for thoughtful and helpful responses that have informed it in many ways.
1. According to Michael Tomasky, the first use of the term in
print was by Associated Press reporter Larry McShane, who, on the evening of September 11, 2001, wrote, ‘‘Shortly after 7 PM, crews
began heading into ground zero of the terrorist attack to search for
survivors and recover bodies’’ (2003: 18).
2. The name Fresh Kills, which has the potential to sound morbid in this context, is actually derived from the Dutch lan-
guage, in which kills means ‘‘streams.’’ Many names in New York
come from its early Dutch settlers.
3. The center of this controversy was Langewiesche’s claim, which he modified in the paperback version of his book, that
firefighters participated in widespread looting, in particular, his
repetition without attribution of a story that a fire truck buried in the rubble was found filled with stacks of blue jeans,
implying that firefighters were looting before the buildings
actually fell (Carr 2003; Noah 2002; Tomasky 2003: 20 – 22).
Langewiesche could have mediated this claim better, as it seems likely from the subsequent debate that the clothing was blown
out of a storefront and into the empty truck. Evidence of the
vitriolic nature of this debate can be seen on the website
Figure 7. Interior space in World Trade Center Site Memorial Reflecting Absence (reproduced with permission, Lower Manhattan Development
Corporation).
The aesthetics of absence n American Ethnologist
323
www.wtclivinghistory.org, most of which is dedicated to discred-
iting Langewiesche.
4. A February 2004 New York Times article demonstrates the degree to which this discourse is so ensconced that it seems
unquestionable. The Times reporter quotes several members of
the jury and several members of families of the dead who were all
outraged that the dimensions of the memorial might not exactly replicate the footprints. One individual asserted, ‘‘To do any less, I
think, would not be telling the story. People who come years from
now will have no idea what the original dimensions were’’ (Dun-
lap 2004b: A31). 5. The project was begun immediately after September 11
by two architects, John Bennett and Gustavo Bonevardi, and
two artists, Paul Myoda and Julian LaVerdiere. They were later
joined by architect Richard Nash Gould and lighting designer Paul Marantz. The display was produced by the Municipal Art
Society and Creative Time. See www.creativetime.org/towers/
main.html. 6. This design seems even more ironic because Eisenman is the
designer of the very interesting Holocaust Memorial in Berlin,
which will open this year.
7. His article was reportedly considered to be ‘‘smug cultural superiority’’ by some jurors (Kimmelman 2004: sect. 2, 1).
8. Other jury members were Paula Grant Berry, a businesswom-
an and widow of victim David Berry; Susan Freedman, president
of the Public Art Fund; Patricia Harris, deputy mayor of New York; Michael McKeon, former director of communications for Gover-
nor George Pataki; Julie Menin, an attorney and resident of lower
Manhattan and founder of Wall Street Rising; architect Enrique Norten; artist Martin Puryear; Nancy Rosen, a curator of public
art; Lowery Stokes Sims, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem;
Michael Van Valkenburgh; and James Young, professor and chair
of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and specialist in Holocaust
memorials. David Rockefeller served as an honorary member, and
Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation and
former president of Brown University, was the chair. 9. Full descriptions and images of the memorial can be found at
www.renewnyc.com.
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