culture foundations.

A B S T R A C T An inherent tension exists between the meanings

of the World Trade Center site created by

dominant political and economic players and the

significance of the space for those who actually live

near it. Most of the writing on and analysis of the

site have focused on the construction of a

memorial space for an imagined national and

global community of visitors who identify with its

broader, state-produced meanings. But New

Yorkers, in general, and downtown residents, in

particular, bring to meaning making their own

personal involvement in and knowledge of a

located history that has social, political, and

economic significance for their everyday lives.

These meanings are as much a part of

memorialization as the dominant players’ political

machinations and economic competition for space

and status. Uncovering and eliciting these local

memorial discourses is part of an ethnographic

project that focuses on how personalized narratives

of loss emerge and are manipulated within

mass-mediated representations of the World Trade

Center space. My contribution to understanding

how the memorial process works has been to

analyze what downtown residents say about their

experience of September 11 and its aftermath, to

record their feelings about a memorial, and, in so

doing, to contest, expand, and modify the

dominant media and governmental representations

of September 11 and its memorialization. [World

Trade Center site, Ground Zero, memorialization,

Battery Park City, cultural diversity, New York City,

sense of place, public space, fear]

T he rebuilding of the World Trade Center (WTC) site offers a unique

opportunity to study the memorialization of a tragic event and the

struggle over its architectural representation in a complex social,

political, and economic environment. The designation of a me-

morial design for Ground Zero has been framed by a disruptive

tug-of-war for political power among New York City, the state of New York,

and the federal government and by an equally bitter struggle for economic

control by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Lower

Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), Larry Silverstein—the

leaseholder of the site—and other downtown cultural, commercial, and

real estate interests. The major players in this sociospatial game have

selected architects who represent their interests by allocating space in

certain ways and by expressing their dominant values in architectural

and spatial form. Architects Daniel Libeskind, Governor George Pataki’s

choice, and David Childs, Silverstein’s choice, are currently locked in an

ongoing battle for the site’s representational and architectural control. At

the same time, a committee appointed by the LMDC reviewed 5,200 design

entries for a memorial listing all of the victims’ names, which would be

placed within this contested space. Peter Walker and Michael Arad’s design

of a parklike setting with two reflecting pools in the footprints of the

destroyed World Trade Center towers was finally selected but was then

criticized for being too soft and undefined and subjected to revision.

In this contentious process, the mourning, anger, and need for reso-

lution of local residents and victims’ families and friends have been largely

forgotten. The outpouring of emotion and ideas for a memorial and for

rebuilding downtown from citizens who participated in the Municipal Art

Society’s ‘‘Imagine New York’’ program has been ignored or, at the very

least, set aside to make way for the desires and fantasies of architects and

real estate moguls. Many nonprofit organizations and nearby neighbor-

hoods continue to demand a voice in the formal memorial process, but they

have not received official recognition, and there is no indication that local

meanings and concerns will be included in the design of the memorial,

SETHA M. LOW

The Graduate Center

The City University of New York

The memorialization of September 11:

Dominant and local discourses on the rebuilding of the

World Trade Center site

American Ethnologist, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 326 – 339, 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.

much less in the planning of the overall site. Why have the

politically and economically powerful frozen the moment

of September 11 for memorialization and co-opted its

commemoration, rather than deal with the messy and

imperfect ongoing public input into the commemoration

process? Why have local meanings and vernacular strate-

gies of memorialization been marginalized and ultimately

excluded from the national and municipal discourse? What

is the perceived or real threat of recognizing the legitimacy

of local residents’, survivors’, and bereaved families’

claims to participate in the decision-making process?

To answer these questions, one must first acknowl-

edge the inherent tension that exists between the mean-

ings of the WTC site created by conflicting political and

economic forces, which are projected out to national

audiences through the mass media, and the significance

of the space for those who actually live near it. Most of the

writing about and analysis of the site have concerned the

construction of a memorial space for an imagined national

and global community of visitors who identify with its

broader, state-produced meanings. But New Yorkers, in

general, and downtown residents and workers, in particu-

lar, create meanings imbued with their own personal

involvement in and knowledge of a situated history that

has social, political, and economic significance for their

everyday lives. These local meanings are multilayered, are

often embedded in landscape and unarticulated, and

should be as much a part of the memorialization process

as the major players’ political machinations and economic

competition for space and status.

Uncovering and eliciting local memorial discourses is

part of an ethnographic project that focuses on how

personalized narratives of loss emerge and are manipulat-

ed within mass-mediated representations of the WTC

space (White 1997, this issue). My contribution to under-

standing how the memorial process works has been to

analyze what downtown residents say about their experi-

ence of September 11 and its aftermath, to record their

feelings about a memorial, and, in so doing, to contest,

expand, and modify the dominant media and governmen-

tal representations of September 11 and of the formal

memorial process.

I began this project for both personal and profession-

al reasons. I live and work in New York City, where it is

difficult not to be consumed by the questions ‘‘What

should happen?’’ and ‘‘Who should decide?’’ New Yorkers

are passionate about their feelings and fears and eloquent

when asked their opinions. At times it seems as though

‘‘memorial talk’’ will overwhelm the city and all of its

media. Much of this ‘‘talk’’ is channeled by the New York

Times and the New Yorker, the official gatekeepers of

what is known about the memorial process, but their

renderings are limited and exclude local discourses that

do not fit the media’s representation. Thus, my work

reflects my desire to ground myself in what I can see

happening and in what city schoolchildren and residents

say about their vision for the future of the site. I am not

advocating any of the local residents’ or children’s spe-

cific proposals, but I think they should be incorporated in

the memorialization and rebuilding process. At the very

least, I would like to understand why their visions have

been so rigorously excluded.

This ethnographic project draws on multiple—albeit

imperfect—sources of data: a collaborative community

research project, interviews and participant-observation

with children at downtown New York schools, and a

longitudinal study of Battery Park City residents and local

organizations. The collected interviews and unpublished

reports offer a critique of and insights into the reasons

that the dominant memorial design was orchestrated to

benefit politicians, landlords, and preselected architects,

rather than local communities, children, and insecure

city residents.

The complexity of the rebuilding and memorialization

of the WTC site—its position in revitalizing downtown

New York City, the enormity of the September 11 tragedy,

and its national significance—provides an opportunity to

rearticulate the local and dominant discourses surround-

ing the process. By including downtown residents’ opin-

ions and feelings, it is possible to reframe the memorial

process as one in which meaning is co-constructed by

individuals and the state. Through this analysis, questions

about processes of memorialization and cultural repre-

sentation become more nuanced. For example, Geoffrey

White (2001, this issue) and Marita Sturken (1997, this

issue) argue that sites of trauma are about the production

of meaning, but in a city the size, scale, and diversity of

New York, whose stories will be communicated and inter-

preted, and how can this be determined? Further, White

(2001), James Young (2000), and Kenneth Foote (1997)

argue that monuments such as the memorial to be placed

at the WTC site organize historical memory, but whose

history will be recorded in such a complex setting and

toward what end? Any site of trauma embodies the dead

buried there, yet the interpretive story transcends the

actual site; in the case of September 11, it extends

throughout the city, the state, and even the nation. How

many audiences—downtown residents, victims’ families,

firefighters, volunteers, city institutions, and displaced

companies, to name a few—have a vested interest in being

represented? More marginal groups also would like to

have a voice in the debate, which further complicates

the situation and increases the possibility of disagree-

ments about what should be expressed. In the WTC case,

diverse personal, group, and community narratives of

September 11 have been expressed in a variety of ways

and locations, but their survival and continuity is limited

by a dominant memorial discourse that overwhelms and

The memorialization of September 11 n American Ethnologist

327

obscures them. This article is one effort to rebalance this

ledger of meanings by explicitly describing and analyzing

the emotions, commentaries, and desires of local residents

who, to date, have not been heard.

Because of my interest in public space and commu-

nity expressions of mourning, this article has as a second-

ary focus the spaces of memorialization that emerged in

the vernacular landscape following September 11 and then

were largely erased. Unfortunately, none of these spaces

still exist as they were originally created; they are now

controlled by the city as part of the rebuilding process. The

irony of this suppression is that, for a period of time in the

aftermath of September 11, there were places residents

could go to express their grief and fear, but these spaces

have been stripped of their decoration and the meetings

and discussion groups that formed around them have not

continued. Only the formal memorial process has captured

media attention and will be inscribed in the reconstructed

landscape of Ground Zero.

To provide a sense of the emotional and physical

setting, I begin with a discussion of public spaces as they

currently exist in New York City, of those that were used

immediately after the WTC attack, and of the spatial

constraints on memorialization in the postindustrial city.

I then discuss ethnic and residential community reactions

to the changes downtown to portray how diverse the

responses to September 11 and its memorialization have

been and the problem that such diversity poses for the

current official procedure. Drawing on two field projects,

one a study of children attending Grace Church School

and the second a study of Battery Park City residents, I

discuss the impact of September 11 on local groups as well

as local perceptions of the tragedy and its aftermath. I

conclude by expressing my own desire that the WTC site

be rebuilt in a way that will respond to the needs of these

interviewees and that will reclaim urban space for spon-

taneous public gathering, rather than reserve it for eco-

nomics and politics as usual.

Fear, consumption, and the postindustrial city: The limited space for memorialization

A new defensiveness has arisen in New York City since the

September 11 terrorist attack. Concrete barriers, private

guards, and police protect what were previously open

plazas and buildings (Kamin 2001). In the context of more

recent events, such as the war with Iraq, the urge to secure

the public realm has become a significant factor in the

design of streets, federal buildings, and landmarks (Cour-

tenay 2002; Mays 2002; Rosen 2001; Sipes 2002). The threat

comes not only from the outside—from terrorists who

hijack airplanes or from suicide bombers—but also from

the danger that New Yorkers are overreacting to the

destruction of the twin towers by barricading public spaces

and denying ourselves opportunities for expressing com-

munity, openness, and optimism.

Long before the WTC bombings, the public spaces of

the postindustrial U.S. city had been fenced off, policed,

and privatized (Low 2000; Zukin 1991). Moreover, antiur-

ban sentiment and fear of the Other across social classes

have been mainstays of residential and workplace segre-

gation ever since the development of suburbs. People

began moving to the suburbs to escape the dirt, disease,

and immigrant populations of the inner city as soon as

trolleys made it feasible. And suburbs offered more than

just physical distance from the city—a more powerful

social distance emerged, maintained through a complex

discourse of racial stereotypes and class bias. The search

for a ‘‘secure’’ and ‘‘safe’’ community now legitimates and

rationalizes class-based exclusion strategies of residential

segregation, such as gated communities (Low 2003).

But even in cities, similar forms of social distance took

shape. Today, for instance, wealthy New Yorkers deal with

the fear of Others by living in separate zones and limited-

access, cooperative apartment buildings. Less affluent city

residents rely on neighborhood watch programs and tol-

erate increasing restrictions on behavior in public spaces.

Typically, Americans have translated this general antiur-

ban sentiment into a more specific fear of crime and

violence that they say pervades the city (Lofland 1998).

And even in the face of declining crime rates, the fear of

crime has ended up justifying more rigid controls of urban

space, particularly in socially diverse places.

Indeed, many civic spaces are no longer democratic

places but, instead, centers of commerce and consump-

tion. Collaborative public – private partnerships between

municipalities and local businesses have transformed such

places as Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan into safe,

middle-class environments maintained by surveillance

and police control (Zukin 1995). Similarly, the public space

of Battery Park City—built on a landfill created by the

WTC’s construction—has limited access and a design

vocabulary that appeals mainly to the upper-middle class.

In the wake of September 11, all privately owned interior

public spaces in New York City—including such notable

places as the Sony Building and the Citicorp atriums—are

now guarded by heightened security that includes man-

datory IDs for entry, bag searches, and roaming patrols,

who watch the dwindling number of users.1 Metal detec-

tors at Battery Park now welcome visitors to the Statue

of Liberty and Ellis Island.

In New York City, unless urban spaces become com-

mercially successful, their future remains in question.

Commercialization and privatization, however, limit par-

ticipation to those who can afford it and who conform to

middle-class rules of appearance and conduct. The mall-

like interior of the WTC was one such space of consump-

tion, bringing people together through transportation

American Ethnologist n Volume 31 Number 3 August 2004

328

nodes, restaurants, and shopping. Ironically, the WTC’s

shopping mall was probably its most genuinely public

space, and it is genuinely missed by Battery Park City

residents (Low et al. 2002). Interior public spaces such as

the Winter Garden at Battery Park City also possess these

qualities of commercialization in addition to an unambig-

uous police presence.

These were not the places to heal and reconcile New

Yorkers’ hopes and dreams after the WTC attack. Instead,

it was the less-structured and less-regulated spaces to

which people turned (Rivel 2001). Union Square, with its

green trees, benches, and circular walkways, became a

sacred space through the creation of spontaneous memo-

rials—written messages, flowers, candles, photographs,

and other objects commemorating the victims of Septem-

ber 11. The construction fence surrounding Ground Zero

was also decorated with messages, prayers, and personal

memorabilia. Other places of grief outside New York are

models of spontaneous memorial, as well. For instance,

mourners placed handwritten prayers, children’s draw-

ings, poems, teddy bears, and flowers on the chain-link

fence around the Murrah Federal Building, site of the 1995

Oklahoma City bombing. And in a park across the street

from Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado,

mourners created a football-field-size shrine with mes-

sages, paper chains, and crosses to remember the 12

students and one teacher who were killed at the school

in 1999 (Senie 1999). Even the ‘‘topography of terror’’

exhibition and the archaeological excavation at the site

of Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, a site of hurtful mem-

ory, offer emotional engagement through their openness,

simplicity of form, and complex symbolic content (Dolff-

Bonekämper 2002).

The WTC site has been transformed many times since

the twin towers fell. As the city cleaned up the rubble from

the explosions and the subsequent fires, it also constructed

walls, barriers, and temporary memorials. A large cross

was erected at Ground Zero by the rescue workers who

continued to work there. At the same time, families and

friends of the victims, sightseers, and saddened citizens

decorated, first, the chain-link fence and, then, when the

walls became more permanent, the Jersey barriers and

small wooden kiosks surrounding the site with spontane-

ous memorials of poems, flowers, pictures, drawings, and

other heartfelt decorations.

The city has tried to regiment this outpouring of

emotion by indicating appropriate locations for these

testimonials to mourning and grief, but, to a large extent,

it has not been able to contain the informal memorials

(Greenspan 2003). Each day, city workers remove the

informal accretions from the construction walls and

fences. At the far end of the bridge to Battery Park City,

however, one private entrepreneur who sells souvenirs

and hats from a wooden kiosk has allowed visitors to

leave tokens of their visit at his stall. It is ironic that

the consumption of September 11 souvenirs—baseball

caps, statues and photographs of the twin towers, and

T-shirts—is encouraged and licensed by the municipal-

ity, whereas personal expressions of grief and mourning

are discarded.

Given these models and the ongoing vernacular

memorialization that people are trying to locate, the

WTC site would seem to provide an opportunity to re-

imagine the postindustrial plaza as a space of reflection

and recovery as well as a place of civic action and dis-

cussion, rather than as a privatized space driven by global

capital. This site of trauma could be transformed into a

communal center for people to meet, mix, mourn, and

remember if the political pressures and economic interests

would allow it.

Currently, the choice of Daniel Libeskind, the 57-year-

old architect of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, to rebuild the

site is seen by many as advocating a site design that will

evoke some of the personal memorial feelings (Goldberger

2003; Kamin 2003). But Larry Silverstein, the developer and

leaseholder of the WTC, is pushing ahead with his own in-

house architect, David Childs, and the commercial archi-

tectural firm of Skidmore Owings Merrill (Iovine 2003).

Meanwhile, government officials, civic organizations, and

citizen activists involved in the process futilely debate

what the final outcome will be (Wyatt 2003). Even the

audacious, although flawed, ‘‘Listening to the City’’ forums

run by the Civic Alliance, in which citizens could propose

what they would like to see happen to the site, were

curtailed by the premature announcement of a design

decision and the ensuing struggle for architectural control

(Sorkin 2003). In this climate of political havoc, it is

difficult to see how any publicly derived memorial

space—rather than one designed with commercial inter-

ests in mind—could have emerged.

Memorialization in the context of fear and violence: New Yorkers’ diverse responses to September 11

The New York City Recovery Project of the Russell Sage

Foundation funded a series of ethnographic projects to

explore how different downtown communities were

responding to the physical, economic, and emotional

impact of September 11.2 Preliminary field reports docu-

ment diverse responses to the attack and its aftermath and

suggest that any single, homogeneous design for the me-

morial—especially one that follows the current model of

policed space—is not what is called for.

For example, Margaret Chin’s (2002) study of workers

in Chinatown found that many people had lost their jobs

and were not eligible for financial compensation because

of their irregular employment status or because the

The memorialization of September 11 n American Ethnologist

329

sweatshops were illegal, undercapitalized, or had closed.

Chinatown workers’ concerns were economic and legal

survival. Monisha Das Gupta (2002) found similar issues

when interviewing immigrant taxi drivers but also learned

that drivers were being harassed by customers, the police,

and the Taxi Limousine Commission. Taxi and limo

drivers complained of inadequate human rights protec-

tion and increased ethnic discrimination, so much so that

many felt they had to give up their jobs. My own expe-

rience corroborated Das Gupta’s findings: One day, three

men passing on bicycles hit the taxi I was riding in,

repeatedly frightening and insulting the Pakistani driver.

The driver told me that he was interested in what should

be built as a memorial for September 11 and wanted the

design to represent his suffering. But he felt excluded

from the process because of his perceived Muslim eth-

nicity and outsider status.

Melanie Hildebrandt (2002) studied Belle Harbor,

Queens, where residents experienced the double trauma

of losing neighbors at the WTC and then dealing with a

major airplane crash in the vicinity shortly thereafter. Belle

Harbor residents feel unique in the amount of trauma they

have endured and plan to build their own separate me-

morial site (Hildebrandt 2002).

New Yorkers have responded differently to the trage-

dy based on their previous experiences of coping with

crisis. Previous life events provide a context and offer

strategies for response. For example, people in their

eighties who lived through World War II and remember

the Holocaust are not as shaken by the terrorist bombings

as younger people. They have experienced death and

tragedy before and tend to view it as an inevitable part

of everyday life. New Yorkers in their forties, fifties, and

sixties remember, as I do, Vietnam and the Cuban missile

crisis. I remember endless school drills, crawling under

my desk or crouching in the hall, practicing what to do in

the case of nuclear attack. I remember my neighbors

building elaborate bomb shelters to house their entire

families. Terrorism is also something I have lived with

during fieldwork in Central America and Africa, so, for me,

the September 11 attacks were not a shock. Adults in their

twenties seem most affected by their shattered expect-

ations and sense of the future. They have not experienced

crises of such magnitude before, and their needs and

concerns are different from those of their parents and

grandparents (Gross 2001).

People also responded to the terrorist attacks differ-

ently based on where they live and work in the city.

Individuals’ mental maps of the city (personal impressions

and physical relationships that order a person’s orienta-

tion in space) were destroyed, and their sense of place

attachment (how they feel about the spaces they live and

work in) was disrupted (Altman and Low 1992). How close

one lives to Ground Zero seems to determine the degree

of cognitive disorder, which ranges from mild disturbance

in day-to-day transit about the city to abject mental

anguish and anxiety. Those residing near the WTC have

experienced the latter. A young man I interviewed, who

lived near Ground Zero, finds his world turned upside

down—he misses his friends, his routines, his ways of

moving across the city, and his favorite places of relaxa-

tion. Moving uptown has only further dislocated him, and

he hopes to return soon to lower Manhattan. A female

friend who lived near the site in the din of trucks, night

lights, and volunteers complains that she can no longer

sleep at night, find a grocery store, or orient herself when

she goes outside (Low et al. 2002).

Anthony Oliver-Smith (1986), an anthropologist work-

ing in Peru, observed that, when a massive earthquake

and avalanche destroyed the small city of Yungay in 1970,

survivors reacted with disbelief, wandering aimlessly and

looking for remnants of their homes. The tops of four

palm trees marking the original plaza were all that

remained of the original site and became the centerpiece

of a new plaza and town, rebuilt against the advice of

experts, on the same site. Oliver-Smith noted that mesti-

zos and indigenous Peruvians, between whom lay a stark

class and ethnic divide, had to adapt to the tragedy in

contrasting ways. For instance, the Yungay disaster gave

greater power and social control to indigenous groups

because so many members of the mestizo middle and

upper classes had been killed. The middle-class survivors

had to adjust to their altered social position and identity

in addition to all of the other problems and concerns they

faced. Kai T. Erikson (1976), who documented survivors’

responses to the 1972 Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, flood,

reports similar reactions, with the psychological and so-

cial consequences of relocating whole towns being addi-

tionally devastating, resulting in increased depression,

disrupted place identity, and inability to work and go on

with life.

Of course, social and geographical transformations of

the magnitude affecting Yungay and the Buffalo Creek

communities did not affect the entire city of New York.

But at the scale of a neighborhood the size of Battery Park

City, located next to Ground Zero, the physical, social, and

psychological impact of September 11 is readily apparent.

Local residents expressed a pervasive fear and insecurity in

almost every interview.3 When asked what the primary

impact of September 11 was on her neighborhood, a five-

year resident replied, ‘‘We feared—there was so much

fear—would this end here? Was this going to stop, or was

it just going to keep escalating? There was a tremendous

fear of the unknown.’’ Although this particular woman

used the past tense, many current residents mention fear

as a lingering effect of the attack on the WTC. They may

not be as frightened as they were on September 12, 2001,

but fear is a still a part of their daily lives. Considering that

American Ethnologist n Volume 31 Number 3 August 2004

330

about half of the neighborhood’s residents left in the wake

of September 11, these findings are even more striking.

One can assume that those who fled the neighborhood

were even more fearful than those who stayed.

Even new residents of downtown feel a change in the

emotional climate. When asked what the primary impact

of September 11 was on the community, one new resident

in her fifties answered quickly, ‘‘Shock. Terror. Lives dis-

rupted. Lives rearranged. You hear stories of people who

haven’t left their apartments since it happened. They’re

just too scared.’’ A man in his forties, who moved down-

town only two months prior to our interview, said matter-

of-factly, ‘‘I think it’s less safe here. After what happened, I

mean. This area is a target.’’

A downtown resident of ten years said that he had

recently found out just how much he had been affected by

the events of months earlier. ‘‘My confidence was shak-

en,’’ he said, ‘‘I didn’t realize it so much until I was stuck

in my elevator for an hour two days ago. The lights went

out and I was stuck in there and I had no idea what was

going on out in the world. Just me and my dog. It was very

scary.’’ A gas explosion at the Con Edison plant in 2002

also uncovered similar feelings. A few days after it hap-

pened, a resident told me, ‘‘It brought everything back. It

was a very triggering event for those of us who were here.

It brought back those feelings—helpless, vulnerable, iso-

lated, scared. I didn’t know I still had all this posttrau-

matic stress.’’

Many adults still live in fear, and it is not surprising

that the events of September 11 have cast a shadow over

the lives of local children, as well. A woman in her thirties

who has lived downtown for almost three years says that,

for children, a deep sense of fear has been September 11’s

greatest legacy: ‘‘My son is scared to go outside. He’s

scared of planes now, too. He’ll ask me, ‘Isn’t that plane

flying too low?’ People get really nervous. On the river,

when you see a lot of police boats, everybody sort of just

looks at each other—scared.’’

And, although the most common complaint of down-

town residents is fear, people also expressed concerns

about economic and community stability. Forty-five per-

cent of residents left after the attack through relocation,

child health concerns, and an inability to deal with the

daily visual evidence of what had happened. They are

being replaced by newcomers, perceived by those who

have stayed to be younger, single, less wealthy, and less

committed to the Battery Park City community. The influx

of newcomers is transforming the area and the power

relationships within it (Low et al. 2002). Longtime resi-

dents’ anger and anxiety is being displaced by their dis-

trust of the newcomers, and they do not even acknowledge

their grief at having lost almost half of their community.

These research findings reflect the complexities

involved in trying to characterize local responses to

September 11. The New York City Recovery Project docu-

ments informal sector workers’ (Chinese sweatshop

laborers, taxi drivers, airport porters, and others) concerns

with economic survival during a period of financial crisis

and political chaos. Funds were available to help down-

town families and businesses in the months after the

attack, but because of many workers’ location just outside

the designated disaster area, their illegal immigrant status

or their inability to prove that they had lost jobs, they did

not qualify for financial assistance. Further, the wealthiest

residents and largest businesses received the lion’s share

of the donated funds. Thus, for the poorer residents of

downtown, the concern was not memorialization but

finding employment or customers.

Other evidence illustrates the degree to which preju-

dice and profiling of taxi drivers and other immigrants

not only excluded them from participation in the grief

and mourning of the city at large but also put them at risk

of physical harm. Taxi drivers and Muslim immigrants

were attacked and vilified by New Yorkers and by the

police. Their immediate concern was to be recognized as

Americans who cared about what happened, regardless of

their place of origin, language, or religion. To this end,

many Muslim (and other ‘‘Arab-looking’’ immigrant) taxi

drivers and businesses displayed large U.S. flags, emblem-

atic of patriotism, on their cars and shops to ‘‘prove’’

their loyalty.

During the same time period, many middle-class

downtown residents were engulfed by an overwhelming

sense of fear and insecurity. And for established Battery

Park City residents, the introduction of newcomers who

did not experience September 11 in the same way they

had, and who ostensibly did not hold similar values,

became a new perceived threat. Even though some resi-

dents had lost jobs and were worried about the economic

vitality of the area, the overriding concern was to recon-

struct a sense of community and safety in the face of the

nearby attack.

This diversity of needs and reactions is one reason

why local residents and workers were not considered in the

reconstruction and memorialization process. Addressing

their vastly different concerns (and many others not dis-

cussed here) would have forced the city to confront the

racism inherent in its policing and antiterrorism efforts.

Politicians and state leaders would have had to recognize

that the city is filled with poor immigrants and marginal

workers who, in the best of times, go unnoticed and, now,

in the worst of times, were desperate. To respond ade-

quately would have uncovered the social, economic, and

political inequalities that pervade the city’s social struc-

ture. Instead, it was easier for the city to focus on the

mental health aspects of the trauma, to provide psychol-

ogists and social workers to treat the fear and insecurity of

local residents rather than face workers’ real concerns and

The memorialization of September 11 n American Ethnologist

331

immigrants’ desires to be included at this moment of

national unity.4

Children’s ideas for rebuilding and memorializing the WTC site

There is no shortage of ideas for a memorial or for the

reconstruction of downtown, and city schools, with their

eclectic mix of students, are good places to get a sense

of the wide range of views. Four months after September

11, I decided to interview students at a private school in

lower Manhattan not far from the WTC site. I asked

eighth graders at Grace Church School what they would

like to happen at the WTC.5 Their responses varied as

much as those of any group of adults and were just

as imaginative:

A New Yankee Stadium, the World Trade Center towers higher—it shows that we are better than before, even if only three stories higher.

Rebuild taller with a statue as the centerpiece of the place, or maybe there would be a memorial inside.

Have a ‘‘Center for the City’’ to show how we came together—maybe it could be a shelter or a place for counseling people or a YMCA.

Instead of two towers have five buildings in a circle connected by different colored rings and a memorial in the center remembering the people who died—like Ellis Island.

Have a piece of the [original] tower in the memorial. . . . It should be something that shows that we are moving on—not just a cemetery.

I would have a sports field, but something, definitely; as long as they clean it up.

A memorial with all the names, a museum with things about the old building; put up poems and pictures.

Two hollow towers open to tourists with glass elevators and a memorial at the bottom.

I loved the buildings and want them rebuilt. There is an empty space now—it is how people know our city. Rebuild it taller and wider.

A park with a garden and a café where you can put flowers and a place to light candles. And have an event there each year to remember.

Maybe a regular park, downtown needs parks. Or a huge memorial park where people can walk. A monument of people holding hands to represent the people who helped and the people who died.

These comments suggest a design solution some-

where between memorialization and forgetfulness, be-

tween the desire to build bigger and better and the

desire to create a space for coming together, healing, and

moving on.

The iconography of the twin towers is a crucial com-

ponent of the eighth graders’ mental image of New York

City, and it anchors their existence. Some worry that,

without the towers, New York is not New York or that it

will remain incomplete. Their fragile sense of place attach-

ment requires the physical presence of the buildings to

mark the skyline and hold constant what is right and

natural in the world. ‘‘Even worse,’’ one girl said, pausing

to take a deep breath, ‘‘other people will not know it’s New

York if they see the skyline without the towers.’’

Third and fourth graders at Grace Church School

painted pictures of an imagined rebuilt site. Their colorful

renderings include many of the ideas of the eighth graders:

no-fly zones, tall buildings over memorials that depict the

WTC towers in miniature, and a twin tower memorial

cathedral. All depict places to remember, recover, and

reconcile. The eight and nine year olds’ juxtaposition of

buildings and garden, workplace and playground as well as

open gathering space colliding with collapsible modern

towers provides a good sense of the diversity of imagina-

tions across the city as to what should come next. An

exhibition of children’s post – September 11 drawings and

paintings at the Museum of the City of New York also

reveals the differences in children’s representations of their

sense of loss. Children up to the age of about ten years (like

those at Grace Church) convey their feelings by depicting

the physical event—planes crashing, people falling, towers

collapsing, new landscapes, whereas older children depict

individual people crying (often themselves) or include

written words (sad, tears, loss) to capture their emotions.

Thus, children of different ages remember September

11 with distinctive iconographies, and their fantasies of

memorialization reflect these differences. A developmental

sequence beginning with feelings portrayed through

actions or events evolves into specific people expressing

emotions, emotions that have names and can be labeled.

Does the labeling of emotion, dissociating it from a depic-

tion of the event and placing it back in the individual

person, help a child make sense of what happened, or does

it simply psychologize feelings of fear, grief, and loss? Does

CNN’s incessant replaying of the initial impact of the

planes and the collapsing towers tap into this early form

of emotional expression? And do New Yorkers also struggle

to contain emotional reaction by locating it in minds and

bodies instead of in political action and outrage?

I am not sure what this transition in children’s ex-

pression of feeling means in terms of a general memoria-

lization process. But the data suggest that children were

involved in their own memorializing and could have

benefited from participation in a larger, citywide event.

Children’s drawings are in many ways similar to the

American Ethnologist n Volume 31 Number 3 August 2004

332

architectural imaginings of Daniel Libeskind, so much so

that it seems clear that their visions would have enriched

understanding of what it means to have experienced and

reacted to this tragic event. The children’s September 11

artwork offers valuable insights into fears about and the

desire to resolve what occurred.

‘‘We don’t want to live in a graveyard’’: Battery Park City residents and memorialization of September 11

Insights into an appropriate memorialization of September

11 were also attained while interviewing Battery Park City

residents during the ethnographic study of the communi-

ty’s response to the attack that most of its members

witnessed.6 On the day of the terrorist attack, 6,000 Battery

Park City neighborhood residents fled for their lives, and

eight residents died (Bernhard 2002). In fact, all the resi-

dents of Battery Park City had to leave their apartments for

at least a week. After the towers fell, the waterfront was a

Dunkirk-like scene of ferries, tugboats, and other vessels

evacuating tens of thousands of residents and office work-

ers fleeing the destruction and the smoke. Other residents

fled on foot to the north, along West Street. Battery Park

City residents were processed in triage centers and pro-

vided with temporary places to stay, many in New Jersey.

During the initial weeks following September 11, mar-

ital law was enforced throughout the Battery Park City

area, and residents were not allowed to enter their homes

or neighborhood without being accompanied by security

personnel. Frantic about their pets and belongings, want-

ing to return to normalcy and take up their previous lives,

residents who returned to their homes fell between the

cracks in the aftermath of September 11. Most residents

stayed away from the area until the smell, noise, dust, and

smoke were gone. Some moved back within a few weeks

and weathered the difficulties of living in a disaster zone:

the search for bodies, debris removal, the lack of basic

services, and severe access restrictions. Others, however,

suffered such trauma that they cannot return.

On their return, residents found tourists clogging their

community open spaces, trying to get closer to Ground

Zero. Conflicts and concerns during these early months—

recorded on Battery Park City websites and in the local

newspaper, the Broadsheet—were about air quality and

other health hazards, obtaining financial and legal assis-

tance, and dealing with the emotional consequences of

witnessing death and destruction so close at hand.

The part of Battery Park City closest to the World

Trade Center, which included the World Financial Center

and residential buildings at Gateway Plaza, sustained con-

siderable damage from the attack. One woman told us of a

Gateway resident she knows who returned home to find a

filing cabinet lying on her living room floor, having crashed

through the window. September 11 was a beautiful day,

and many residents had left their windows open. They

returned days or weeks later to find a thick layer of dust on

everything. Like the rest of lower Manhattan, Battery Park

City was under martial law for many weeks after the attack.

Some residents spoke of ‘‘tanks in the street,’’ others of

waiting for days behind police barricades to be allowed to

return even briefly to their apartments to collect belong-

ings and pick up pets. One woman described her experi-

ence as follows:

I work at home, and my windows face where the World Trade Center [stood]. I was there; I heard the planes and saw it all. I think about it every day—how all those people died. I can function all right—I work, take care of my kids—but I’m sad. I don’t feel depressed, but it’s still heartbreaking. It was so difficult—do you know what happened to us? We were all evacuated in pickup trucks, nobody could stay here. We stayed in New Jersey for awhile. But in November, coming back here—you had to take a shuttle just to get in here, passing all those little teddy bears. There were barricades and police all over the place. Once when I was in a huge hurry, there was a policeman with a gun, and I had to wait for the families of the victims to go by. There were so many events—people turning against each other. After we were evacuated, we got someone in the police— someone we knew—to give us an escort to get me back in to clean out my refrigerator. There were people standing there behind barricades who saw us going in, and they were so resentful, they were screaming at us, threatening to report us to the police. I couldn’t believe it. . . . You know—it has nothing to do with you. We had an escort—it wouldn’t make any difference to how long you have to wait to get back.

Residents stayed away for varying lengths of time, some

returning after a week or two, but many not returning until

winter or spring. The woman quoted here did not return

until November. She says being with other survivors helps

coping with the emotional residue:

After September 11th it was hard to stay. It was really tough. We were very ambivalent. . . . We noticed that some of our friends who did move away were having a hard time coping with their experiences being away from here. Here you’re with other people who went through it, and it helps to be here. Some people have these traumas—they saw people falling out of the buildings—and they can’t come back. But I think they feel isolated living somewhere else. Here we support each other a lot. We talk about it—not a lot, not all the time—but we talk about it. It’s really a different kind of support here: no one else . . . who wasn’t right here can know what we went through.

The memorialization of September 11 n American Ethnologist

333

Others residents reported staying at a family house in

Connecticut through the fall, or on a boat in Sheepshead

Bay through the winter, or at a sister’s apartment in

Manhattan. Many moved to the eastern end of Long Island

and to the mountains of New York or Massachusetts where

they had weekend and summer homes.

A New York Times survey reported an average resi-

dential vacancy rate of 45 percent in the months after the

disaster. The survey, of 26 residential buildings containing

7,000 dwelling units within a four-block radius of the

World Trade Center site, found that vacancy rates ranged

from one-quarter to three-quarters of the dwelling units in

any one building (Winter 2002). The buildings with the

highest vacancies had leased large blocks of apartments to

corporations for employee housing. At Gateway Plaza, the

oldest residential development in Battery Park City, about

seven hundred out of a total of 1,711 apartments were

vacant after the complex reopened in October. By August

2002, however, vacancy rates in the survey area had

dropped back to just under five percent overall, and many

buildings were full. The influx of new residents has

surprised many in the real estate industry who expected

the downtown residential market to remain soft much

longer than it has. The New York Times survey article

attributes the resurgence primarily to a $300 million rental

assistance program, which offers up to $12,000 in federal

funds to people who move into the area—even more to

pre – September 11 residents who decided to remain.

Another factor was widespread rent reductions of up to

25 percent, sometimes with offers of one free month. The

New York Times report also states that building values

have increased in Battery Park City and Tribeca. In the

first quarter of 2002, people paid $664 per square foot for

condominiums in Tribeca—up 17 percent from the first

quarter of 2001—and buyers in Battery Park City paid

$442 per foot—a 7 percent increase over the same period

of 2001.

The turnover in rentals has changed the area’s demo-

graphic profile, as many families with children left. In

2002 Public School 89 in Battery Park City was expecting

28 percent fewer students to enroll than in fall 2001. The

Downtown Little League, which in recent summers has

had as many 600 young participants, had fewer than 400 in

summer 2002 (Marbella 2002). The New York Times survey

article suggests that many new residents of Battery Park

City are unmarried young adults willing to double up to

pay the high rents (Winter 2002). Of the research partic-

ipants who addressed the subject of newcomers, most

said that families had moved out and that newcomers

seemed to be younger. One woman, however, said that

her building on River Terrace now had more young

families than before. It is unclear to what extent the area

is changing demographically or if, in fact, the perceived

changes are statistically accurate. What is clear, however,

is that established residents think that the newcomers are

younger and single, and many are concerned about new-

comers’ commitment to the area.

The research on the social, psychological, and physical

changes in the post – September 11 Battery Park City com-

munity began in July 2002, ten months after the WTC

attack. To capture as complete a picture as possible of

Battery Park City at one moment in time, we undertook a

Rapid Ethnographic Assessment Procedure in the area. In

a Rapid Ethnographic Assessment Procedure, multiple

qualitative methods are used to generate data from differ-

ent sources, and the data are then triangulated to provide a

more comprehensive analysis of community issues and

concerns. Our focus was the impact of September 11 on

the Battery Park City community addressed through three

levels of inquiry: (1) the individual resident, (2) the neigh-

borhood, and (3) the built environment.

The 2000 census counted 7,951 residents of Battery

Park City.7 Of the residents, 70 percent were white; the

second largest group, 17 percent, were Asian; 3 percent

were black or African American; 3 percent claimed two or

more races; and 2 percent reported being some other race.

Battery Park City was equally divided between male and

female residents. The majority of residents were young

adults between 26 and 45 years of age, and a relatively

small number were children under 18 years of age. Of the

population, 14 percent were under 18 years old, 7 percent

were between 18 and 25, 28 percent were between 26 and

35, 26 percent were between 36 and 45, 15 percent were

between 46 and 55, 6 percent were between 56 and 65, and

5 percent were over 65. Of the adult residents, 61 percent

lived in family households and 26 percent lived in one-

person households.

Of residents, 72 percent were born in the United

States, and 28 percent were foreign born. Not surprisingly,

then, 68 percent of adult residents aged 18 to 64 spoke

English, 14 percent spoke Asian and Pacific languages,

12 percent spoke other Indo-European languages, and

4 percent spoke Spanish. In the early 1990s, local residents

referred to Battery Park City as the ‘‘United Nations’’

because of the large number of diplomats and foreign-

born professionals who lived there. This characterization

still held in 2000. Finally, 67 percent of Battery Park City

residents were not living in the same houses they had

occupied in 1995, suggesting that many residents were

transient, partly because of the nature of the rental market

and partly because many of the corporately owned apart-

ments were used for temporary company assignments.

Nonetheless, in 2000 a core of residents, 33 percent, had

lived in the neighborhood since 1995 or earlier.

These demographics confirm observations from pre-

vious research that Battery Park City residents before

September 11 were mainly white, young professionals

working in New York City, often downtown. There was a

American Ethnologist n Volume 31 Number 3 August 2004

334

sizable Asian population, mostly foreign born, living partly

in corporate-owned apartments. On the whole, the popu-

lation was mobile, even transient, especially in the corpo-

rate rental sector, when compared with that of other New

York neighborhoods. Resident data indicate a generally

wealthy community prior to September 11: Residents

reported annual household incomes ranging from a low

of $10,000 (for a single person) to $600,000 – $700,000. The

median household income for Battery Park City recorded

by the 2000 census was $107,611.8

When asked about the memorial, residents said they

appreciate the need for one but also fear that it could

overwhelm the neighborhood. One resident expressed the

ambivalence that many feel.

Regarding the memorial, we have conflicting thoughts. We lost some people from Battery Park City, people lost friends and relatives, so we appreci- ate the need for memorial. But we’re kind of memorialized out downtown. When Mayor Bloom- berg spoke two weeks ago he seemed to get bad press, but what is heartening to the downtown community is that it was the first time someone in city government raised the concerns of the downtown residents. At meetings I’ve gone to, I have advocated for a joyous, inspiring memorial, not something somber where you have to whisper and be quiet. I didn’t lose a family member, and it is nothing compared to what those people suffered. But at the same time, the family members can choose whether or not to go to the memorial. If you live across the street you don’t have that choice. It’s there. So you are looking at it every day. . . . A certain level of it you accept as inevitable and appropriate. But the idea that this would look like the cemetery at Normandy is not looked on positively by downtown residents. [field notes, July 2002]

Another respondent summed up the sentiments

expressed by most: ‘‘Everyone has an opinion on the

memorial and what it should be. Basically though, we

don’t want to live in a memorial.’’

Having experienced the chaos of September 11 first-

hand, residents feel a special connection to the plans for a

memorial. In addition, both old and new residents recog-

nize that they will be greatly affected by the memorial

project, first by the attendant inconveniences of a nearby

construction site and later by the increased tourism a

finished memorial will bring. Battery Park City is unique

in that, within its 92 acres, it already includes a memorial

to New York Police Department officers who died in the

line of duty, the New York City Holocaust Museum, and

the recently finished memorial to those lost in the Irish

potato famine. ‘‘We’re like a dumping ground for memo-

rials,’’ one resident commented, and more than one

interviewee made it clear that ‘‘we don’t want to live in

a graveyard.’’

Although most residents concede that the magnitude

of the attack makes the memorial issue important to a great

number of people beyond Battery Park City, they are also

concerned with the local implications of the rebuilding. For

residents whose daily lives were so disrupted by the attack,

the issue of bringing business back to the area is more vital

than commemorating the events of September 11 and their

victims. The temporary memorial that grew up at the site of

the preexisting police memorial has given residents a taste

of what is to come, and not many of them like it. Several

residents have altered their daily walking routes to avoid

that area. ‘‘It’s not healthy for me to live in a cemetery,’’ a

resident in her forties remarked sadly, ‘‘The main thing that

gets to me is the pictures of the dead firemen.’’

Residents’ response to the notion of a memorial is of

the less-is-more variety. Their emphasis is on ways in

which the new area can be a source of revitalization rather

than remembrance. ‘‘You don’t want a dead spot, you

want life there,’’ one resident commented, ‘‘I think there

should be offices like usual, the same thing that they had

before. Not dwelling on the past, thinking only about

terrorists. . . . Life has to go on. If it was me, I’d want

something to show that my child died, but people need to

work, too.’’ No resident interviewed denied the need for

some form of memorial, but all understood that a memo-

rial would not merely be a destination for others to visit

but also a permanent part of the neighborhood they live in.

For this reason, many of the residents emphasize that the

site should be rebuilt with mixed use in mind, with a good

portion of the new space being commercial. It is, many

residents feel, the businesses that will ensure that Battery

Park City will thrive again, will live again. ‘‘We lost 110,000

jobs,’’ one resident commented, ‘‘and it would be great to

have more people.’’ Although recognizing the need to

commemorate the events of September 11, one resident

noted, ‘‘We are surrounded by death memorials. Now we

need the opposite: life and overcoming.’’

Residents and community leaders see the WTC site as

part of their neighborhood and are worried that they will

continue to be a ‘‘memorial’’ dumping ground. Even

though many lost friends and family and had their lives

completely disrupted by the events of September 11, they

would like to see the WTC area developed in a way that

would fit into their community, adding retail and recrea-

tion space. Mainly, they do not want to live in a cemetery

or graveyard, as they put it, but they long to return to the

vital and lively place they lived in before the attack. Yet

Battery Park City residents and community leaders feel left

out of the public and political process of memorial mak-

ing. More shocking is that they actually have been left out,

even though, along with the victims’ families, they will be

affected the most by what is built on the site.

At the time that initial interviews were being con-

ducted, the first plans for the rebuilding were just being

The memorialization of September 11 n American Ethnologist

335

released. Consequently, residents’ comments on the pro-

posed plans were fairly general. It is clear, however, that

the primary concern is that the neighborhood regain the

vibrancy and services it had prior to September 11. Resi-

dents are in favor of including commercial space in the

rebuilding project because employees coming to work in

the neighborhood will make services such as stores and

restaurants economically viable. Improving transportation

to the area is a major concern of many.

A significant amount of concern centers on what the

massive new construction will do to the quality of life in

Battery Park City. This concern was expressed particularly

in connection with proposals either to reconstruct West

Street or to build a tunnel to reroute the traffic on West

Street. Although these plans would seem to bring many

benefits to the neighborhood, respondents were ambiva-

lent about them: ‘‘I am mixed on that. No one likes that a

highway cuts us off from the city, but construction could

be destructive. In the long run it would be a good idea, if it

can be done without being environmentally destructive . . .

but if you can’t cross it [the street that separates Battery

Park City from the rest of downtown] for five years while

they are building it—no one wants that.’’ A similar senti-

ment was expressed by another interviewee:

Remember there is a community here that needs to continue with their lives. I have faith that in the end it will be wonderful. I was at ‘‘Listening to the City.’’ But we have lives, we need emergency services, shopping. We have daily lives. Don’t forget our needs during the rebuilding. We are willing to help, want to help, but allow us to go on living meanwhile.

Many feel that the political authorities remain uncon-

cerned with the residents of Battery Park City, whom they

do not perceive as victims of the attack. A longtime tenant

activist said,

There is a sense of anger at the politicians and powers that be that are ignoring that we are victims too. We lost our supermarket, our buses; it is going to be a construction zone for 5 – 8 years. No one acknowl- edges us. They only see the victims, the dead, and their families as victims. We are not comparing ourselves with them, just saying that there are many types of victims and we should be acknowledged.

Similarly, a newly active resident told us,

It was a great place to live. After 9/11 there were issues that brought us together. It was a force for community activism. Our needs were not being met. A lot of people felt abandoned by the officials and the government, such as with asbestos and financial issues. The relief agencies took a long time to get here, not until late, in January. And now going forward, we have issues about the rebuilding.

These respondents are quite skeptical about the po-

litical process that will result in decisions about the re-

building effort. They feel that it is unreasonable that so

many people who do not live or work in the Battery Park

City neighborhood will be given a say in the process. One

individual expressed a mild version of this sentiment:

‘‘First and foremost we want to have a strong voice in

the decisions. This is our community. Yes, it was an attack

on our country, but it is our neighborhood.’’ An extreme

version was articulated by a newly active resident:

How do you fight such an entrenched system? I think it is community second, corporations first. . . . I want more democracy. Community should come first. Dealing with Environmental Protection Agency was my first exposure, democracy is bogus, a farce . . . you’re a pawn in the game. . . . I don’t think it is a cabal of ten people, it’s the system . . . the average person cannot do anything . . . [is what] comes through in a crisis situation.

Overall, community leaders and residents are con-

cerned about their lack of representation in the rebuild-

ing and memorial decision-making process. Even though a

Battery Park City resident is a member of the LMDC

committee, those in the community feel that their voices

are not being heard. Worse, they feel that they have been

overlooked as inadvertent and secondary victims of Sep-

tember 11. They are deeply concerned that they will have

little to no control over the fate of the WTC site and

memorial process, which, from their point of view, will

‘‘make or break’’ the quality of life in their local commu-

nity. But, if Battery Park City residents had been consid-

ered in the rebuilding and memorialization process, then

the city and state would have been committed to a much

longer planning and design process. As the resident quoted

above put it, ‘‘Democracy is bogus . . . the average person

cannot do anything.’’ By excluding the local community

from active participation, the city reinforced this negative

perspective and provided additional evidence that officials

were not willing to make reconstruction and memorializa-

tion a ‘‘democratic’’ process.

Conclusion

On February 26, 2003, Daniel Libeskind’s complex of

angular buildings and a 1,776-foot spire was selected as

the plan for the WTC site. The choice, favored by Governor

Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg, was made by a committee of

representatives of the LMDC, the Port Authority of New

York and New Jersey, and the offices of the governor and

mayor. The selection of the Libeskind plan climaxed a

design competition that was launched when an initial set

of plans, developed by preselected architectural design

firms in July 2002, was rejected as boring and uninspired

American Ethnologist n Volume 31 Number 3 August 2004

336

by both the public and officials. On December 18, 2002,

nine preliminary proposals were unveiled as finalists, and

Libeskind’s was selected from among them.

Daniel Libeskind describes his scheme, which features

the tallest tower in the world and a sunken memorial

incorporating 30 (originally 70) feet of exposed Hudson

River slurry wall, as symbolic of ‘‘democracy’s resilience in

the face of terrorist attacks’’ (Kamin 2003, citing Libe-

skind’s comments). The plan also accommodates the

required square footage for rented office space, a museum,

and a controversial space called the Wedge of Light, which

Libeskind contends will be illuminated by sunlight on

September 11 between the hours of 8:46 a.m., the time

the first airplane hit, and 10:28 a.m., when the second

tower collapsed. Critics have called the 1,776-foot-high

tower ‘‘astonishingly tasteless’’ (Kamin 2003, quoting Her-

bert Muschamp) and a possible target for another attack,

and the calculations of sun and shade on which the Wedge

of Light is based have been labeled inaccurate. Libeskind,

however, argues that his tower is symbolic of his first view

of Manhattan skyscrapers when he first came to this

country from Israel as a child of Holocaust survivors. The

tower echoes the upraised arm of the Statue of Liberty and

represents Libeskind’s love for his adopted country. For

the national media, Governor Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg,

and architectural critic Paul Goldberger, the site plan and

memorial space design are emotionally evocative. But they

do little to enhance the overall fabric of New York public

spaces and offer little to solve the problems—much less

the feelings of fear and insecurity—of those who live and

work downtown.

The current Libeskind design does not take into con-

sideration any of the local concerns I elicited through on-

the-ground ethnography. In some ways his design, with its

tall spire and sunken pit of exposed slurry wall, is closest to

the fantasies of a few of the children, but it lacks the

humanity of a park for all. Sadly, the memorial space—

although not yet designed in detail—dominates the Battery

Park City side of the site, whereas the retail and commer-

cial space that the neighborhood argues it needs is includ-

ed within the outer ring of tall office buildings that cry out

‘‘business as usual.’’ And the sunken expanse of memorial

space also is not perceived by residents or children as a

‘‘safe’’ or ‘‘secure’’ space. Dark, subterranean spaces in

cold, northeastern cities rarely are. Instead, Libeskind’s

schematic design is a testimony to the professional cre-

dentials of the architect and the requirements of the office

space square footage demands of the leaseholder.

The desires of Battery Park City community members,

schoolchildren, ethnic enclaves, and insecure citizens

could have been accommodated by a memorialization

process that took seriously the need to include all ideas

of what a place of memory and representation of Septem-

ber 11 should be. Instead, economics and politics have

outstripped any sense of inclusiveness or compassion for

the wider range of sufferers. The dominant discourse of a

national tragedy signified by great and ‘‘inspiring’’ archi-

tecture obscures the feelings, worries, and real-life con-

cerns of those living and working downtown. Here, then,

lies the strength of on-the-ground ethnography: the pro-

duction of a body of data that contests the decisions of the

more powerful players in this memorial monopoly. Al-

though understanding local fears and desires may not

change the shape of the memorial design, it does provide

insights into how personal narratives contest the dominant

discourses. The national tragedy threatens to consume

local sorrow and fear, and residents feel overwhelmed by

the idea of living in cemetery.

Important insights into the memorialization process,

however, are provided by Libeskind’s reference to his

immigrant status and to the Holocaust, and by the

ethnographic studies described in this article. As opposed

to the Holocaust, the destruction of the WTC towers was

immediately encapsulated into a moment and an image

called September 11. The Holocaust and other catastroph-

ic events, by contrast, have been given various names,

labels, and meanings, continuously transforming one’s

vision of the world and of what constitutes human

nature, as their horror and tragedy traverse the politics

of time. Further, the memorialization of the Holocaust,

like that of the Vietnam War and Pearl Harbor, has taken

many forms.

But in the case of the WTC site, it seems as if state

officials, assisted by the media, sought to contain an act of

terrorism in a name (September 11), place (Ground Zero),

and master plan (Libeskind’s) as quickly as possible so that

the act’s residual meanings could not escape or spread.

These residual meanings include a wide range of concerns:

about U.S. imperialism, what it means to be a disenfran-

chised immigrant or worker in New York City, what

architectural symbols of wealth and prestige could be

gained from the destruction, and what constitutes truly

democratic practice in a culturally diverse city. As I point

out after each of the studies discussed, none of the con-

cerns of workers, Muslim immigrants, children, and down-

town residents were included in the reconstruction and

memorialization process. And each of these groups tried to

have a voice, either through citywide ‘‘listening’’ panels,

grassroots activist groups, representatives on decision-

making boards, letters to the editor, websites, and radio

talk shows. But none of these vehicles were persuasive,

and, instead, as I have documented, the WTC project was

city business as usual. Money and political control

trumped inclusion and democracy. The city, state, and

national governments and their elected and appointed

officials did not want to examine the broader meanings

of September 11 but aimed at restricting participation to

produce closure as quickly as possible. And for those who

The memorialization of September 11 n American Ethnologist

337

still suffered or whose feelings about what had happened

remained unresolved, ubiquitous mental health workers

and posttraumatic stress disorder medicalized what oth-

erwise would have been a political issue.

So what will finally happen? Will the new buildings of

the World Trade Center site contain only consumption

spaces or have guards that discourage use by minorities

and the poor, or will the proposed new buildings and

memorial site allow diverse communities to express their

needs and desires in a complex space of reflection and

reconciliation? Will the search for security and desire to

ward off anxiety continue to create architectural spaces

that feel unsafe and contrived rather than a ‘‘Union

Square’’ where people can express their grief, love, and

humanity? Is the September 11 memorial process just

another football in the convoluted politics of New York

City and New York State?

The diverse range of views expressed by the students

and residents of lower Manhattan compels acknowledg-

ment that, given the rich variety of life in New York City,

Union Square is closer to the appropriate ideal. After

September 11, everyone congregated in local parks and

plazas. These places were the communal centers where

people came together and shared experiences. The memo-

rials at Union Square demonstrated that the emotional life

of New York City still resides on its streets and in its public

spaces, and that fact should guide the spirit that infuses

any plans for the WTC site.

In keeping with this long-standing, democratic New

York tradition, I imagine a complex space with gardens of

reflection and recovery, buildings with memorials and

historical documents as well as places to work and play,

and open plazas for people to come together to discuss

and disagree in a public environment. A postindustrial

plaza where the imagery and imagination of all commu-

nities, children and seniors, workers and retirees, residents

and visitors, can find public expression. I wonder if the

political forces that have been unleashed can be controlled

so that the public has a place to live again as well as to

mourn and remember.

Notes

Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Carol Collet and the

eighth-grade music and art class students, and Steve Montgomery

and the third- and fourth-grade art class students at Grace Church School for sharing their ideas about and images of the WTC and

for contributing to this article. I would also like to thank my Public

Space Research Group associates, Dana Taplin, Mike Lamb, and Mirele Goldsmith, for their participation in the Battery Park City

project, and the Russell Sage Foundation and the Research Foun-

dation of CUNY for funding this ongoing ethnographic study.

Finally, I want to thank the Battery Park City residents, the colleagues, and the New York State and Port Authority officials

who took the time to talk with us about the memorialization

process. I am indebted to Elizabeth Greenspan, Lori Coppola,

Mara Heppen, Michael Sorkin, Sharon Zukin, Harvey Molotch,

Marita Sturken, and Geoffrey White, who have written so compel-

lingly about memorialization and its difficulties, and whose inspi- ration I continually draw on. The data on the children at Grace

Church School were first reported in Michael Sorkin and Sharon

Zukin’s volume, After the Trade Center (2002), and in a report for

the Russell Sage Foundation written by Dana Taplan, Mike Lamb, and me (Low et al. 2002).

1. These observations are based on Lori Coppola’s 2002 field

notes and Mara Heppen’s 2003 field notes.

2. The New York Recovery Project was the brainchild of Eric

Wenner, the president of the Russell Sage Foundation. He funded

New York sociologists and anthropologists whose graduate stu-

dents were working on local sites to conduct ethnographic work with those students on community responses to September 11.

Nancy Foner, the chair of the recovery project committee,

approved my proposal to study Battery Park City as part of this

initial effort. The communities studied included Belle Harbor, Queens, taxi drivers in Manhattan, Chinatown, airport workers,

relocated Wall Street companies, artists working in the down-

town area, and residents of Tribeca. The plan is for the Russell Sage Foundation to eventually publish the joint faculty – graduate

student studies together in one volume. The Battery Park City

study, reported on later in this article, has been expanded

because of additional funding from the Research Foundation of the City University of New York. The results reported in this

section are based on preliminary field reports presented at a

series of in-house conferences held in October and November

2002 at the Russell Sage Foundation. The researchers and their preliminary reports are cited in the bibliography.

3. We are now in the process of coding responses to all of the

open-ended interview questions on fear and violence to run a quantitative analysis on the difference in the degree of fear

expressed during the first and second summers following Sep-

tember 11. In a preliminary run of the data, we found that a

generalized sense of insecurity and fear of terrorism and a sense of safety within the neighborhood remained the same in 2003.

4. My colleague Morris Dickstein told me about a National

Public Radio program on the wives of undocumented Mexican workers who had died in the WTC. These women traveled to New

York City to ask for financial assistance, but because there was no

record of their husbands as city residents, they were not compen- sated for their losses.

5. This research was made possible by the help of Carol Collet,

who allowed me full access to students for interviewing and

opportunities for participant-observation. Students were invited to share their drawings and paintings as well as to take part in a

lengthy interview about their September 11 experiences and their

hopes for the future. The comparative work with students of different ages was reinforced by my observations of children’s

artwork depicting the events of September 11, which was dis-

played in the Museum of the City of New York show at which I first

reported my initial findings.

6. This study was undertaken by the Public Space Research

Group of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

with the assistance of Dana Taplin, Mike Lamb, and Mirele Goldsmith. It began in the summer of 2002 and continued through

October 2004 to obtain longitudinal data on how residents’

perceptions and concerns have changed. To date, 135 residents

have been interviewed, 12 expert interviews with community officials have been collected, and hundreds of pages of field notes

have been recorded. Results of the study to date are based on a

content analysis of the interview questions and field notes.

7. The census defined the area as tract 31701.

American Ethnologist n Volume 31 Number 3 August 2004

338

8. Households include couples and families, single residents,

and unrelated adults sharing a dwelling unit.

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accepted April 3, 2004 final version submitted January 27, 2004

Setha M. Low

Ph.D. Programs in Environmental Psychology and Anthropology The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

365 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10016

[email protected]

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