(RE)CLAIMING THE SIXTEEN ACRES, 2001–2002

The first days after the collapse of the Twin Towers, the city government took charge at Ground Zero, setting up rescue and recovery efforts and clearing the roads around the ravaged 16 acres bound by Liberty, Vesey, West, and Church streets.^{Footnote 11} The higher political echelons were less assertive. The razed land belonged to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which was recovering from a great loss of personnel in the Twin Towers, including its executive director.^{Footnote 12} The Port Authority, a semi-governmental state agency, was officially subordinate to the state governor, George Pataki. The governor chose the time-tested politician’s tactic of watching the proceedings before speaking out with regard to the future of Ground Zero. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was vocal, but mostly regarding the victims and survivors. Giuliani knew, however, that his term was almost up, and he held the strategic opinion, which would be voiced often and loudly by others over the next years, that no civic or commercial buildings should ever again be built on Ground Zero.

A stark contrast was provided by the last force on the space-production side at Ground Zero: Larry Silverstein, real estate mogul and leaseholder of the land beneath the destroyed towers. Silverstein had invested in several buildings of the World Trade Center just a few months before 9/11.^{Footnote 13} The fact that his acquisition was so recent that the insurance documents were not yet entirely finalized complicated matters significantly. To bolster his claim to double insurance payments (for two separate attacks on two separate towers), Silverstein stated his intention to rebuild the Twin Towers just weeks after the originals had been destroyed. To the press, Silverstein declared that not rebuilding “would give the terrorists the victory they seek,” and that “we must not let terrorists destroy our way of life or our city’s vital financial heart.”^{Footnote 14} The real estate company received much criticism for this brash action.

Two months after the attacks, in November 2001, Governor George Pataki and Mayor Giuliani created the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC). This agency, set up to oversee the development of the site after rescue and recovery operations had finished, would get a remarkable position in the political hierarchy of city planning. Political scientist Maarten Hajer observes that “[w]ith the installation of the LMDC [Pataki and Bloomberg] essentially ‘created’ ambivalence about which rules should apply and hence they opened an arena for contestation in which all sorts of actors could claim the right to have a say.”^{Footnote 15}

Like Silverstein’s press conference, it can be seen as a political performance in a chaotic discursive space where ordinary democratic and political restraints had less meaning. The political and organizational situation, as rife with meaning as it was lacking in historical precedents, formed a battleground in which new, sometimes creative ways could be found to influence the development of Ground Zero. The invocation of the meaning of objects on the site would become a major strategy in that arena.^{Footnote 16}

More or less simultaneously with the establishment of the LMDC, architects’ collectives and other groups and committees started popping up. The media duly reported that Silverstein was already drawing up plans for offices, and even though Ground Zero had been meticulously fenced off, the New York Times informed its readers of the “sheer rapidity with which the site is being cleared, with debris being hauled away to the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, and to locations in New Jersey where it is already being ground into scrap.”^{Footnote 17} Debates in the media, civic gatherings, and idealistic art exhibitions about the future of Ground Zero were taking place simultaneously with the quiet planning in boardrooms, but there was little connection between these spheres. Very few were aware, for instance, that Silverstein had contacted his architect, David Childs, to start drafting plans for new buildings at the site weeks after 9/11.^{Footnote 18}

A permanent memorial of some sort was crucial to many, but because of the political ambivalence it was far from clear where any development proposal should be sent. One important realisation seemed to take root nonetheless. What was crucial at the moment, said Michael Manfredi, a member of an advisory committee called the Memorial Process Team, was that the design, the “art,” would “not be a footnote to a large development project.”^{Footnote 19} His words illustrate the widely felt dread that the Port Authority-Silverstein program would primarily feature commercial development. And it did. Silverstein still owed the Port Authority $100 million per year in rent; and the Port Authority, in turn, could not do without this revenue from office space to finance other infrastructural and real estate projects throughout the state.

In 2002, the Port Authority commissioned six proposals for redevelopment of the site, in what they termed a “design study,” on the basis of the strict demand that any design would have to accommodate the same 10 million square feet of office space the Twin Towers had provided.^{Footnote 20} The six firms were asked to reserve some space for a memorial as well, but many alternative forms of possible land usage were ignored.

As the forces of production asserted their power and intentions, four modes of potential alternative site consumption could be distinguished. Each mode had its own advocates in sometimes-overlapping groups that challenged the interests of the governor, Silverstein, and the Port Authority. First was the proposal to develop the site as a space of mourning. Many, especially New Yorkers, saw the entirety of Ground Zero as a graveyard that should never be built upon again. Second, a much larger group was attracted to the site in order to gaze and reflect on the tragedy, consuming the space as tourists. Third came the proposed use of the 16 acres as residential space. This is the mode of consumption proposed by both those who wished to use it as residents of nearby neighborhoods, through shopping or as recreation, and those who wanted to use it as a space for residence, with housing built on Ground Zero. Finally, several developments after 9/11 opened doors for potential historical consumption of the site. Throughout the development process, possibilities presented themselves to conserve, visualize, and connect with a pre-9/11 history of the site.

CURATING MEMORIALIZATION: 2002–2004

Around the time that the design study was announced, Governor Pataki declared the end of recovery operations in a highly ritualized and performative ceremony in which soldiers marched an empty coffin out of the pit to bagpipe music. Although human remains would be recovered from the site for years to come, Pataki signaled that the time had come to stop framing the site as a burial space only and to begin moving on to a phase of redevelopment.^{Footnote 21} The Port Authority announced more changes at the site, including a new 30-foot-high barrier around Ground Zero. Neither party seemed to realize that the new phase would also entail intense battles over the objects and materials on and around the site.

Immediately after 9/11, the barriers erected to demarcate the site became the most important objects in the communication with and the consumption of the tragedy that had played out behind them.^{Footnote 22} A patchwork of paper notes, “missing” posters, and photographs changed walls of bare plywood into sites of public mourning. By placing candles, teddy bears, flowers, t-shirts, and other tokens near Ground Zero by the thousands, visitors “physically transformed” the barriers into temporary memorials, “places accorded special, even sacred, status by the ritualized acts and offerings of everyday urban pilgrims.”^{Footnote 23}

Harriet Senie has observed that by offering these everyday, often banal things, mourners “create a public space for individuals and communities united in grief and often anger.”^{Footnote 24} From its origins in nineteenth-century roadside memorials and other, mostly Catholic, spontaneous shrines, the creation of modern temporary memorials has evolved into a secular and, surprisingly, strictly coded ritual in the last decades.^{Footnote 25} Their recognizability perpetuates itself through mainstream media, as news broadcasts have increasingly used video and photo footage of massed things to convey the extent of feeling that the event caused in the affected community.^{Footnote 26} The massiveness of temporary memorials, their suggestions of grassroots community involvement and direct emotional display, all correspond to the perceived greatness of the tragedy. Significantly, they demand physical interaction, even if this means just walking around it.^{Footnote 27}

Figure 1.

A spontaneous temporary memorial on Union Square on September 25, 200. Photo by Rob Sheridan, used with permission.

At Ground Zero, they were not just “innocuous expressions of grief,” Elizabeth Greenspan reminds us: “With each bear, banner, and handwritten signature, people were expressing sympathy but they were also making claims upon the land.”^{Footnote 28}

The Port Authority attempted to channel this wave of public grief by commissioning a temporary memorial of its own: two vertical rays of light beamed into the night sky, suggesting the Twin Towers in the New York skyline. It was a well-loved memorial, but too expensive to be maintained for more than a few weeks. A temporary memorial in nearby Battery Park City proposed by the LMDC met with much disapproval; victims’ families found a memorial away from Ground Zero objectionable (as one family member explained, “[I]f [my brother] is anywhere, he’s buried somewhere at Ground Zero. And I wouldn’t want to go to anywhere else but there”), while Battery Park City residents were equally opposed, fearing that the memorial might turn into a permanent one.^{Footnote 29} One resident told the press: “To have a temporary memorial in a residential area where you have traumatized children and traumatized adults, I think is asking a little too much for one neighborhood.”^{Footnote 30} A report from New York New Visions, an architects’ and planners’ coalition, found that rescue workers “expressed concern that a temporary memorial might distract attention away from a permanent memorial,” while Lower Manhattan residents stressed “the need for temporary memorial sites.” The report continues: “[T]hey were concerned about the amount of tourism that a memorial site would generate, and therefore favored reclaiming the current site for public uses such as a park, performing arts center, cultural center, or learning center for children.”^{Footnote 31}

Memorialization was laden with meaning for everyone, and this early discussion of the use of space shows the ways in which potential modes of consumption vied for the available space. But as challenging as long-term planning would be for the Port Authority, the piles of stuff growing on the sidewalks near the site were an even more urgent problem. The temporary memorials, though no one’s property, could not be treated as litter.

Although made up of cheap objects that were often of a perishable nature, many such temporary memorials have been the subjects of preservation efforts. The problems with either storing or exhibiting the temporary memorials, however, are manifold. First, the chaotic power of a thousand teddy bears placed by a thousand individual people is obliterated as soon as a curator marks the things and attempts to reassemble a pile of them in an exhibition space. The same goes for the direct experience of gazing upon a memorial that is spontaneously erected in a place as public as a sidewalk. Jack Santino calls them “performative commemoratives” that place death at the heart of social life.^{Footnote 32} The shock of feeling, the urge to add a thing to the pile or to take part in the performance of grief by crying, praying, or even picking up and caressing an object, is almost impossible to reproduce meaningfully in a museum setting. Objects removed from their location are alienated, decontextualized.^{Footnote 33} An object placed in a museum becomes heritage, ethnography, the result of the culture of “another.” Its significance is often inextricably linked to its spatial context, and its biography is irreparably terminated when taken out of that context.^{Footnote 34}

Second, museum space is problematic because it excludes certain modes of consumption. Museums are not public spaces, and they often demand entrance fees and specific forms of behavior that resemble the touristic mode of consumption—certainly in the eyes of the many families who vehemently protested the storage of unidentifiable human remains in a space bordering the 9/11 Memorial Museum.^{Footnote 35}

In the case of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, the level of decontextualization is to some extent remedied by the fact that it is an “on-site museum,” safeguarding the genius loci or “place authenticity.”^{Footnote 36} On-site museums have been compared to medieval pilgrimage destinations harboring relics that “do not show isolated, unrelated bits of history, but entire scenes.”^{Footnote 37} More specifically, the 9/11 Memorial Museum can be referred to as a “trauma site museum,” a type of museum that is believed to “maintain a real spatial contiguity with the trauma itself.”^{Footnote 38} This does not mean that all the problems mentioned in relation to the museological presentation of temporary monuments have been solved. The 9/11 Memorial Museum displays the objects indoors, in a closed-up and carefully choreographed space.^{Footnote 39} This means it is impossible to exhibit anything other than a representation of what once was a powerful, spontaneous expression of grief.

The Department of Parks and Recreation began removing and storing the many shrines and piles a few weeks after 9/11. The Giuliani administration had clamped down on street vendors, public performances, and unsolicited public art. True to form, they officially banned the creation of memorials in parks and other public sites in the face of widespread protest. Decomposing flowers were composted to feed official memorial flowerbeds, objects were stored in warehouses around the city, yet the coded rituals of temporary memorials continued to be performed: visitors still felt a need, as well as a sense of entitlement, to place flowers and other objects on or near Ground Zero.^{Footnote 40}

The new 30-foot wall that the Port Authority envisaged met with unprecedented outrage. Families demanded that anything that was to stand on the perimeter for the next decade include a memorial, architects and designers opposed the prospect of Ground Zero being walled off to the public, and New York New Visions appealed to the LMDC’s Alex Garvin, who agreed that the wall was unacceptable. The Port Authority’s response was one of complete surprise, but their subsequent actions betray their awareness of the potency of the object they were about to put up. It refused to adopt the LMDC’s recommendations and instead commissioned a see-through fence, designed so that it could not be turned into a permanent memorial. Mark Wagner, the Port Authority consultant in charge of the fence, admitted that the Port Authority was acutely aware of the agency a new object might attain in any struggle concerning the development. The organization “feared that a fence full of memorials and handwritten notes could engender a sense of attachment. And this, in turn, could complicate its plans to redevelop the land.”^{Footnote 41}

While mourning was enacted through creation outside the barriers, removal and demolition still took place within them. Anticipating possible objections to the displacement of dust and other material, the Port Authority had named a committee shortly after 9/11, headed by Wagner, to select objects to be salvaged from the site, as well as from the New Jersey and Fresh Kills recycling plants.^{Footnote 42} On May 30, 2002, the last column of the South Tower, 36 feet in length and bedecked with rescue workers’ graffiti and “missing” posters, was removed from the site. Like many other construction materials, wrecked cars, and pieces of public art tagged by the committee, it was taken to Hangar 17 at Kennedy Airport. Officially, the mandate came from the judiciary: Ground Zero was a crime scene, and all potentially relevant material from it had to be preserved as evidence.

The collection of material in a drafty and obscure hangar met with some disapproval. After visiting the hangar in 2003, a journalist published an alarming article that accused the Port Authority of allowing the objects to “rapidly and permanently degrade because of deficiencies in temperature and humidity control.”^{Footnote 43} In the following years, curators glued peeling paint back on to rusted girders and carefully stored fading photographs that were once duct-taped to the girders. In 2006, the problematic status of Hangar 17 was further highlighted when a cross-shaped steel beam that had stood at the site, where it had become a focal point for commemorative open-air masses, was to be moved to the hangar. Catholic priest Brian Jordan led a passionate protest, stating that it was “an unacceptable location for the cross, even temporarily,” and forcing the Port Authority to consider more accessible public locations.^{Footnote 44} This points to the main, and most relevant, concern about Hangar 17: a complete lack of public access. The material, however carefully preserved, was all but invisible to the public and often absent from public debate. Perhaps because of this, and due to the legal status of the material as evidence, the material was barely considered in the design proposals for the 9/11 Memorial.^{Footnote 45}

After tests on the structural integrity of the beams in Hangar 17 were finished in 2005, it gradually became clear that these were exhibits in a court case that would never take place. By 2011, there were weekly dispatches of objects to be used in monuments within fire departments or suburban squares, some still tagged “evidence” with pieces of paper. The Port Authority actively encouraged applications for pieces of material by towns and museums around the world.^{Footnote 46}

In spite of these efforts, the sacralization of all material from Ground Zero made the process of clearing the site for construction problematic. As early as October 2001, Richard Scherr, a finalist in the competition for the Oklahoma City Memorial, noted that the material rapidly removed from the WTC site “represents a fabric… that can speak to us from the site.”^{Footnote 47} He suggested that material being ground to scrap or buried could very well have been used in a future memorial. Many New Yorkers felt the same way, as evidenced by such groups as Save the Facades, which claimed to “fight to preserve history.” The remaining facades, the group states on its web site, “provided comfort and resolve in the weeks and months following the terrorist attacks. The public was assured that these poignant remnants would be included in the future memorial. But now the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation wants to hide them in an underground museum.”^{Footnote 48} Architecture critic Herbert Muschamp wrote that “a memorial to those lost in the terrorist attack already exists. We will probably see no more eloquent reminder of that day than the twisted steel walls that at present rise from the wreckage of the World Trade Center.”^{Footnote 49}

In the summer of 2002, Pataki and Bloomberg were shown the six proposals in the Port Authority’s design study. Each proposal incorporated a tremendous amount of office space, a memorial, cultural facilities, and new infrastructure into the site.^{Footnote 50}

Figures 2.1 and 2.2.

Two of the six proposals in the design study clearly show the uniformity of the imagery. Lower Manhattan Development Committee, “Urban Design Approaches and Concept Plans.” Image courtesy of the Lower Manhattan Development Committee.

Pataki praised the plans and gave the project his fiat. Bloomberg was dismayed at the narrow scope of the possibilities for the site and asked why there was no option for an empty site or one with residences.^{Footnote 51} As mayor, however, he could not prevent the Port Authority from putting the proposals on show the next day.

Shortly after the six design plans were made public, the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York (a consortium consisting of several eminent organizations such as the Regional Plan Association, the New School, and the Pratt Institute) organized a “Listening to the City” conference, attracting more than four thousand people. Each of the plans was subsequently voted “poor” or “unacceptable” by a majority. Despite the fact that the meeting was cosponsored by the Port Authority and the LMDC, and despite the former’s executive director’s meaningful opening words that the site was “not a blank slate,” the public had made a clear statement.^{Footnote 52} There was a desire for boldness and visionary planning, and—although it was not made explicit—an unease with the outcomes of the Port Authority’s rigid program.^{Footnote 53}

It was clear that proposals regarding production of space at Ground Zero had hitherto ignored major alternative uses of the space. As with its 30-foot opaque wall, the Port Authority may have hoped to retain control over a volatile redevelopment process through a lack of transparency. As demands for a more open and inclusive planning process grew louder, consumer groups appealed to powerful material symbols on Ground Zero. The most powerful protesters had, until this point, favored a space of mourning, but with millions of visitors to the site since 9/11, tourism had to be taken into account as well.

Although access to Lower Manhattan was, for some time, restricted, the space of Ground Zero was consumed by tourists from its inception through photographs and other media representations. However, by visiting the site, which was populated by memorial activity and temporary shrines, almost all visitors inevitably partook in rituals of mourning, as Debbie Lisle, Marita Sturken, and others have observed.^{Footnote 54} Yet development of the site was, in many ways, aimed more at a touristic mode of consumption, in the traditional sense, than at mourning or a hybrid of tourism and mourning, which increasingly drove away disenchanted residents of southern Manhattan itself.

Visitors from outside New York did come, and they kept appearing in extremely high numbers to see, photograph, and otherwise engage with both the pile itself and the surrounding area with its plaques and exhibition spaces. Though they were well-meaning and well-informed consumers of the space, their consumptive patterns diverged from those of family members of the deceased and other involved New Yorkers, who avoided a site that had become just “a hole and a lot of gawking,” as Greenspan writes.^{Footnote 55} As the demands of victims’ families and survivors became more specific, tourists were increasingly encouraged to perform traditional touristic consumption practices. From 2002 onward, for instance, respectable newspapers published travel features advising visitors where to eat after visiting Ground Zero.^{Footnote 56}

Just months after 9/11, a group of architects decided to upgrade a small viewing platform, built for President George W. Bush, in order to “fulfil a vital public need: to see and understand what happened.”^{Footnote 57} Soon after the platform was opened in December 2001, the enormous enthusiasm to visit and gaze from the platform caused discomfort. Victims’ families hated the idea of masses gazing upon the remains of their loved ones, while tourists berated each other for taking photographs or signing their names on the platform’s plywood. Although the platform was taken down just a year later, it had “served as a potent symbol of the public’s sense of ownership over the land,” Greenspan noted.^{Footnote 58} Many had felt a need to make the pilgrimage to Ground Zero as a way to come to terms with the “realness” of their experience on 9/11, and they saw gazing upon Ground Zero as a significant healing experience.^{Footnote 59} The construction of the platform can be seen as initiating the site’s “destinization.” After its removal, the site of trauma was increasingly transformed into a representation of itself through modern techniques, such as touch screens now present on the site, in order to construct a new kind of “tourist realism.”^{Footnote 60}

Eventually, the removal of tangible reminders of the tragedy—the smoking piles, the twisted steel, and the temporary monuments—made the site less interesting for visitors seeking to experience the immediacy of the tragedy.^{Footnote 61} Sturken observed that a set of photographic displays put up by the Port Authority around the perimeter of the site “compensates for the fact that the site has little to show that can conjure up its intense meaning.”^{Footnote 62} And indeed, for many years to come, international tourists, especially, would characterize the site, which had once embodied realness, as just “a big excavation,” as one visitor put it, “[m]ore like a ‘been there’ kind of thing.”^{Footnote 63}

SURVIVING OBJECTS, SURVIVORS’ OBJECTS: 2004–2007

After the debacle of the design study, the Port Authority and the LMDC discarded the six original plans as just studies, and in 2003, they held a new competition. Despite the embarrassment of “Listening to the City,” the new criteria were as restrictive as before, still demanding the ten million square feet of office space as well as space for a memorial (with the sacred space of the Twin Towers’ footprints free of commercial development), yet allowing no residential construction.^{Footnote 64} Five teams of architects provided detailed designs, some grandiose, like Sir Norman Foster’s “kissing towers,” and some featuring other modes of consumption. Peterson/Littenberg, a firm that had acted as Garvin’s consultants since 2002, proposed to reinstate the pre-2001 sculpture the Sphere, discussed below, and the historical coastline of the Hudson River in its design. Garvin selected designs by Rafael Viñoly’s THINK group and Daniel Libeskind, who both had kept most pragmatically to the competition’s demands.

Governor Pataki had the final say and chose Libeskind’s Memory Foundations. It appears he may have been swayed by the emotional, highly personal rhetoric and imaginative imagery of Libeskind. But Libeskind had never designed a skyscraper before, and more significantly, he had not been asked to do anything but provide a master plan for the usage of the space. After this victory, Libeskind’s design for a group of skyscrapers around one shard-like tower was fundamentally modified by Childs (Silverstein’s architect of choice for his skyscrapers), to meet security demands and translate sculptural imagery into a useable construction plan, following a long and bitter design feud.^{Footnote 65}

Figure 3.

An early design sketch of Libeskind and Childs’ later design. Image courtesy of the Lower Manhattan Development Committee.

In January 2004, Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence was announced as the winner of a much less controversial (and much less transparent) memorial design competition held by the LMDC, and in July of that year, a cornerstone was laid for Libeskind’s proposed Freedom Tower, then scheduled to open in 2008.^{Footnote 66} Some might have realized at the time that this date was far from feasible, nothing more than a political statement. Much conflict still lay in the way of the Port Authority and the LMDC, much of it over objects on the site.^{Footnote 67} As the New York Times wrote late in 2004, the Port Authority faced “the greatest test yet of its preservation mettle as decisions are made about extraordinary—if subtle—physical remnants that stand in the way of redevelopment plans.”^{Footnote 68} It showed remarkable foresight. With the Port Authority, Silverstein, and Libeskind keeping each other in a stranglehold over fees, deadlines, and design, the public grew increasingly frustrated and Ground Zero ever more symbolically complex.

Unease had mounted over the sacralized dust, rapidly carted off to Fresh Kills Landfill, and the steel girders of the Twin Towers’ walls shipped off to Chinese steel ovens. The debates that followed from this unease between the producing Port Authority and LMDC, and the modes of consumption that they excluded to varying degrees, make interesting cases. As Bruno Latour stated, “[T]hings, especially public things, map political cultures and shape political bodies. … Dingpolitik provides more credible possibilities than Realpolitik.” The agency of the objects at Ground Zero was becoming more visible with every week of site development.

Interestingly, resistance to the removal of soil or girders before 2004 did not halt, or even significantly stall, the ongoing site recovery and construction. Perhaps the process, which was handled by engineers and police officers with surprising efficiency, went too quickly, but most likely, concepts like steel and sand, even if they still contained human remains, were too abstract to inspire the public imagination and rile enough protesters. The much greater agency of more concretely tangible objects confirms this. From the earliest days after 9/11, the heavily dented Great Spherical Caryatid for instance, formed a familiar rallying point for feelings of grief, hopefulness, and anger. This sculptural homage to peace by Fritz Koenig known to New Yorkers simply as the Sphere, did not enjoy much notoriety when it stood between the Twin Towers. The first journalists writing about it after 9/11 felt obliged to describe the object to their readers in detail.^{Footnote 69}

In contrast, articles with titles along the lines of “Where is the Sphere?” abound in the media to this day.^{Footnote 70} Koenig’s sculpture was removed from Ground Zero early in 2002, partly repaired, and placed on a small lawn in Battery Park.^{Footnote 71} Although initially presented as a temporary solution, the sculpture stands there to this day, to the dismay of many. Residents did not appreciate having too many memorials in the neighborhood they were trying to rebuild, and victims’ relatives as well as tourists preferred to see the sculpture back at the site, where it could better fulfill its role as an homage to peace—the meaning Koenig had intended for his work—and its new, added meaning as a symbol of endurance.

The Survivors’ Stairway is another case in point. The last flight of stairs from Tobin Plaza to street level still stood in its place, and naturally, hundreds of survivors attached meaning to it—everyone had used emergency staircases. The more material was removed from the site, the more poignant and visible the recognizable remnants became, and in the course of 2004 several artifacts could be identified. Among plaza tiles, the floor of the central “crossroads” of the subterraneous shopping mall, and the gnarled roots of an uprooted tree, the stairway stood out.

It was mentioned first in the New York Times in 2007, when David Dunlap wrote about a “badly battered stairway that rises from the south side of Vesey Street . . . . In some quarters, this is called the ‘survivors’ stairway.”’^{Footnote 72} A group called The World Trade Center Survivors stated on their web site, savethestairway.org, that

In 2006, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, an influential non-profit organization, put the staircase on its list of the most endangered historical places in America. The protests had reached a climax when Silverstein Properties announced an office tower designed by Foster for the lot on which the staircase stood. The National Trust claimed that “Silverstein Properties has not made a commitment to preserve the staircase,” and it stated that “it will be the most dramatic original piece of the site that will have meaning to generations to come.”^{Footnote 74}

It certainly looked dramatic, battered and covered in dust as it was, and the image of the staircase featured prominently on posters and on web sites.

Figure 4.

The Vesey Street “Survivors’ Staircase,” as it caught the public’s eye after 2005. Photo by Brad Miller, used with permission.

Silverstein, fearing a confrontation with the vocal and mediagenic survivors’ and families’ lobby, announced that the stairway site would be excavated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and stored. Foster demonstrated how important the stairway had become, when he declared that his designs for the WTC 3 tower could be amended so as to save it, even suggesting that it be included in his design.^{Footnote 75}

The heroic image of the battered staircase fit the protesters’ narratives well. It matched the images of dust-covered ruins seen during and shortly after 9/11. None of them seemed to realize in 2007 that the staircase had survived the attacks completely unscathed—which is why so many people made a successful escape by it. Its derelict state was a result not of 9/11, but of excavation and deconstruction efforts. For years, systematic demolition of the structures remaining on the site had continued more or less shielded from public view, and the staircase was partially dismantled as part of this routine process.

Figure 5.

Photographer Joel Meyerowitz found the stairs relatively unscathed in November 2001. Joel Meyerowitz, Aftermath (New York, 2006), 192.

Though the concrete effects of protests like these on the development process are difficult to measure, widespread media attention to the protests and fragmentation of public support may well have been one cause of the fundraising difficulties the National September 11 Memorial and Museum has encountered.

The National Trust wrote, in a pamphlet entitled “Moving the Stairs = Moving Forward”: “[W]e need the ‘Survivors’ Staircase’ as a reminder of the way America lost her innocence, as well as a symbol of America’s strength, resilience and determination to survive.”^{Footnote 76} Peg Breen, the president of an organization for landmark conservation, said she was sorry it was not better looking, “but it is what it is. It’s real. It’s there. People did escape by it. It still exists. And I think that stands for a lot.”^{Footnote 77}

Meanwhile, residents saw the tug-of-war as yet another obstacle in the way to a redeveloped, healthy neighborhood. Community Board 1 urged that eventual preservation should in no case “cause or add to delay in reconstruction” or increase the already incredibly high costs of the Memorial Foundation, and the West Street Coalition was opposed to any efforts to save the staircase. Its chairman was quoted in the New York Times: “[I]f it can be moved to a museum, great. But to the extent that this is going to delay rebuilding the World Trade Center site, I think New Yorkers have had enough [of waiting].”^{Footnote 78} Significantly, he also questioned the uniqueness of the staircase as a “surviving” structure (the Liberty Street pedestrian bridge was another above-ground remnant still standing) and pointed to recently published photos taken in 2001, which showed the undamaged stairs after 9/11.^{Footnote 79}

The stalemate over the staircase lasted through 2007, while the LMDC once again tried to mediate by conducting a series of meetings between the parties. In the end they proposed, late in 2007, to carefully remove the stairs and to include it in the future museum.^{Footnote 80}

LOST HISTORY: 2008–2010

The proponents of Ground Zero as a residential neighborhood could not claim a connection to the material of the site. In a way, this is surprising, for housing had been a greater part of the biography of the site than mourning or tourism. The neighborhood that was demolished to make space for the World Trade Center as part of Robert Moses’ scheme of urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s had been known as Radio Row. As a neighborhood, it was well-loved, and Jane Jacobs and others unsuccessfully petitioned for its preservation.^{Footnote 81}

The absence of material remnants of this past on the site resulted in the absence of any meaningful struggle for housing on Ground Zero. The low-rise buildings of Radio Row had been torn down, and even the layouts, contours, and foundations of the pre-1960 housing blocks had been irreversibly erased by the work on the new World Trade Center buildings.^{Footnote 82} Its skyscrapers and twin super-skyscrapers needed much deeper digging to plant its basement levels and foundations.

The great significance that surfaces through an analysis of the historical mode of consumption is the realization that elements of the physical biography of the site had been erased once before. The place had been effectively scoured between 1966 and 1973, when Radio Row was demolished to make room for a space dominated by its post-industrialist office function. And effective the scouring was. For although there were many relevant arguments for reinstating the residential character of the site in 2001, and among the advocates for this mode of consumption were powerful professionals, legal experts, and wealthy homeowners, they could not point to tangible objects on the site that could, literally, substantiate their claims. Over the years, the residents instead became proponents of simply speeding up any development that would make the area livable again as soon as possible. Of course, a long-term construction site is detrimental to both property value and living comfort in the surrounding area. The residents’ tactic is clear from the advocacy of Community Board 1 and the West Street coalition for removal of the Survivors’ Stairway.^{Footnote 83}

At a surprisingly late stage in the construction process, when few would have anticipated further debate over objects on Ground Zero, a last hurdle appeared. On a rainy July morning in 2010, workmen digging down to lay foundations for a tour bus parking facility encountered sturdy timbers. It was the hull of an eighteenth-century ship. Some readers of the news coverage of the find recalled the 1973 story of another ship called the Tijger, which, upon its discovery at the WTC site, had been partly salvaged by a historically minded Port Authority foreman. But this time, no foreman was present to represent a historical interest from the side of the Port Authority. Instead, a small team of archaeologists was sent in to document any historical material for the Port Authority in accordance with the regulations for archaeological research (the so-called process 106). Several other unofficial colleagues flocked to the site as well to see what could be salvaged of the ship, which was thought to have been sunk, on purpose, as a landfill.

It was an urgent matter indeed, for as the New York Times reported, “construction work could not be interrupted.”^{Footnote 84} Since 2008, Christopher Ward had been at the helm of the Port Authority, and his one strategy for untangling the stalemate between stubborn producing and consumers’ groups was de-symbolization and anti-monumentalism. His refusal to accept any invocation of symbolic or emotional value as an argument was successful, and construction was moving faster than it had in years. The new executive director had grudgingly accepted the symbolic ten-year anniversary as a deadline for finishing the monument.

Although there was plenty of media attention given to the story, no one doubted, let alone challenged, the argument that construction work should continue within a matter of hours. One of the archaeologists, Mary McDonald, somewhat apologetically told the Associated Press that she “wanted to at least salvage some timbers; it was unclear if any large portions could be lifted intact.”^{Footnote 85} The first wood had been spotted on Tuesday, and by Thursday, the AKRF archaeologists planned to have the artifact removed. In the end, it was just over two weeks before everything salvaged from the ship was moved to a water tank in the Bronx, to be packaged and sent to a research institute in Maryland. The impatience with the proceedings is captured well by several commentators on the news items, including one who simply wrote: “Great. Another reason for the WTC to be delayed.”^{Footnote 86} Process 106 was carried out remarkably rapidly, and the paperwork was resolved within days.^{Footnote 87} Once the artifact was in storage, the archaeologists had to wait for the LMDC to give permission to start the process of preserving the ship, indicating that even this piece of history in the ground was deemed to be the property of the developers of the site alone. Eventually, in 2011, parts of the ship were brought to Texas A&M University’s Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation, where the preservation process began in earnest. One of the university’s archaeologists, Peter Fix, said that “if the timbers are to be reconstructed and exhibited, they could provide future generations with a tangible connection to their maritime past.”^{Footnote 88} Although still the responsibility of the Port Authority, it is unlikely that this tangible connection will be exhibited at the site where it was sunk and found.

The biography of the space of Ground Zero is crucial to the understanding of New York. The location played a very relevant part in several episodes of the development of the borough, the city, and the United States. But in the two waves of development by the Port Authority, in the 1970s and from 2001 onward, the tangible remains of this history were removed and, in many cases, destroyed. Cornelius Holtorf surmised that places are reinterpreted by each new present according to the “history culture” specific to their social context.^{Footnote 89} By reinterpreting Ground Zero as a prospective monument instead of a retrospective monument, built with an eye to twentieth-century events, the 9/11 Memorial (as well as the constructions around it, with the name “Freedom Tower” being as much a monument as “Reflecting Absence”) effectively recasts September 11, 2001 as Stunde Null. This is also evidenced poignantly by the case of the small memorial built for the six victims of a car bomb placed in the World Trade Center parking garage in 1993. The fountain was destroyed in 2001, and in 2009, the six names of the 1993 attack victims were simply etched into the 9/11 monument without distinction.^{Footnote 90}

In 2010, almost 3,000 people signed a petition initiated by Michael Burke, whose brother died on 9/11, to move the Sphere back to Ground Zero. The Port Authority was not swayed by their arguments, nor was the National September 11 Memorial and Museum after its founding in 2005. Some of Burke’s followers, including several collectives of victims’ families, organized a boycott of the anniversary of the attacks.^{Footnote 91} As the petitioner for the sculpture, Michael Burke was told by representatives of the 9/11 Memorial that they “do not want any 9/11 artifacts cluttering the 8-acre memorial plaza.”^{Footnote 92}