25 September 2001

The hundreds of photos and posters of the WTC missing have been removed from the walls, bus stops, lamp posts and fences around St Vincent hospital near a project of ours. I had come to look forward to seeing the disorderly growth of the appeals from relatives who had no central place to go to ask for help finding the missing -- New York has no municipal office dedicated to that sad purpose, as I guess few cities do that have not experienced mass casualties.

There is an ad hoc collection of missing appeals and memorials at Union Square, so that may be where the relatives have chosen to post their heartbreakers, or perhaps the city government sent them there due to embarrassment at the city-wide posting of appeals -- which demonstrated an inability of government, of a culture, to answer an unexpected, and unanswerable, need.

These individually-designed icons of misery and loss help offset the officially sanctioned grieving and plans for public memorials. These evanscent artifacts may not have lasting power like architecture and sculpture and ceremonies being proposed for WTC memory but they seem to me to be far superior at conveying the stark irreplaceable, the unreconstructability of what once was.

The ground swell for preserving the huge "beautiful" shard of facade of WTC looks promising for warding off the rush to reconstruct real estate monstrosities at the tragic site as if the disaster's true value was to demolish and provide an opportunity to build even worse than before in the great world class New York tradition of ever more wretched and inhumane architecture and urban design.

There will be outcries against wasting downtown New York land by leaving the facade shards (and, I hope a huge pile of surrounding rubble) and devaluing land prices. And no doubt vain world class artists will moan the debris is not real art. But if all goes well those multitudes who have made their public appeals in vanishing photos and posters will demand that official world class New York art and architecture be banned at the site as desecration of the memories of their beloved.

The site is a tomb now, a strange landscape cemetery, unique as a true world monument which no rebuilt structure could ever match. Perhaps it must be totally excavated  and a simulacrum restored to match what has been done to other "world monuments." But what a second tragedy that would be, to do no more than negate misery with sacred art and architecture.

-- John Young