Current practices at the World Trade Centre site – official and informal – deploy conflicting conceptions of public memory and grieving. The destruction and recon- struction of the WTC is a topic that has been the subject of a wide array of often- contradictory perspectives in the popular, architectural and critical press, while the proposals for the site have stirred heated controversy over what and how architec- tural and artistic memorial practices should commemorate. Recent ad hoc memorial activity and material culture suggest a critique of that which is officially sanctioned at the contested palimpsest of ground zero. Palimpsest: The World Trade Centre and Informal Memorial Practice Cynthia Hammond
O n 10 September 2002, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey opened a viewing wall, around the site of the former World Trade Centre, for visitors to watch the reconstruction process. This fence replaced a much smaller viewing platform on Fulton Street, opened in December 2001. That simple wood construction incorpo- rated a ramp and plywood wall, on which visitors could write or leave notes, which they did in profusion. The Fulton Street platform was an inadequate, but empathetic buttress for the outpouring of response that otherwise had not had a home at the WTC since the days im- mediately following the event. Candlelight vigils, flowers, miniature shrines, twenty-four-hour sit-ins and thousands of photographs cre- ated an unprecedented atmosphere described by Peter Lucas as “social intimacy”. Just ten days after this collective and cumulative process began, authorities removed all the memorial materials at the WTC, purportedly because of heavy rains. With that divestment, clearance became the engine that has driven official activity at the site since. For Diana Balmori, one of the design collaborators for the new view- ing wall, actually a fence, visibility is part of New York’s construction traditions — a means by which the transformation of a site can claim democratic values through its viewability. Here, and crucially, the fence substitutes a scopophilia for democracy, and what is supplanted is the inevitably messy and fraught nature of grieving and self-examination.
Two kinds of signage are fixed to the fence. Large text and image panels, set well above eye level, engage the rhetoric of freedom, mar- tyrdom and resurrection to shape an ‘appropriate’ visitor response. Small didactic panels every few feet remind tourists and mourners not to write messages, climb, leave notes, objects, flowers, and so forth, on or near the fence. “Please understand all articles left behind must be removed”, says one, showing a generic human figure littering. “Trespassers will be prosecuted”, states another. Given the symbolic, political and international import of this location, and the remarkable flowering of informal memorial practices in the months following the fall of the towers, the number and banality of both types of panel underscore what visitors are actually being asked to rehearse onsite: compliant, patriotic citizenry. While it looks like a chain link fence, the Port Authority is correct in their naming: it is indeed a wall. Despite the prohibitions, visitors continue to act upon the site in ways that offer a different calibre of memory than that presented by official practice. On a trip to New York in May of this year, I walked around the perimeter of the new wall, noticing a palapable absence — not of the Twin Towers, but of the emotionally and politically rich detritus of photographs, flowers, wreaths, signs, and mementos that one might expect in such a location. I was struck by the sterility of presentation in the official panels and the constant exhortation to tourists and mourn- ers to behave themselves. One might take a picture, but not leave one.
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