First, from the Times, a lovely and haunting series of before-and-after panoramas from New York City: first with the WTC and then without.
Second, one of my favorite recent children’s books: The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. The book is quiet shading into contemplative, offbeat and even daring in places, and beautifully illustrated. Beware: if you don’t like choking up in front of your kids, make sure you prepare yourself for the conclusion, which reminds me, in its impact, of Art Spiegelman’s iconic New Yorker cover.
[Update: Occasional contributor Bryan Waterman’s memories.]
[Update II: Giblets and Fafnir remember in fafblog fashion.]
The Edge of the American West 
17 comments
September 11, 2008 at 8:39 am
Ahistoricality
The Man Who Walked Between the Towers was how we introduced the 9/11 attacks to the Little Anachronism, who wasn’t quite born yet when they happened. It is a wonderful book in its own right, as well as a very subtle and lovely tribute.
September 11, 2008 at 9:04 am
bw
I showed those Times photos — which reminded me of the Voice’s “Wish You Were Here” postcard cover — to my 12-year-old daughter this morning. She’d just started kindergarten a few blocks from WTC on 9/11, and we’d just moved to town 5 weeks before that. We were lucky to be at the school and to get the kids out in good time.
She doesn’t remember any of it, though. The photos fascinated her, since she knows the “after” versions quite well but doesn’t remember the Towers themselves. Her older sister, 14, for some reason, thinks she actually saw the first plane hit, which would have been impossible, since she was inside the school and I was the one who told her class what had happened. Memory is weird.
I noticed the Towers of Light from my bedroom window last night. Since we didn’t live in this apartment — a little father uptown than we were in 2001 — until a couple years ago, I hadn’t really thought about how the WTC would have looked from those windows. Whoever lived here must have had a nightmare view of the collapses.
Anyone seen Man on Wire? Maybe I’ll ditch work and go this afternoon.
September 11, 2008 at 9:35 am
Adam Arenson
Ah! This historical episode explains what I found poignant but otherwise confusing covers on the 9/11 New Yorker last year:
Around this household, watching the WTC site name reading this morning and observing the moments of silence, we were wondering: Is the telecast live outside the NYC area on broadcast television this year? (Was it ever?) And how do you think they will decide when the memorial is not to be televised, more for those who come to observe — like a Memorial Day parade, say, or an Armistice/Veterans Day ceremony — than a communal event? In the NYC region, it’s definitely too soon, but someone will have to make that decision someday.
September 11, 2008 at 9:36 am
Adam Arenson
Make that the 2006 cover.
September 11, 2008 at 9:38 am
md 20/400
Man on Wire is worth seeing. Speaking of which, here’s the New Yorker’s cover for 11 September 2006.
September 11, 2008 at 10:42 am
bw
Shit, Ari. I should have buried that link deeper.
In the NYC region, it’s definitely too soon, but someone will have to make that decision someday.
I don’t know — it seems like the memorializing (other than official stuff happening at ground zero or, obviously, among families of victims and survivors) gets a lot more play outside NYC, don’t you think? Most people I know try to avoid thinking about it. I tried too, but damn Towers of Light and Ari and those Times photos ruined that.
And then my mom sent me an account of a flagraising ceremony in rural Arizona, complete with Boy Scouts, prayers, music, etc. Maybe it is destined for something more like July 4 than like Memorial Day.
How and for how long was Pearl Harbor officially remembered?
a little father uptown than we were in 2001
s/b “a little farther,” although I suppose I am a little father, downtown, too.
September 11, 2008 at 10:55 am
Vance
In Italy (and I guess other European countries too) the habit of naming events by date alone is more deeply ingrained than here. A friend had his workshop on Via XX Settembre in Cremona — when I asked what happened on that date, he told me, with a certain superiority, something wrong (it was the Breach of Porta Pia, marking the end of the Pope’s temporal rule). In that context, it was touching to see, in several towns large and small, a Via 11 Settembre 2001. It’s the unexpected reminders that get you.
September 11, 2008 at 10:58 am
Vance
Sorry, I see that it’s actually the Corso 20 Settembre, in Cremona.
September 11, 2008 at 11:46 am
kid bitzer
an australian academic commented to me that he came from a fairly left-wing political background which had always treated the u.s. and its culture with a fair bit of skepticism if not hostility.
he was sorry about the loss of the towers. but he said what really baffled him–what he could not square even with his negative, prejudicial stereotypes of the u.s.–was the fact that this many years later they still have not been replaced.
the chicago fire? chicago rebuilds, bigger than every. the san francisco earthquake? san francisco comes back and takes over the whole damned peninsula. it’s aggressive, obnoxious, sprawling, in your face–american, whether you love it or hate it.
but this paralysis, this protracted, muted inability to build back. it’s just unamerican.
every couple of weeks in iraq costs us as much as just putting up a new pair of twin towers. even if they got knocked down again, we could put ’em up again once a month, over and over, and still save money over our folly in iraq.
have i mentioned that i do not like bush?
September 11, 2008 at 12:04 pm
ari
Sorry, Bryan, I should have asked you before hoisting your link above the fold. Do you want me to pull it?
September 11, 2008 at 12:10 pm
ari
Also, kb, isn’t there a case to be made that the 9/11 site has become hallowed ground, a vernacular graveyard of sorts? I don’t know what percentage of the people killed in the towers were incinerated, or trapped inside and their bodies never found, but I think it’s quite high. Which means that what’s left of those people can be said to have been sprinkled, as ash, throughout lower Manhattan, or buried, after the towers fell, especially in that one spot. Which might explain why it’s so hard to build there.
A better explanation, though, can be found in this book or Paul Goldberger’s snoozathon that covered much the same ground.
September 11, 2008 at 12:11 pm
bw
No — the day’s the day, for better or worse. I’m trying to figure out if my desire not to think about/memorialize it is itself a complex emotional/psychological response.
I’m heading over to that f*ing movie, though.
September 11, 2008 at 12:17 pm
bw
Which might explain why it’s so hard to build there.
One of the things that working on NYC history teaches you quickly is that a good chunk of lower Manhattan is an unmarked graveyard of some sort. One series of disasters after another. To that end, I find some comfort in the idea that incinerated unfortunates may have found their remains scattered on the graves at Trinity or St Paul’s or throughout neighborhoods marked by epidemic disorders, slave insurrections and burial grounds, highly destructive fires and the like. There’s a close connection between anonymity and death in the history of those acres.
September 11, 2008 at 12:27 pm
kid bitzer
well, ari, that may be part of the taboo.
but folks died here in chicago, and some died in san francisco too, and i don’t know whether that made everyone stand back and say “cant’ build where they died!”
your explanation would all have to work at the level of metaphor anyhow, right? because so far as actual body-parts-in-the-rubble go, all of that stuff was shipped out of manhattan and sifted through long ago.
i remember reading a long nyt account of the people whose job it was to work at the dump where they were taking all of the rubble and debris. they kept an eagle eye out for the occasional macroscopic human remains. the rest–along with the microscopic remains–went into the landfill (in jersey or staten island or wherever it was).
so, no, i do not think that anything that is left of those poor people is buried at that one spot. as i recall, the site itself was stripped down to bare earth–nothing of the towers or their inhabitants remains on that site. maybe in surrounding neighborhoods and streets, but that would still be true even if we rebuilt on that site.
at the metaphorical level? yeah, maybe you have explained part of the taboo. but real leadership would have said “hey, a year’s up! let’s commemorate these people in the way they would most like, by building a huge fucking building and filling this place with life, industry, bustle, money, and america!”
but instead of a leader we got fuckhead.
September 11, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Jason B
Just over a year ago my wife and I came to Oklahoma to find an apartment, and while we were here we visited the Oklahoma City National Memorial. That bombing had left my mind for the most part–maybe because of 9/11.
I was amazed at the memorial, but not by the reflecting pool, or by the chair-monuments, or by the inscriptions of 9:01 and 9:03 on the giant stone gates. I wasn’t too affected by the pictures of the day of the bombing–only saddened, because I’d spent all of my horror the day it happened.
What affected me the most about the memorial is that it’s still used as a memorial by the common people. The official memorial is beautiful, but the chain-link fence–an ugly necessity when the memorial was being built–is more touching. People still leave mementos on the fence more than a decade after the bombing. They leave enough tokens that there is little space for anything to be added, even now.
I guess if the absence of a new building at the WTC site encourages more of the fence-tributes, then I’d rather they didn’t build there anyway (not that they would need to clear it with me). We can get our grand statements and bathos from the national news.
September 11, 2008 at 7:05 pm
ari
Yeah, kb, it’s all about metaphor, or, perhaps, the way that people construct collective memories and express cultural power through the process of memorialization. And so, even if a real leader had been on the scene, s/he would have had to grapple with the power of the 9/11 survivors’ organizations, which power is pretty awesome to behold. That’s is why I suggest Phil Noble’s book as the place to go to understand why there’s still a hole in the ground where the WTC used to be. At the same time, I’m somewhat sympathetic to Jason’s point about vernacular memorialization. I guess, in the end, I don’t think it’s a simple case.
September 11, 2008 at 7:06 pm
ari
There’s also, as I’m thinking about it, the problem of constructing buildings whose footprints occupy superblocks in what should be an area of a city congested with pedestrians. But now we’re into a level of abstraction from the problem you’ve identified that doesn’t make much sense to me.