Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Thursday, May 16, 2002
11:15 - Gardeners in the Garden of the Dead http://freshair.npr.org/dayFA.cfm?display=day&todayDate=05%2F15%2F2002	(top)
Looks like I need to pick up a copy of this week's New Yorker. It features a photographic gallery of the WTC site over the past several months by Joel Meyerowitz, who was interviewed last night on NPR's Fresh Air. It was one of the best such interviews I've heard in a long time, and what's especially weird is that earlier yesterday I had just been thinking about the WTC site, what it must look like today, and what they might build there. He talked about his first panoramic shots that he took of the site in late September, when it was still smoking, lit by stadium lights. He talked about walking past an escalator every day that led up to a second-story day-care center across the street from the site, frozen in ash-- he went up there and found all the cribs and tables smashed up against the far wall, where the force of the buildings' collapse had driven them, from through the WTC-facing plate-glass window. He talked about visiting the Fresh Kills landfill, which had been closed just months before 9/11 (it had been "completely filled up"), and was reopened to accept all the rubble from the buildings. Said rubble appeared as though it had all been cataloged, tagged, and stacked without regard to its initial purpose-- fire trucks stacked eight high, steel girders and office equipment, and a larger-than-life human-figure Rodan sculpture lying on its side right next to a piece of the airplane. He talked about some of the relics he's acquired from the site-- most notably, a 2-foot-long piece of steel that a cleanup worker had given him, which had a Bible heat-welded to it, opened to the "eye for an eye" sermon. He talked about the kind of memorial he'd like to see there: in among whatever buildings get put in, a forest made up of 3000 trees. They would be pines of various sorts, natively from whatever countries the various victims of the attacks were from (80 English firs, 100 trees from Germany, or whatever the numbers are). Then each tree could represent a person, to anyone who might want to visit the site, in an abstract way. He talked about what the WTC site looks like now-- it's a huge, 16-acre pit, which the workers (the "cleaners") call the Bathtub. It's almost completely cleared and smooth; it has a single column left from the South Tower, which people are still attaching photos to; the plan is that when all the cleanup is done, they'll take down that column, drape it in flags, put it on a flatbed truck and then on a barge, and send it out to sea to float wherever it will. At the other end of the Bathtub is a giant mound of fine-grained rubble, which the cleaners continually spread out over the open space and rake for human artifacts-- a shoe, a bone, anything that can be used for forensic identification. They just keep raking, and they feel compelled not to stop; some of them go back to rake even when they've put away their uniforms for the day. The guy that Meyerowitz talked to said that they were "gardeners in the garden of the dead." I want to see these photos. I may have to go pick up a copy. But then Fresh Air moved on to Paul Goldberger, the New Yorker's architecture critic; he talked about potential plans for things to put in where the WTC was. To my unabashed disappointment, he did confirm that it was very unlikely that they would build something similar to the previous WTC-- no mega-skyscrapers, primarily because nobody builds mega-skyscrapers anymore (the economics stop being in their favor after about 80 stories), but also because nobody's going to want to have their offices on the 100th floor of a building right where the old one was. Sure, it would be a perfect act of defiance, but as he went on to say, there are other ways of being defiant than rebuilding exactly as it was. The one thing we can't do, though, is leave the site empty of buildings. To do so, in one of the least trite usages of the term in the past eight months would be to let the terrorists win. Because if their goal was to eliminate the heart of the busiest financial center in the hated West, then it would become a colossal success. Especially, if Occidental Intelligence Briefing is correct, the World Trade Center towers-- more than any other landmark or piece of infrastructure-- were seen in the Muslim world as a symbol of global Islamic failure in defiance of what Allah had promised-- and so therefore it had to go. (I agree with OIB's author on the point that this should make us feel a bit better-- if what they wanted to destroy was symbols rather than infrastructure, then we don't have much left to worry about on the same front.) Goldberger talked about "healing the skyline" with some kind of non-business-related tower, maybe something communications-related (like the CN Tower, and after all the WTC did have that gigantic antenna which could stand to be replaced) and/or an observation deck or something. Some kind of landmark which would suggest the WTC and place something significant into the void the towers left, but not something as imposing. Presumably his comments will appear in the same New Yorker issue. I want to see what some of the proposals look like. I'll see if I can find a newsstand.