By Etta Sanders and Carl Glassman
A victim’s wife and her twin sister hope
for a memorial they can love
Jane Pollicino and Vicki Tureski walked down Church Street alongside
the World Trade Center site, pausing to peruse a list of names on
the fence until they found the one they were looking for: Steve
Pollicino, Jane’s husband, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald
on the 105th floor of the north tower.
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As they walked on, a street vendor approached them with a
book about the attacks.
“No thanks,” said Vicki, “we lived it.”
They are still living it. Wearing cardigans adorned with American
flags and sporting Twin Tower pins, they came from Long Island
to view the memorial finalists at the Winter Garden.
“We had no expectations so we can’t be disappointed,”
said Jane.
When they had looked at all the models, they were neither
elated nor disappointed.
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“I guess I was hoping there would be one I just loved,”
said Vicki. They liked something about all of them and that will make
it easier when only one is chosen. “We could live with it,”
Vicki said.
But there was one, called Suspending Memory, that particularly struck
a chord. Each victim is memorialized by an illuminated glass column
set amid dogwood trees on the footprints.
“This is the one I would choose,” Jane said. “If I
had to pick right now which is my favorite.”
Vicki concurred. “When I saw that, I thought, ‘that’s
it for me’. That’s all I need.”
“Because it’s a cemetery,” they said in unison.
Another design depicted a glass wall etched with names. For the second
time that day they find Steve’s name. “Leave it to Steve
to be part of this big historical thing. He was so laid back,”
said Vicki.
The sisters met Steve Pollicino more than 30 years ago when they were
both 17 years old. Even after Jane and Steve married, the three remained
close. Anyone Vicki dated, she said, “Had to get along with me
and Steve.”
Steve worked at the World Trade Center for 15 years, returning without
hesitation after the 1993 bombing.
“He felt very safe going back,” said Vicki. “He loved
being at his job,”
Jane knows that if the final memorial incorporates biographies, she
will have to decide what she wants people to read about her husband
for generations. “We’re going to have to figure out what
to say. It’s a burden,” she said. “But am I going to
leave it to someone else? No.”
What they hope for most is that the final design will have a private
place where family members can go.
“This is the last place Steve set foot on this earth,” said
Vicki. “We have no remains. We have no place to go. That’s
all we need.”
Resident looks for the memorial that makes her
feel at home again
“This is like a futuristic, bad movie,” said Kelly Colangelo.
She was at the Winter Garden looking at a memorial design titled Reflecting
Absence.“It’s so dark and gray and stale.”
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During the 18 months leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, when she
lived on John Street, Colangelo was at the World Trade Center
every day. On weekdays she took the PATH train to her job
in New Jersey. Weekends and evenings, she ran errands in the
concourse or listened to music in the plaza. “I used
to like sitting outside on the plaza, eating my sandwich and
thinking about how good I had it, how lucky I was,” she
said.
She came to see the eight memorial finalists hoping for one
that would allow her to sit there again. She was looking for
open, green space. And she wanted to see the preservation
of features like the slurry wall.
“I was hoping the memorials had incorporated at a minimum
the sphere,” said Colangelo of the salvaged brass sculpture
by Fritz Koenig that stood in the center of the plaza fountain,
was salvaged from the rubble and is now on display at Battery
Park, “That’s where I go to remember.”
She was also looking for something that would give visitors
a sense of the massive size of the towers. Only one, Lower
Waters, she said, “captures the vastness of an entire
floor.”
She also liked that it has a reflecting pool and easy access
from the street. “I like the fact that you can just walk
up a couple of stairs and you were on the foot print, just
like before when you walked up a couple of stairs and you’re
in the north tower.”
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She was put off by parts of other designs that she would have to enounter
during her daily routine. “This one, Garden of Lights. Creepy!”
she said, looking at the design featuring an underground passageway
leading to a roomful of lit pedestals that shine upward. “I don’t
want to see 3,000 lights coming out of the ground every night. I think
we can remember in a less obtrusive way.”
Colangelo, who now lives in Battery Park City, thinks of herself as
a survivor of the day that shook her sense of safety and damaged her
apartment. “I’m definitely a survivor. We’re all survivors
down here.”
She was upset after a recent encounter at a public forum with a victim’s
family member, who she felt was dismissive of the concerns of residents.
“This is not his site. It’s not the families’ site.
This is the neighborhood’s site, the city’s site, the region’s
site. It’s the world’s site now.”
But her anger was tempered by sympathy for his loss, and by her memory
of how close she came to being one of the victims herself. She boarded
a PATH train on the morning of Sept. 11 at 8:15 a.m. If she had been
there only 31 minutes later, she thinks, it could be her parents looking
at these memorials.
A firefighter’s brother seeks solace in
seeing the rescuers set apart
If Michael Burke could create a memorial, it would look like the Lexington
Avenue Armory a few days after Sept. 11. He and other kin of the missing
went there by the thousands for information and hope. Their flyers
with photos of loved ones papered the walls, from floor to vaulted
ceiling.
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“The faces, they were just looking at you,” Burke
recalled. One of those faces was his brother, Capt. William
Burke, the only man lost from Engine 21 on East 40th Street.
“I’d been running around searching for my brother
for days. But that was when the full impact, the magnitude
of the event hit me,” Burke said. “And that was
my idea for the memorial, to create another room like that
and have people walk in and feel what we felt that day.”
The design that comes closest to his idea is Dual Memory,
which features a below-ground gallery of victims’ faces.
“The tragedy, the loss and sacrifice hits you immediately,”
he said.
Standing beside the Dual Memory display in the Winter Garden,
Burke introduced himself to Tim Kelly, a firefighter from
Rescue 4 who was looking at the same plan. Burke mentioned
his brother. “Yeah, sure” Kelly nodded, recognizing
the name.
Rescue 4 lost nine men at the trade center. Kelly and Burke,
like most colleagues and relatives of rescue workers who were
killed, want separate recognition, including rank and company.
“I know a lot of people don’t like hearing it, but
there’s a huge difference between the victims and the
rescuers. It’s monumental,” Kelly said.
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This was Burke’s second visit to see the displays. Now, he said,
he wanted to look for more than how the names were treated. He was
intrigued by Reflecting Absence, with its barren plaza and lonely
trees. “It’s wicked. It’s a tough one and a legitimate
take on it. But it’s just death. I don’t see any regeneration,
I don’t see any ascension.”
Ascension was a feeling that Burke was looking for. That’s why
he rejected plans like Garden of Lights and Lower Waters that take
the visitor underground. “You do get that sense of loss and absence,”
he said of Lower Waters, with its park that slopes to 30 feet below
street level. “I’m not going down there. It’s like
saying this was it. Those buildings fell on them and that was that.
I don’t see it that way.” On the other hand, he was drawn
to Inversion of Light, in which a blue laser shines skyward. It speaks
to him of the “regeneration of souls.” “They are not
underground, buried here,” he said.
Burke said he would like sound to be part of the memorial, perhaps
some words about each victim. For his brother, he said, it should
be “Keep going. I’m right behind you.” That’s
what Billy Burke was saying to his men before he got separated from
them and went to aid civilians. “I would like to get one of the
firemen to read it,” Burke said. “One of the guys from Engine
21 who was there.”
She hopes for a memorial that also recalls the
joy of the Twin Towers
As a child, Lillie Ng’s mother took her on a special trip to
the World Trade Center every year. She was a Stuyvesant High School
student in 1993 when she heard the explosion of the first attack on
the towers. And as a computer consultant she worked in the Trade Center
until three months before it was struck again.
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Ng loved the towers, and she likes to recall what made them
special to her: the play of sunlight through windows; the
feel of wind on the plaza; even the way the buildings’
smelled. So as she examined the models in the Winter Garden,
she thought that a fitting memorial would somehow provide
some of that same feelings. “I would hope that people
would learn to respect the space, and to not forget what was
there before,” she said.
Ng wished one of the plans included a piece of the towers’
ruins, like the section that had remained standing. “That
was very striking. It made the tragedy real for many people,”
Among the finalists, she liked those that featured light more
than water. “A lot of people are going to throw coins
into a burial ground,” she said, looking at the model
of Lower Waters, with its water-filled footprint. She liked
the clearly defined footprints of Suspending Memory, and faulted
Inversion of Light because the names of the dead, etched in
glass, seemed hard to reach. “There’s nothing you
can take with you,” she said.
Ng said she disliked the “graveyard effect” of Suspending
Memory’s illuminated columns. But then a young woman
named Li Liu approached Ng shyly and spoke of her friend who
died on Sept. 11. Suspending Memory was her favorite. “We
can memorialize the individual” she said of the columns.
Ng listened carefully. Later she said her feelings had changed.
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After looking at the designs, Ng sat down on one of the Winter Garden
benches and watched children play on the grand marble stairs. She
marveled at the expression of such joy in the very place where there
had been death and unimaginable destruction.
Whatever memorial is built, Ng said, “people have to enjoy the
space. And if they can appreciate it the way we did before, then that
is almost a memorial in itself.”
In search of a design that connects him to—and
through—the site
One thing stood out as Jeff Galloway looked at the model of a memorial
called Reflecting Absence.
“It’s got this ‘Berlin wall’ along West Street,”
he said. “It looks like a big sign to Battery Park City that
says, ‘Keep out.’”
To Galloway, a Battery Park City resident and member of Community
Board 1, the World Trade Center memorial should not only commemorate
the lives lost, but should also help repair a severed neighborhood.
One design, Passages of Light: Memorial Cloud, which features a street
level walkway and is described by the designers as, “a translucent
bandage healing a wound,” comes closest to achieving that goal,
he said.
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What Galloway does not want to see is something that evokes
a graveyard. He dismissed Suspending Memories, with its tombstone-like
columns set in a grove of trees on the tower footprints, as
“two cemeteries and a pool of water.”
As he walked around the displays of the memorial finalists
at the Winter Garden, Galloway found little else of what he
was hoping to see: easy access to the site from the southwest
corner and a connection to the rest of the neighborhood.
The memorial jury, he said, mostly ignored that need. “It
almost looks like all these guys got together to try to thwart
that,” he said.
Galloway doesn’t require a memorial in order to remember.
The windows of his apartment overlook the site and his memories
of that day are already permanently etched.
On Sept. 11, he and his wife picked up their children at P.S.
234, then rushed home to get their dog before evacuating.
They were approaching the esplanade when the first building
fell and enveloped them in a blinding, choking black cloud.
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“We were about as close to the events as you could be and still
be alive,” he said.
Unlike other visitors to the memorial, neighborhood residents will
have no choice but to see it every day.
“This isn’t just some memorial smacked down in some place.
This is a memorial on the spot where it happened, set in the midst
of a neighborhood that still exists.” |
