Community Speaks Out on Two Memorials


 
Following close scrutiny by Battery Park City residents, Lower Manhattan community leaders, and representatives of victims' families, two temporary memorials to World Trade Center victims will be launched Monday, March 11.

"Tribute in Light," two 50-foot-square columns of light beamed skyward to recall the Twin Towers, is being installed in Battery Park City, on the undeveloped lot at Vesey and West Streets, east of the Embassy Suites hotel. The $500,000 memorial will be turned on from 6 to 11 p.m. every night, weather permitting, from March 11 to April 13. Details on the March 11 lighting ceremony are still being worked out.


  The second memorial, centering on the remains of the Fritz Koenig spherical sculpture, once a centerpiece of the World Trade Center plaza, is going in Battery Park, after Battery Park City residents strongly opposed its proposed placement in their neighborhood.

The five artists and architects who conceived of Tribute in Light (formerly called Towers of Light), as well as the lighting designer who helped make it happen, discussed the project at a March 6 event sponsored by the Municipal Art Society (MAS), one of its sponsors.

"I hope people will get a sense of peace, a sense of order from it," said artist Paul Myoda.

Myoda and Julian LaVerdiere, another collaborator on the project, had studios on the 91st floor of Tower 1, through a grant program run by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which had its offices in the tower. (The artists had departed two months before the terrorist attack.)

Gustavo Bonevardi, one of the architects, has lived in Greenwich Village all his life and has always felt a special connection to the towers. "I grew up watching these buildings go up, and I watched the buildings come down," he said.

In a brief interview later, he said that working on Tribute in Light had been an emotional experience.

"I used to go down with my father all the time to watch the construction of the towers," he said. "Watching them being built probably had a great influence on my becoming an architect."






  Kent Barwick, MAS’s executive director, said that concerns raised by residents, Community Board 1 (CB1) and other groups had been addressed. Noting Battery Park City residents’ worries that crowds will come downtown to view the lights, Barwick and lighting designer Paul Marantz both emphasized that optimal viewing will be from a distance, not from close up.

"This is a memorial that can be seen and used by everybody in their neighborhoods." Barwick said. "You don’t have to travel to Lower Manhattan."

Marantz estimated that the spectral memorial will be visible from a radius of about 20 miles. (For a list of optimal public viewing spots in Manhattan, see below.)

Barwick also said that the light beams—emitted by 88 powerful bulbs—will be "extremely directed" and won’t disturb residents in nearby buildings, and that electrical power will be siphoned from the Embassy Suites, which remains closed.

"If you live downtown, your lights won’t dim."

Several family members of victims of the attack who attended a meeting of CB1's memorial committee on March 5 said they had no special interest in the temporary gestures that will mark the six month anniversary of the attack. Nevertheless, they expressed displeasure with the mangled remains of the sphere that is being placed in Battery Park.

"To me the sphere is upsetting," said Michelle DeFazio, a widow who had been married for only three months. "They didn't find anything of my husband." DeFazio said she is still unable to look at even a picture of the World Trade Center.


  "It just shows so much destruction," said Nicole Petrocelli, whose husband Mark, 28, was a commodities broker.

The sphere memorial had been intended for a fenced park in Battery Park City, between 2 World Financial Center and Gateway Plaza and close to the entrance to the viewing platform for families of Sept. 11 victims. But residents protested in phone calls and emails to city officials and at a March 1 meeting hastily arranged by Community Board 1. As the meeting began, CB1 chair Madelyn Wils announced she had just received a call from the mayor stating that he was reconsidering the site.

At that meeting, Battery Park City residents, many of whom were in or near the Twin Towers on the morning of Sept. 11, spoke emotionally about their struggles to heal from the trauma of the attack. They said they wanted the sphere placed at a different site so that

their community has a chance to recover without being confronted by the crowds and the emotional burden the memorial would bring. The proposed site, they noted, was already home to a police memorial and the so-called "teddy bear memorial."

"I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a memorial, but I’m not sure it should be put in a place where people are trying to regroup and get their lives back on an even keel," said Maria Smith.

"If it’s always there every time you look out or walk past, you have no option but to confront it," said Jeff Galloway, his voice cracking as he recalled being trampled following the attack.

"You are the same kind of victim as we are," said Christy Ferer, whose husband, Neil Levin, the executive director of the Port Authority, died at the Trade Center, and who is the mayor’s liaison with the families.

In Manhattan, the Municipal Art Society recommends the following public places for optimal viewing of Tribute in Light:
  • Washington Market Park in Tribeca
  • Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village
  • Abingdon Square at Eighth Avenue and Hudson Street
  • Union Square Park
  • 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue
  • Herald Square—triangular pedestrian island at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Broadway, between 31st and 35th streets.
  • Empire State Building Observation Deck