9/11 Memorial's Evening Closure a Broken Promise, CB1 Committee Says

At 9 p.m., a September 11 Memorial guard closes off the northwest corner entrance to the plaza before standing by to turn late-comers away. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

UPDATED 7/16/14 11:07 a.m.

As darkness falls on the September 11 Memorial plaza these warm summer evenings, security guards go to work with yellow chains and movable fencing, preparing to close off entry to the eight-acre site. At 9 p.m., the time that the plaza shuts down, that task is done and the next job begins: turning away a continuous stream of visitors who are left unhappy and confused.

“Closed! You gotta go back,” the guards tell them, one after another.

“I thought it would be open all night long,” said a dejected Nick Rivera from New Jersey, who was in a group of 11, including four friends who had to return to Puerto Rico the next morning. “I had no idea they would have some guards there.”

The nighttime closing of the plaza, which became accessible without a ticket in May when the memorial museum opened, is more than just a disappointment for late-arriving out-of-towners. To a committee of Community Board 1, it is a broken promise.

“All the discussions that we had with Port Authority, with Silverstein [Properties] constructing some of the buildings, with the Department of Transportation, with the original Lower Manhattan Development Corporation was that it would remain an open precinct,” said Michael Levine, CB1’s planning consultant.

“There was no indication that the memorial plaza, the entire six city blocks, would be closed,” noted CB1 chair Catherine McVay Hughes.

In a July 7 draft resolution, the board’s Planning Committee urged September 11 Memorial officials “to remove all temporary after-hours barriers and restore access to allow north-south and east-west access 24/7 which will fully restore connectivity to the level originally promised.”

On July 16, Downtown elected officials wrote a letter to Memorial President Joe Daniels in response to community concerns, requesting longer operating hours for the plaza. (The full text of the letter can be found here.)

Since mid-May, visitors have been able to enter the plaza, from 7:30 a.m. until before 9 p.m., from West Street near both Vesey Street and Liberty Street, and at the southeast corner of the park, near Greenwich and Liberty.

Madelyn Wils, now president of the Hudson River Park Trust, was the CB1 chair when many of the planning discussions about the memorial took place. She told the Trib in an email that she also believed that the plaza would be more accessible.

“[The plaza] was to be open and that was a principle early on,” she wrote, adding, “I understand now that the plaza is open that they may want to close early, but I would think that it should be consistent with at the very least NYC park hours.”

Most areas of Hudson River Park close at 1 a.m., though playgrounds close at dusk. The largest city parks also close at 1 a.m., while most others close at dusk. Battery Park City’s Rockefeller Park and Wagner Park don’t close.

At a July 2013 CB1 meeting, September 11 Memorial president Joe Daniels made it clear that public accessibility is at the heart of his vision for the site.

“The general idea is for people to walk up to the memorial like they’d do at any other plaza memorial in America,” Daniels said.

“As it was originally designed,” he added, “from all four sides.”

Memorial officials declined to be interviewed about the policy or the committee’s assertion that they are reneging on a promise. In a statement, a spokesman said the memorial would “consider” more extended hours “once the 9/11 Memorial is fully complete and accessible on all sides” where there is now fencing due to construction.

“While we are not a city park, similar to those spaces, we have closing hours for financial, safety and security reasons,” the statement said, adding, “We have always had operational hours since the fencing has been removed from portions of the memorial's perimeter. Some fencing remains because of ongoing, surrounding WTC construction.”

(Representatives from the memorial are scheduled to provide an update to the Planning Committee at its September meeting.)

As recently as April, Port Authority program director Glenn Guzi stood before CB1’s Planning Committee and pointed to the West Street side of the site where the state Department of Transportation has been constructing a sidewalk. Once that project is completed, he said, “this fence will also be coming down and there will be unrestricted access from this sidewalk along here into the memorial plaza.”

That project, which began in April, is expected to be completed by the end of this month, allowing pedestrians to walk freely along that edge of the plaza, according to state DOT spokesman Beau Duffy.

Pedestrians will also be able to traverse the north end of the park, at Fulton Street, once construction of 1World Trade Center is complete.

But access to the perimeter of the site falls far short of what CB1’s Planning Committee is calling for.

“The answer isn’t that, ‘Oh, yeah, you can walk around it 24 hours a day,’” said Jeff Galloway, the committee’s chair and a longtime Battery Park City resident. “It’s that this is supposed to be something that you can walk in and through 24 hours a day.”

“If this is the new normal and [the plaza] is going to be a locked-down place only open to tourists in the prime hours,” he added, “that’s not what we signed up for.”

— Additional reporting by Carl Glassman.