The WTC Blogs: Part 5b: A Visit to the WTC Site and Lower Manhattan

Click the photos to enlarge.

Before our 4:00 pm appointment to view the site, we walked what felt like miles, in the heat to Battery Park; I wanted to see the atrium, an arched globe of glass that was virtually destroyed. It had opened onto the WTC plaza. We rested for a while and then hauled ourselves up and walked almost for a half hour to the site. There is so much construction going on that it is difficult to walk directly. There is a subway overpass and the amount of stairs was exasperating. Luckily we found an elevator.

I have already reported on the procedure to enter the site in the previous blog.

As I said, “The sound of water rushing and rushing. The sound never ends. A natural, calming, white-noise sound, of life giving water.”(see video)

The towers disappear into light and reflection

Let me try to explain.

I became emotionally shut down. I registered everything intellectually, I took many photographs, I ran my hand along names, I heard the roaring water of the forever flowing downward fountains, I saw the huge footprints of the towers, I looked upward to the new building that will soon begin to replace them.

I knew if I let myself really feel I wouldn’t be able to control myself. In fact, as I was walking around the perimeter before entry I choked up; I remembered people falling from the heavens. I was disoriented without the towers as landmarks.

I wouldn’t allow myself to cry. I went numb.

I observed thousands of people observing what I was observing, in fact I preferred to photograph the people. I became one step removed from reality by looking through their eyes.

I was exhausted; perhaps part of the drain was due to the emotional component and trying to deny it: the pain, the horror. It was, in effect, all cleaned up, sterilized of dust and blood. Kind of like visiting the concentration camps; you know what you are seeing and what it represents but it is still too much to process, just too much.

I saw people photographing one another but there is something perverse about lining up in front of a disaster site and smiling. It seems to be a tourist thing.

Each year, I would watch the commemoration, hear the “names” see the reflecting pools on the building footprint but I never got a sense of the enormity of the scale and of the event. Just the sadness, the pervasive sadness.

So, there is the sound of water roaring that never stops and water flowing down, down, down into a pit and then there is another pit in the center but it is impossible to see the bottom from any angle. It says: “I am an event that you will never be able to understand, I am an abyss and I flow into darkness, down, down…” and yet the light plays upon the water and the white noise of the roar is comforting yet throws you off balance: there were buildings here of great height, how can there now be nature?

You’ll notice that the water is “combed” into into individual strands that continually fall and meet as one body in the huge pool, made by the foundation of the towers. Then the pool descends again. From wherever you stand you are unable to see the bottom.

Still, one tree survived, The “Survivor Tree,” a Callery pear that was planted on the original site thirty years ago, and after the disaster it was reduced to a mere eight foot stump. The tree was planted in a city park and revived, in fact it grew to thirty feet and flowered again. In 2010 is was uprooted by storms. Later in the year it was replanted on the site. It is a tree of hope.

The glass building is the entrance to the future museum. If you peek in you can see two saved tridents, the fork shaped structures which rimmed the lower outside of the building. They beautifully reflect all that is around them. So many of the enormous buildings being erected are glass and they almost disappear into the clouds.

The final set of photographs were taken at Occupy Wall Street in Zucotti Park.