On New Year’s Eve 2002, after living and working next to Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan for 16 months, I moved out of my hard-won, one-bedroom apartment in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn and left New York City.
Every one of those 16 months had been a conscious decision to remain, until I was no longer sure what my determination represented. Friends who worked in midtown had no desire to come closer to the grave site. I bought and ate my lunches on Fulton Street near the Seaport in full view of the rubble and the smell—and the oddest souvenir stands that opportunity has ever produced.
On card tables set up on the sidewalks, NYPD baseball caps and FDNY ski caps lay next to 8.5 x 11 glossy programs—complete with two burning towers on the covers—looking just like their Broadway counterparts. There were postcard racks of the terror too.
I wanted to buy one of these souvenirs to remember they existed, but I could never look directly at them. They belonged to an upside-down time and place.
Months into 2002, I asked a coworker why he’d returned to our downtown offices that following September Monday and kept returning every day since. He told me he kept coming back because I did.
At Thanksgiving, my father picked me up at the train station in Connecticut for turkey and stuffing. He said I looked tired and suggested a break.
A month later, I’d resigned my position and not re-signed my lease. It’s a decision I regret to this day, because I never returned to New York, and I had every intention of doing so.
There was no regret at the time. I distinctly remember both my dreams and nightmares coming back that January. I slept soundly for the first times in over a year.
In the spring, New York City announced a design competition for a 9-11 Memorial that was open to anyone, and I constructed a submission. It was cathartic. I drafted my ideas in Adobe Illustrator, printed them out in sections on 8.5 x 11 sheets, and adhered them to two 30 x 40 regulation-sized foam core Presentation Boards with acid-free, double-sided tape. I kept one and submitted the other.
Submission #859043 is a bit of a hodgepodge. I hadn’t been to graduate school yet. I hadn’t taught graduate school yet. I hadn’t pounded into my students and myself the idea that less is more.
I had one good idea, on which I should have focused, instead of compounding it with bits and pieces of other memorials. I included “trees” and “gates” and “the names” in addition to two massive walking labyrinths laid out over the tower footprints in a new age-y gesture I can only blame on the moment.
My pool idea was inspired.
In the original World Trade Center plaza, to one side of the Towers, there was a large round fountain and reflecting pool with a 25-foot bronze sculpture of a sphere at its center by artist Fritz Koenig. It stood for 30 thirty years—it was a year older than me—until it was damaged but not destroyed by the falling debris on 9-11.
I wanted to return that round pool to the space near the footprints, and reinstall Koenig’s damaged art, only I’d construct the pool out of pixels and water—and the pixels would mirror the past. Seamlessly blended into the fountain, a translucent, interactive screen would recreate the movement of water and the reflection of what used to stand above.
Imagine walking up to this pool in Lower Manhattan now, looking down into and seeing, not an empty sky or the Freedom Tower or the underside of Koenig’s broken Sphere, but the Twin Towers, just as they stood, and Koenig’s Sphere restored, from any angle.
Too morbid, I understand that now too. It would be too much for our generation. If I had isolated and emphasized and further explained the pool as the entirety of my memorial, it would have made a better submission, but still not the winning one. I like Arad’s “Reflecting Absence,” though I still haven’t seen it myself.
Yet my pool still intrigues me as a piece of media sculpture—as a work of art. I could set up my pool anywhere with a skyline and let it capture a present for the future, or recreate a past.
The location is everything. Subtle, inconspicuous, a fountain in Times Square could work, giving you glimpses of a balldrop in the 40s, or the first skyscrapers to alter “Longacre Square” in the 1800s.
The experience would be peripheral, something ghostly rather than outright time travel. Something CGI wrapped in old stone or tile waterworks. Pedestrians could still toss a penny and get a ripple.
A wistful well, a witnessing well, a remembering pool?
Yes, there’s still something in that idea.