On New Year\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2014and the oddest souvenir stands that opportunity has ever produced.<\/p>\n
On card tables set up on the sidewalks, NYPD baseball caps and FDNY ski caps lay next to 8.5 x 11 glossy programs\u2014complete with two burning towers on the covers\u2014looking just like their Broadway counterparts. There were postcard racks of the terror too.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Months into 2002, I asked a coworker why he\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
A month later, I\u2019d resigned my position and not re-signed my lease. It\u2019s a decision I regret to this day, because I never returned to New York, and I had every intention of doing so.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In the spring, New York City announced a design competition for a 9-11 Memorial<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Submission #859043<\/a> is a bit of a hodgepodge. I hadn\u2019t been to graduate school yet. I hadn\u2019t taught graduate school yet. I hadn\u2019t pounded into my students and myself the idea that less is more.<\/p>\n I had one good idea, on which I should have focused, instead of compounding it with bits and pieces of other memorials. I included \u201ctrees\u201d and \u201cgates\u201d and \u201cthe names\u201d 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.<\/p>\n My pool idea was inspired.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> by artist Fritz Koenig. It stood for 30 thirty years\u2014it was a year older than me\u2014until it was damaged but not destroyed by the falling debris on 9-11.<\/p>\n I wanted to return that round pool to the space near the footprints, and reinstall Koenig\u2019s damaged art, only I\u2019d construct the pool out of pixels and water\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s broken Sphere, but the Twin Towers, just as they stood, and Koenig\u2019s Sphere restored, from any angle.<\/p>\n