Tourism and Sacred Ground: the Space of Ground Zero

4 Tourism and “Sacred Ground” The Space of Ground Zero n October 14, 2001, weeks after it had become clear that Othere were no survivors left to be pulled from the rub ble at Ground Zero in New York, and with the recognition that the bodies of many of those who had died would never be recovered, the City of New York decided to distribute the dust. Mayor Giuliani set up a procedure through which the families of the dead received an urn of the dust from the site for a memorial ceremony. The dust (which was oth erwise being hauled from the site to the Fresh Kills landfi ll on Staten Island) was gathered into fi fty-fi ve-gallon drums, covered by American fl ags, blessed by a chaplain at Ground Zero, and given a police escort to One Police Plaza.1 Offi cials wearing white gloves scooped the dust into four thou sand small urns, each engraved with 9–11–01 and wrapped in a blue velvet bag.2 By this ritual, the dust was transformed into a substance that was understood to be sacramental and ceremonial (handled with white gloves), moved from drums (indicating refuse) to urns (indicating individuals, ashes, the remains of life), yet that was also offi cial (accompanied by police escort) and national (covered by fl ags). This attempt to make the dust sacred, to turn it into a relic, reveals many aspects of the construction of meaning at Ground Zero in the years since 9/11. While analyses of From Tourists of History by Sturken, Marita. DOI: 10.1215/9780822390510 Duke University Press, 2007. All rights reserved. Downloaded 10 Nov 2017 13:24 at 130.132.173.231 Figure 46. Urn filled with dust from Ground Zero, presented to rela tives of the victims, October 28, 2001. AP Photo/Robert Mecea. 9/11 have tended to focus on the role of spectacle in the event, as the years have gone by it is the material refuse of 9/11 that, at least in New York City, has been most fraught with confl ict and contested meanings. The dust is simultaneously ashes, refuse, evidence, and a fatal contaminant. Its status remains ambiguous and troubling. As late as 2006, certain family members of the dead continue to advocate that it be returned to Ground Zero from Fresh Kills. And starting in 2005, several young (and previously healthy) people who had been rescue workers at Ground Zero or employees who fl ed the area died of respiratory disease that was attributed directly to their exposure to the dust at Ground Zero. They are most likely the fi rst of many survivors of 9/11, rescue workers, and janitors who worked in the cleanup whose lives will be shortened by the time they spent at Ground Zero.3 It is perhaps in the dust of Ground Zero that the meanings of this site are most complexly embodied. From Tourists of166 History by Sturken, Marita. DOI: 10.1215/9780822390510 CHAPTER 4 Duke University Press, 2007. All rights reserved. Downloaded 10 Nov 2017 13:24 at 130.132.173.231 It could be said that Ground Zero was created in the moment on Septem ber 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center collapsed, shockingly, in a cloud of dust and debris that, as some witnesses said, “chased” down the streets of lower Manhattan in New York. Within a few hours, the media had found the name, and it stuck.4 Ground Zero is a name pulled from history, its ori gins inextricably tied to the destruction caused by nuclear bombs; it began as a term used by scientists for a bomb’s point of detonation, thus defi ning a bomb’s central site of destruction. The term implies nuclear obliteration, yet it also, ironically, conveys a starting point, a tabula rasa. For instance, the architect Michael Sorkin’s book about rebuilding New York is titled Starting from Zero. 5 And, as Amy Kaplan writes, “We often use ‘ground zero’ collo quially to convey the sense of starting from scratch, a clean slate, the bot tom line,” a meaning that, she says, resonates with the “often-heard claim that the world was radically altered by 9/11, that the world will never be the same.”6 As a term, “ground zero” defi nes New York as the focal point of 9/11, inscribing the space within a narrative of exceptionalism in which New York is the most important and unique aspect of 9/11. The exceptionalism that defi nes the events as the worst American experience with terror had an in stant effect on how the Oklahoma City bombing was viewed, almost imme diately redefi ning it as 9/11’s smaller and less signifi cant precursor. (In fact, the term ground zero was used quite often in Oklahoma City to identify the place where the bomb had wreaked the most damage.) The term also effectively erases the other events of 9/11, including the crash of Ameri can Airlines 77 at the Pentagon, which killed 189 people, and the crash of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, which killed forty people. The idea of ground zero as a blank slate or as the targeted center of the bombing thus sets into motion a set of narratives about 9/11, both the narrative of lower Manhattan as the symbolic center of the event and the narrative that 9/11 was a moment in which the United States lost its innocence. Both enable a very particular narrative of exceptionalism, one that proclaims the events of 9/11 to be unique in the history of violent acts. This sense of histori cal exceptionalism hovers behind the nomenclature of lower Manhattan as Ground Zero—not only in disavowal of the original meaning of the term but also in the belief, widely circulated and deployed politically, that history itself was transformed on 9/11. Yet what is Ground Zero as a place or a destination? It is, of course, a temporary name. Presumably, when the site is fully rebuilt, it will offi cially be called something else, the new World Trade Center perhaps. As a place From Tourists ofTOURISM History byAND Sturken, “ SACRED Marita. GROUND DOI: 10.1215/9780822390510 ” 167 Duke University Press, 2007. All rights reserved. Downloaded 10 Nov 2017 13:24 at 130.132.173.231 that is defi ned as existing in between two places (the World Trade Center and its replacement), Ground Zero is more a concept than a place. It is an ephemeral space, yet one charged with meaning. In the years since September 2001, Ground Zero has become a site of destruction and reconstruction, of intense emotional and political invest ments, a highly overdetermined space. It is a place inscribed by local, na tional, and global meanings, a neighborhood, a commercial district, a tourist destination, a place of protest, and a site of memory and mourning. The narratives that have been layered on Ground Zero reveal the complex con vergence of political agendas and grief in this space, as if, somehow, the production of new spatial meanings will provide a means to contain the past, deal with the grief, and make sense of the violent events that took place there. The narratives and meanings produced at Ground Zero matter at the local level precisely because they have impacted in profound ways the redesign of an enormous area of a densely populated city and because they reveal the problematic relationship between urban design and commercial interests that govern a metropolis such as New York. These meanings and narratives matter at a national level when they are deployed in the service of national agendas, within a broader global context in which images of the United States are exported with political consequences. Ground Zero is a site where practices of memory and mourning have been in active ten sion with representational practices and debates over aesthetics: a place, one could say, defi ned and redefi ned by a tyranny of meaning. Ground Zero is also a space defi ned by and experienced through media technologies, a place constantly mediated through images, a place “visited” via websites and by tourists, a place fi lled with photographs that is itself re lentlessly photographed. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is in charge of rebuilding the site, had a webcam up for a few years so that viewers could monitor its changing landscape. It is the case that the space of Ground Zero was, from the moment of its naming, already defi ned through mediatization. The collapse of the World Trade Center towers was witnessed by an extraordinary number of viewers, by those standing on the rooftops and streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, by millions of television viewers throughout the United States, and by many millions of television viewers worldwide. September 11 is thus often seen as an event of the image, in which some new register of the spectacular was “achieved.” The intense networks of media that defi ned the events of 9/11 demon strate the increased fl uidity between public and private media, as cell phone From Tourists of168 History by Sturken, Marita. DOI: 10.1215/9780822390510 CHAPTER 4 Duke University Press, 2007. All rights reserved. Downloaded 10 Nov 2017 13:24 at 130.132.173.231 conversations and answering machine messages left by those who were trapped in the towers or on hijacked airplanes and the so-called amateur images of home video and still cameras were incorporated into the ongo ing network and cable news coverage. This blurring of public and private paralleled an intermixing of old and new media (in boundary crossings that inevitably made those distinctions seem inadequate).

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