Tensions surround 9/11 memorial on anniversary

AP photo

NEW YORK—Tensions over how to pay proper respect to the dead are overshadowing New York’s memorial at Ground Zero as a gap widens between survivors and the general, more forgetful public 11 years after 9/11.

Just days before the latest annual remembrance of the cataclysm that saw hijacked airliners flown into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, the once overwhelming sense of national solidarity appears to have faded.

At the somber site, which only opened last year to mark the spot where over 2,600 people were killed on Sept. 11, 2001, out of a total of nearly 3,000 dead, police, private security guards and volunteer guides are enforcing strict rules on decorum.

The measures are aimed at curbing what some relatives of victims see as rising disrespect, ranging from picnics under the newly planted oak trees to an incident in June when visiting high school students threw trash into one of the black pools marking the footprints of the fallen towers.

Signs insisting on good behavior are everywhere around the huge pools and bronze panels inscribed with the names of the dead.

“If you see anyone scratching, sitting on or otherwise damaging the names panel, please alert memorial staff,” reads one such notice.

Nothing like serious vandalism has occurred, but even the most seemingly benign activities, such as thousands of tourists snapping photos of each other in front of the monument, are too much for relatives who refer to the site as “sacred ground.”

“People laughed and took pictures smiling, and so many people leaned on the tablets with all my friends’ names engraved in them, holding Starbucks cups, like it was a kitchen table,” Marianne Pizzitola, head of a fire department retirees group, complained in a letter to the memorial’s president, Joe Daniels.

Those tensions are part of a broader shift as the raw horrors of 9/11, which also saw the hijackers crash a third plane into the Pentagon while a fourth plummeted into a Pennsylvania field, become less salient for most people.

On the anniversary, relatives will again go through the heart-rending Ground Zero ceremony where the names of all 2,753 people killed there are read out.

When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg last year brought up the possibility of scaling down the lengthy ritual, he immediately prompted a backlash from some victims’ families.

Throw in the politicized furor over plans for a nearby Islamic cultural center and a lawsuit filed by atheists against a steel cross at Ground Zero and the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum can sometimes seem less than the peaceful place for remembrance that it is meant to be.

And for those who want the memorial to remain a restricted zone for ticket holders, things are only going to get more uncomfortable.

When the surrounding skyscrapers of the new World Trade Center are finished and leased, the memorial is designed to become fully open.

At that point, the shaded plaza around the fountains won’t just make a perfect spot for the odd tourist picnic but a likely destination for thousands of office workers on a lunch break. AFP