Yesterday, my son and I went to New York City. Months ago, I had gotten two tickets for Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, which has been on tour, and has for months, and still is, currently in New York City.
We were kind of in a rush to get to the exposition, so we were kind of in a rush. However, our PATH train stop for this was the World Trade Center. Originally, I had been planning for my son and I to go to Central Park, and spend the rest of the day exploring that. But it occurred to me, looking around at the glittering new Freedom Tower and the waterfront along the Hudson River, that maybe we should simply stay where we were, and try to explore and enjoy this instead. That is what we wound up doing, and I am glad that is what we indeed did.
The pictures of the waterfront, and the Statue of Liberty, to say nothing of the Van Gogh exposition, I will post later.
For today, however, I wanted to post the pictures of the World Trade Center (WTC). I had been very near the WTC a few times since September 11th, but had never actually gone to the site of where the towers had stood, and which I had come to know as Ground Zero. For some reason, I had assumed - wrongly, obviously - that the ground was closed off behind fences. The last time that I specifically remember being there was when Barack Obama went to lay a wreath, I believe, just days after the death of Osama Bin Laden. My ex and I brought our son, thinking it might be something special, and to see the sitting President of the United States. We saw him, but he unfortunately does not remember it. Of course, he was very young, not even six, so that makes sense. But one thing that I remember was that it seemed that everything was fenced off, and they may even have been completing the memorial still by that point. The impression that I had was that this was off limits and inaccessible to the general public, unless you paid for a ticket to the museum.
But it is open to the general public (although they closed it off for some reason when it started to rain fairly heavily). This is a fitting and moving tribute to the victims of 9/11. The falling waters of the fountain more or less drown out the sounds of the surrounding city life, including the traffic and horns and people and such. That makes this a place of solemn reflection, and it is a beautiful and moving memorial, as such.
In any case, we went there after Van Gogh, and discovered that it was indeed open to the public. It was my first visit to the actual site of where the towers stood since before that fateful day. Back in 1998, my father and I saw a concert in between the towers. it was Phillip Glass, with a French group, Autour de Lucie, as one of the opening acts (perhaps the only opening act). It was hot and sunny, as I recall. Surely, I saw the towers after that, but that was the last time that I would be so close to them.
This visit felt so strange. I saw the square fountains outlining where the towers had stood. It still sometimes feels surreal. It was a moving experience, not unlike the Vietnam Wall in Washington, or Dealy Plaza in Dallas. You definitely get the sense of a somber recognition of something memorable and tragic. But I was not yet born for either the Kennedy assassination or the Vietnam War, really (technically, the war was still going on when I was born in October of 1974, but American involvement had largely ended by that point). However, I was definitely around and old enough to remember September 11th. How could I forget? How could anyone?
These were some of the pictures that I took there yesterday. The one that I posted on the top, and which begins the collection below, actually moved me quite significantly. To see the rose that some loved one placed in memory of somebody who was lost on that day, somebody who had gone to work as usual and was not expecting the tragedy that was about to unfold, was very sad, and I almost felt myself welling up. So I took a picture, and felt that it would be fitting to post it here.
RIP to all of those lost on that fateful day.
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