The Ground Zero Culture Wars

One of the last crumbs of hope for imaginative, forward-looking urban renewal at the new World Trade Center has just been swept away. On Wednesday, New York Governor George Pataki -- a Republican presidential hopeful for 2008 -- wiped the International Freedom Center from redevlopment plans at Ground Zero.

Pataki's intervention into a project he himself had originally signed off on (together with the increasingly impotent Lower Manhattan Development Corporation) came in response to pressure from Debra Burlingame's activist group, Take Back the Memorial, and the many people they brought on board: nearly 50,000 signatories to an online petition, members of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, The New York Post, and even Senator Hilary Clinton.

These critics feared that the IFC, which would have been a gateway to the underground memorial and memorial museum, would have drowned out the "story" of 9/11 with irrelevant political causes célèbres. Any discussion of the history and concept of freedom, which the IFC proposed to host as a constructive intellectual response to the 9/11 attacks, would have too easily turned controversial, thus defiling the "sacred ground" of World Trade Center.

There were certainly good reasons even for progressives to think twice about the now-extinct IFC: 9/11 would have implicitly stood at the apex of the world's lumped-together freedom struggles, and one has to be suspicious of putting "freedom" in a museum, a place normally reserved for the rare and antiquated. But even with these reservations and risks, it would have been better to build the IFC than not.

The IFC, and the new World Trade Center as a whole, appear to be victims of an intensifying culture war at Ground Zero, which the forces of reaction are winning, hands down. As it did on the national political level, mourning has morphed at Ground Zero into a sense of exalted privilege and unlimited sovereignty for some of the 9/11 victims' families, and into a deep suspicion of placing the attacks into a global context -- even without the slightest intention of excusing them.

Take Back the Memorial and its more extreme supporters seem to want, in effect, to preserve a 16-acre plot of Lower Manhattan as the cemetery Osama bin Laden turned it into. They don't want a vibrant urban culture emerging on the site of so much pain, even though this, alongside a respectful memorial, would seem to be a pretty good response to 9/11.

What remains at the new World Trade Center on paper is the foreboding fortress of the "Freedom Tower," several other corporate castles housing 10 million square feet of office space, a vast and solemn concrete plaza dotted with ready-made instant trees, 500,000 square feet of retail space and a bloated memorial museum that will now also colonize the IFC-less World Cultural Center building. To top it off, Pataki's office just announced the approval of an absurdly baroque new PATH transit hub on the site. If the IFC would have desecrated holy ground, as its opponents claimed, what about all these developments?

Another, less well-reported development at Ground Zero along with the eviction of the IFC also hints at the growing sense of entitlement and isolationism: the New York Times' Nicholas Ouroussoff reported on June 19 that the architects of the 9/11 memorial, Michael Arad and Peter Walker, have acceded to families' demands for private grieving rooms and a private entrance to the memorial.

One can only assume that victims' family members will carry a special key to bypass the tourists and access restricted parts of the memorial. This demand for hierarchy and privacy at the memorial is part of the the same line of thinking that led to the ouster of the IFC.

"Just Don't Fund It"

"There is most definitely a resonance of the culture wars here," Burlingame told me in an interview the day before Pataki nixed the IFC. Burlingame pointed to the lesson of Rudy Giuliani and his fight against the Brooklyn Museum exhibition "Sensation" in 2000. The court ruled that you can't fund a public institution and then withdraw that funding when it features something you don't like -- in this case provocative works by the Young British Artists of the late 1990s.