John Young on the World Trade Center site
John Young has taken an abiding interest in the World Trade Center site, and he most recently notes:
Ruins are what's missing at WTC, and visitors continue to lament their lack, and express shock that there's nothing to see there except the usual banalities of development, kitschly decorated and celebrated.
This is a harsher version of my own observations, but it rings true for me.
John has added to his observations some of his journalistic photography, contrasting the appearance of the World Trade Center site immediately after the September 11 attack with its appearance today.
His and my references to memorials of the Holocaust makes me think of Paul Treanor's article about memorials. I bet Treanor would be unhappy with John Young's piece on the theory that it might imply that a sufficent number of catastrophes in New York would make the whole city permanently unfit for habitation solely because of the resulting moral imperative to turn the city into a monument park.
