The Record
Sunday, November 4, 2007
COLUMNIST
A living memorial is best
By JAMES AHEARN
SPECIAL TO THE RECORD

A fitting tribute to New Jerseyans who died on Sept. 11 is already in place, on a restored brownfield, and called the Grove of Remembrance.

THE CONSTRUCTION bids for the Sept. 11, 2001, memorial proposed for Liberty State Park have come in. The bids were expected to be $10 million or so. The low bid turned out to be $22 million. The high bid was $25 million.

The state Treasury Department is negotiating with the architect for revisions that would cut costs but preserve the plan. I submit that that would be wasted energy.

The plan is a grandiose, overblown architectural fantasy that would forever spoil the breathtaking view from the park of the harbor, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan.

I have an alternative memorial in mind. It would cost nothing, because it is already in place in the park, although few know it is there. It is smack where a memorial should be, well back from the water's edge but with a view of the site where the World Trade Center stood.

This installation, on 11 acres of a former brownfield, is called the Grove of Remembrance. It was built with a modest federal forestry grant of $143,000 and with $220,000 in cash and in-kind donations.

The grant paid for 691 mature trees, one for each New Jerseyan who died in Lower Manhattan on that terrible day. The grant also paid for mulch, soil and shrubs, and for a big bronze plaque engraved with the names of the dead.

The grove, a living memorial, is maintained free of cost to the state by volunteers and by Jersey City schoolchildren who grow flowers and plants in classroom conservatories and take them to the grove each spring for planting. The kids learn about gardening and the responsibilities of citizenship.

Every year, there is an Arbor Day contest, for which children write a poem or a short prose piece. The winners read their compositions aloud, in a ceremony in the grove, and plant a tree. It is homey and nice.

The first year this custom was observed was 2003, when then-Gov. James E. McGreevey planted the first tree in the grove, attended by relatives of the New Jersey Sept. 11 victims. Four days later, on April 25, Arbor Day, 300 volunteers planted, mulched and watered another 200 trees. The Grove of Remembrance was thus established.

Vanity

Our Jim had bigger plans, though. A garden was all well and good, but he wanted something monumental, a built structure that would commemorate his own leadership as well as the dead.

In December that year, he announced a national competition for a design for a memorial. Three hundred twenty entries were submitted. These were whittled to a half-dozen by a team of architectural and design professionals. Then a jury of a dozen New Jersey relatives of 9/11 victims picked the winner. It had been submitted by a Manhattan architect, Frederic Schwartz.

He called it "Empty Sky," because it would be open to sun and rain, morning and night. It would consist of two parallel, 30-foot-high concrete walls, faced in stainless steel, 16 feet apart. Each wall would be 200 feet long, the same length as each side of the World Trade Center towers. On the steel would be engraved the names of the 691 New Jersey dead, in random order.

The walls, open at the ends as well as the top, would be built atop a 10-foot-high earthen mound. They would focus the gaze of visitors toward the site where the towers stood, on the other side of the harbor. At night, bright lights atop the walls would shine straight up into the sky.

The installation would cover 1.6 acres, including much of the public, harborside plaza adjoining the historic Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal. The plaza, formerly used for concerts and other public gatherings, is now truncated, ending at a pile of dirt 30 feet high, surrounded by a fence. The pile is to be compressed into the planned 10-foot mound.

Funding source

What has yet to be established is where all the money for the memorial is to come from. The Port Authority is supposed to contribute $7 million and the state $6 million, although it is confronting a deficit of more than $3 billion. McGreevey had spoken vaguely of private donations, but no campaign has been mounted.

Jersey City officials have criticized the scale and location of the memorial, as has Sam Pesin, the indispensable, irrepressible president of Friends of Liberty State Park. He complains, justifiably, that state officials have convened no hearing on the plan since it was chosen. If they did, they would get an earful.

Governor Corzine has supported the plan, and I suppose that, if need be, he could just sit down and write a personal check for whatever was needed. But there is a better solution. It would be to give greater visibility and recognition to what's already there, the Grove of Remembrance. If in addition something more was deemed necessary, it should supplement the grove, not stand between it and the harbor, cutting off the view.

James Ahearn is a contributing editor and former managing editor of The Record.
 
Correction note from Friends' president Sam Pesin on this great column: as the other material on The Friends website indicates, the  memorial's massive Hill and Walls would obstruct views toward Ground Zero, Lower Manhattan, NYC views up to the George Washington Bridge from the closest and busiest place in LSP, and also block views of the Hudson River and river boat activity (but it wouldn't block view toward Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island). The memorial Hill has already demolished the Terminal's Public Plaza.

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