Memorial Chauvinism

Speaking at a rally shortly before the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, New York Governor George Pataki told the crowd how moved he was by a new exhibit he had just helped unveil at Madame Tussaud's in Times Square: a life-sized, carved-wax portrait of three firefighters raising the American flag out of the rubble at Ground Zero.

There are no plans to install a Madame Tussaud's at the World Trade Center site, but on the eve of 9/11's fourth anniversary, such imagery has come to define the sort of artistic expression and commentary allowable on this most sensitive piece of real estate. Since June a battle has been raging in lower Manhattan over the institutions slated for one of two cultural buildings called for in Daniel Liebeskind's master plan for the WTC site--and, with Pataki following the charge (his eye on national office), the right wing is winning.

The building, a horizontal box of glass and wood designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta, will occupy a corner of Ground Zero's "memorial quadrant," alongside the "Reflecting Absence" memorial and a museum containing artifacts and other material documenting the events of 9/11 and the people who were killed that day. Intended to provide a buffer between the heart of the memorial and the quotidian traffic and commerce surrounding the site, the Snøhetta Cultural Center was to house two of four organizations chosen by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) last year from 113 applicants: the Drawing Center, an art museum based in SoHo since the late 1970s, and the brand-new International Freedom Center (IFC), a "multi-dimensional cultural institution combining history, education and engagement" that is the brainchild of Tom Bernstein, co-founder of Manhattan's high-end athletics complex, Chelsea Piers. Working in a yin-yang relationship with "Reflecting Absence" and the 9/11 museum, which commemorate loss, the IFC is "meant to honor regeneration, the living, and the positive," says Paula Grant Berry, the project's vice chair, whose husband, David, perished in the south tower of the WTC.

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