Columnist Benjamin Grove: Ground zero is ghastly, but also a sacred place

Benjamin Grove

Friday, July 19, 2002 | 3:46 a.m.

NEW YORK -- Walking through Manhattan's financial district toward ground zero, visitors feel a palpable emptiness. The breathtaking gap in the skyline is unnatural here among the skyscrapers. There's too much sunlight.

Posted signs direct visitors to the viewing area. So do the unfortunate, inevitable World Trade Center souvenir vendors.

Visitors can walk right up to a sidewalk that runs along the south end of the site. A chain-link fence separates them from the hole.

It is a stark vision. The site's dusty floor is still littered with construction equipment, although most of the workers have gone. Jutting from the western edge of the excavation, several stories down, a giant pipe was exposed -- as if someone had ripped out the heart of lower Manhattan and left an artery hanging in the cavity.

The 16-acre hole is an open wound awaiting treatment.

To that end, officials last week unveiled six concept proposals for redeveloping the site. Each design features open, memorial park space, along with four to six as-yet undesigned buildings -- none as tall as the World Trade towers. Several park designs feature a poignant "footprint" of the original towers.

Passionate disagreements about the designs are inevitable; critics quickly noted that the concepts are dull and uninspiring -- too much like any other downtown for such a historic, symbolic spot.

But whatever the buildings eventually look like, the architects got it right to include prominent park memorials in each proposal. Future generations of New Yorkers, and other Americans, need a quiet and tasteful place to work through a long, complex healing process.

For now, a simple hole suffices.

The site is a ghastly vision, but also a sacred place, and people come for reasons beyond morbid curiosity. I was drawn there myself last Sunday morning during a weekend trip from Washington to New York.

On the subway, I met others headed to the site: first a Canadian couple, and then a couple from India now living in suburban Washington.

As the five of us approached the site our chatter subsided. We walked along the fence, peering into the hole and gaping skyward at the 110 stories of empty air. We shuffled along with the rest of the milling crowd in near silence. The place draws a reverential hush.

Ten months after the attack, some visitors at the site are still in the grieving stage, blotting tears or sticking a bouquet of carnations in the chain-link fence. Others have moved on, having waded through sorrow and anger and settled into thoughtful reflection.

Later the Canadians, Bill and Ruth, and I talked about why people trek to ground zero.

It was home to both the absolute worst and best of humanity, they agreed. It is a powerful experience to pay witness to a single place that symbolizes both, they said. They had come to ponder hate and heroism.

Ruth, a British-born doctor, has been troubled that men could be so fueled by hatred that they would seek to kill so many. She wants to understand it better, but can't.

Ruth's husband, Bill, said he was haunted by the simple notion that Sept. 11 had begun so routinely for so many people -- just like him, like any of us -- heading off to work.

"By 11 o'clock, the whole world had turned upside down," he said. "It's incomprehensible."

Bill wanted to see firsthand where the blissful monotony of the world's routine was shattered.

Bill's grown son, a scientist not prone to emotional outbursts, had called his father that morning -- a rarity, Bill said. "Dad, Dad! Somebody's going to have to pay for this. There's going to be a war!"

Like Bill and Ruth, I came seeking answers. We want to get our minds around the enormity of it: the devastation, the sheer waste of 2,823 promising lives taken so suddenly. We want to understand the root cause of terror.

Perhaps a fitting memorial one day will lead people to answers. But there are few to be found in the hole. For now visitors leave ground zero empty-handed, but not empty-hearted.