City officials are faced with an awkward question: What to do with the tourists who want to see the most famous sight in New York?
It is awkward because no one wants to think of the World Trade Center ruins as a tourist attraction. The site is still a crime scene under investigation, and no one wants to seem ghoulish. There are still human remains there, and no one wants to desecrate the most hallowed ground in America.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
But people still want to go there. They want to visit for the same historic reasons they want to visit the battlefields of Normandy or the crematoriums of Nazi Germany. And while the notion of turning it into a tourist attraction might sound offensive, in fact the place has already become one -- for certain tourists.
The police barricades around the site have become the most exclusive velvet rope in town. On the outside are tourists without connections, whose first question in New York is now, "How can I see it?"
They've been snapping photographs of the south tower's rubble from two blocks away, at Broadway and Liberty Street.
Inside the barricades are other tourists, the famous, ranging from Don King to President Jacques Chirac of France. On Sunday, Oprah Winfrey got a personal tour from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, joining Larry King on a list of prominent journalists who visited. Prominence alone was enough to admit Muhammad Ali. Lance Armstrong went on a mayoral helicopter tour with former president Bill Clinton.
Power is the surest ticket for a visit, to gauge from the many politicians who have visited, including a 100-member tour group from Congress. Money can also make you one of the priviliged few, as a Saudi prince demonstrated by showing up with a US$10 million check. That check was indignantly returned by Giuliani after the visit.
At some dinner parties in New York and Washington, "Have you been down there?" has become the question most likely to inspire one-upmanship. The more competitive visitors will duel over who got closer and who breathed worse air. Most of those who have visited try not to sound too proud of their feat -- they know this is far different from getting into the club or restaurant of the moment. But they cannot resist telling the uninitiated what they saw and felt, because the scale of devastation is too large to be captured in television images or photographs.
Giuliani says that he wants the priviliged tourists to see the destruction firsthand so that they're inspired to use their influence to help the city. By that logic, it makes sense to let the masses get a look, too, because they're potential donors and supporters, too. In fact, they could offer direct support by paying fees dedicated to the victims' families and to the recovery effort and memorial.
It's not safe, of course, for tourists to be wandering around a smoking pile of debris. It's possible for some groups to go there on escorted visits, but arrangements would be tricky, and the numbers would have to be limited. It's not a place where hordes of tour buses belong at the moment.
But tourists wouldn't be in anyone's way if they were inside one of the buildings overlooking the site. There's been preliminary talk among city officials of allowing some kind of observatory to be established next to the ruins. Doing it tastefully would be a challenge, but curators have managed to do so at the sites of other disasters and atrocities.
Providing an observatory would do more than just satisfy people's curiosity. It would give them an outlet for the emotions they've been expressing at the informal shrines all over New York. It would be a place to satisfy visitors like the prayer group from Roanoke, Virginia, that arrived downtown one evening and walked into a restaurant called City Hall, on Duane Street.
"They came all the way from Roanoke to New York just to show their support, but they didn't know where to go once they got here," said Henry Meer, the chef and owner of the restaurant. "They came in here and asked me, `Where can we go to pray?'"
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