I'll spare you the moral outrage, though I'm sympathetic to it. I would agree more with the person complaining about the tchotchke salesmen down there, except that they'd go away if morons would stop buying their stuff. They're just trying to make a living, and it's hard to blame them for that no matter how tawdry a way of doing it it is (and believe me, it is), but there's really nothing more offensive to me than the sub-cretins who buy this crap to take back to Nebraska.
All right, I lied, I didn't skip the moral outrage, but the point is, in the immortal words of every cop in every movie ever made, "Show's over, folks, nothing more to see here." No matter how maudlin you are, no matter your sick, twisted fascination with this place, the fact remains that all you accomplish by going here is slowing down the people on Church Street and in the PATH station who are actually trying to get somewhere. Taking your cheesey snapshots won't bring back all the people who died for no reason, nor will it make the people who commit such wanton violence think twice before they do it again, so just go somewhere else, for your own mental health's sake.
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At Least Do This: Spend as little time there as possible, don't buy any maudlin crap from the vendors, and don't pretend you know what you're talking about. If you weren't there, and/or you didn't know anyone who died or had to run for their lives, you simply cannot comprehend what it was like when it happened. You can fill up your digital camera card. You can buy an entire Vietnamese sweatshop's output of T-shirts with American flags on them, but it won't reach you in any meaningful way as far as I can tell. There are plenty of places for quiet reflection around the city, and this isn't one of them.
On the other hand, if you're interested in construction, and in particular very slow construction, and in particular construction of things we have no use for, you can watch the snail's-pace work on the new World Trade Center, anchored by the Freedom Tower, but it's not much to see, and you'll only be getting in the way. Every morning on my way to work I'm delayed by tourists. Don't be one of those people.
One more thing: sometimes the electronic sign in the PATH station is broken...it's supposed to say "Welcome|| to the World || Trade Center" (why you need an electronic sign to always show the same message is beyond me) but the rightmost section often breaks and so it's just "Welcome || to the World." That's worth a picture, I suppose...I've taken one myself. It's sort of poetic.
Alternative: To tell you the truth, I really enjoy wandering around Downtown. There's not much on the usual tourist path down there, other than Brooklyn Bridge and George Bush's Basement...erm...Ground Zero, and maybe the outside of the Stock Exchange, which is, by the way, only sort of on Wall Street...that's the side entrance. The front door and the prodigiously large flag across the columns and all that is around the corner on Broad Street. Anyway, walk around, bring a map if you're not too confident on your navigational abilities, and see where New York began.
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on Feb 8, 2007
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