Posted on: Monday, October 1, 2001
Island Voices
Two cities, two different monuments
By John Griffin
Former editor of The Advertiser's editorial page
It may seem strange here in Hawai'i to talk about monuments to those just slain when a long new war has hardly begun. Yet that is part of the healing and transformation process in New York City.
The city is debating the possibilities of what might be done on the rubble-choked site of New York's fallen World Trade Center. Should it be new towers, a park monument, or something in between?
New Yorkers must decide, and they are getting lots of advice. For the horrible destruction of the twin towers has become a national and international matter. What's to be done goes far beyond a major business decision or urban renewal project.
I see irony in this. For some people, New York City has long represented an almost arrogant, even uncaring, East Coast Establishment that focuses attention away from the rest of the country.
Before Sept. 11, some felt New York City seemed like another world populated by rude folks and cultural snobs.
But now we have seen a more caring side of New Yorkers that was always there behind the rough-and-tumble of life in the big city.
Indeed, in a broader dimension, it has become an emotional capital of the United States. We have all become New Yorkers in a way I never was when growing up in upstate Rochester. Besides that, many people from Hawai'i are there, in the ruins and among the survivors.
And, with other things, we also need to think how this question of suitable monuments relates to a Hawai'i 5,000 or so miles away. Readers should send in their own letters to the editor on that.
To me, Honolulu has a mixed record. Our official downtown monument to World War II veterans is almost hidden by a bus stop across from the State Library. The Waikiki Natatorium arch, a memorial to the few who fell in World War I, is restored, even if the inappropriate salt-water pool still sits in decay. The Korea-Vietnam memorial on the State Capitol grounds is unobtrusive, maybe too much so.
Still, the sunken battleship Arizona and the triumphant Missouri remain great symbols at Pearl Harbor, and the sprawling green of Punchbowl cemetery is a haunting statement to sacrifice. These are mostly federal legacies, influenced at times by local Hawai'i pressures.
This still leaves us with the question of what to do with the current symbolism of the World Trade Center in New York City and what it means to the nation.
Right after the shocks of Sept. 11, the first instinct of some leaders was to proclaim that the World Trade Center, or some variation, would be rebuilt as a symbol of U.S. economic might and national resolve.
Later questions, some practical, others emotional, were raised: Would the result be a tempting new target for world terrorists of the future? Would people work in the new high-rises? Can't we look ahead to a new Manhattan, rather than going back to the 1970s?
I liked the park proposal advanced by author Pete Hamill in his New York Daily News column: a park with one simple memorial wall with the names of victims, like the Vietnam monument in Washington. He wrote:
"Down there at Ground Zero, I want to see an enduring monument to what we should think of as our greatest structure: freedom. I'd like to see an oak tree planted in memory of every nationality that died there. Most of all, I want to see flowers bloom where so many died. I want to hear children laughing. I want to hear the rattle of leaves on autumn afternoons."
Hamill also proposed a strip of fence welded from fragments of ruined police cars, fire engines and ambulances. Many others have suggested monuments using the jagged fragments of the World Trade Center that towered over the rubble. Many world cities have done that with ruins after horrible wartime destruction.
Whatever goes on the 16 acres will be a new icon and pilgrimage site. The question is: What will it say to people, not about the old center, which many New Yorkers and others felt was ultimately unattractive as well as imposing, but about deeper American values?
Some fear that just as commercial interests will seek to rebuild, perhaps incorporating the stock exchanges, so, going in the other direction, the end result could be an excess of static monumentalism.
A group in Hawai'i is considering a Honolulu Trade Center on Kapi'olani Boulevard, which is fine and maybe needed. We also could use something dramatic and distinctive on the Kaka'ako waterfront, a statement-symbol of our aspirations.
But in this we are different from New York City. It has made its way as a pre-eminent world capital and no longer needs to proclaim itself with towers in the sky as it did when the World Trade Center was built. As they say, New York can whisper now and the world will listen.
Honolulu, in contrast, has miles to go in making its name as an East-West meeting ground. Also, we are not memorializing some new disaster. We can be bolder. As Hamill notes, there are now whole new, safer and more horizontal concepts for buildings.
Still, in both cases, the basic call is for a mixture of culture and class in looking ahead and outward to a world that is all too close. Such statements are needed.
