Even without a memorial, hundreds of thousands flock to the World Trade Center site. LISA TOLIN takes a look at disaster tourism.
Japanese tourists Mitsutaka Ito, left, Masa Ito, center, and Hiroshi Takamizawa take photos at Ground Zero. (AP Photo/Bernadette Tuazon)
Tourists walk up to the hole with cameras, laughing about some oddity noticed a block away.
They stop talking as they peer through a chain-link fence to the yawning construction site below. They have, after all, come to pay respects, to reflect on those horrible moments when life was briefly suspended in the World Trade Center, and for so many, came to an end.
But on a bright summer day, five years can seem like 50. The mood is quiet, but the only moist eye in sight belongs to Pam Sherwood, 40, of Phoenix, Ariz.
"We see everything in the paper and on TV, but to see it ... it's just too sad. It's too sad thinking of the terror of everybody running down the street, just running and hiding," she says.
Her 20-year-old daughter, Malory Rifen, didn't want to come here.
"I'm just standing here looking at a big hole," she says. Rifen says she remembers 9/11 mostly for being forced to file out of her classroom to watch the news. She drawls in deadpan: "Kinda messed up my day."
Five years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, its horrors have been incorporated into our national psyche. They are reflected in our politics, our art, our wars. But they are also easily forgotten.
And while the tourists come here to remember, their visits can seem cavalier, like one more stop sandwiched between the Statue of Liberty and Times Square.
"It's not an amusement park, but some people treat it as such," says a Port Authority police officer who asked not to be identified. Thirty-seven Port Authority officers died in the attacks. "People ask for the gift shop. That hurts."
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LOOKING AT DISASTER
The unofficial gift shop is down the street, where vendors sell T-shirts and posters. Jose Enriques, 40, says he sells 10 to 15 photo albums a day, for $5 apiece.
With no fixed memorial yet, capitalists have filled the gap. It's a byproduct of our consumer culture, says Eric Klinenberg, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University.
"It's easy for an important place to become cheapened by crass commercialism," he says.
By conservative estimates, hundreds of thousands of people come to ground zero each year to see the site where the twin towers once stood. Groups give walking tours complete with transportation from midtown Manhattan.
Similar "disaster tours" are given at the site of the Flight 93 crash in Pennsylvania, in post-Katrina New Orleans and in parts of southeast Asia devastated by the 2004 tsunami. And in a sense, they are nothing new.
"Think about the extent to which there's tourism at war sites," says Klinenberg. "Millions of Americans make pilgrimages to Civil War battlefields every summer. And September 11 is obviously a historic war site as well."
If ground zero didn't begin as a war site, it certainly became one. In that way, it's not unlike the Pearl Harbor memorial or the Auschwitz museum, which guides visitors through a space where the Nazis murdered 1.5 million people.
And yet with the attacks still fresh, the visits straddle an uncomfortable line between voyeurism and a history lesson on the all-too-recent past.
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A PAINFUL REMINDER
The question, then, is why? What makes tourists shun the traditional notions of escapism -- a relaxing trip to the beach, a nice walk in the wilderness, a fruity drink with an umbrella -- and spend a vacation dwelling on the horrors of their time?
Perhaps ground zero is the anti-Disneyland, where people come to see the world not as they wish it to be, but as it is, at its worst. Instead of colorful rides, there are children's pictures, bright and crudely drawn, with messages to the fathers they lost that day. Cartoon figures are replaced by images of true heroes -- the police officer saluting a fallen comrade, the nurse surrounded by empty blood bags.
Visitor after visitor echoes the same sentiment: They come because they must see it for themselves.
"For millions of people around the world, experiencing it through television is not enough. Even in this digital age there's something special and powerful about a firsthand experience -- seeing, touching and smelling what's there," says Klinenberg.
Therein lies the tension: For people who experienced the attacks firsthand, who lost a loved one or ran from the scene covered in ash, there is no need to see or touch or smell. The site itself is a painful reminder of a past that lives on.
There are two kinds of people affected by Sept. 11, says Joseph Trainor, staff researcher at the University of Delaware Disaster Research Center: those with personal ties and those who felt the attack as a larger event that shaped our history. In an era of media saturation, everyone could see the planes hitting the twin towers on a continuous loop and feel personally attacked, no matter how far away.
"They felt like it was something that happened to them," Trainor says.
Like many visitors to ground zero, Eugene Dunn came from halfway around the world. The 42-year-old from Cape Town, South Africa, brought his 4-year-old daughter.
"I just needed to see it," he says. "I don't think anybody would forget it. But being here is totally different from seeing it on TV. You can still sense that somberness in the air."
His daughter, Gabrielle, was born on Sept. 11, 2001 -- the day, she says, "when this building broke."
She smiles as she says this, and twirls around a pillar. She is a reminder of what died that day, and what was born from it.
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MORE ON SEPT. 11
For more stories related to the fifth anniversary of the attacks, look at asap's special report Living with 9/11.
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Lisa Tolin is asap's sections editor.
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