Today I was walking the Schuylkill River Trail when I noticed something I had never noticed before: a 9/11 memorial. It’s nothing fancy, with only a piece of a beam from the towers, an inscription around the beam identifying what it is, and the names of three Philadelphians who died in the attacks. It’s simple and tucked away, but when I noticed it and realized what it was, it made me pause and changed the mood of my walk entirely.
That’s really what a memorial is supposed to do, and I would argue that the most effective memorials are similar to this one: hidden in the midst of everyday life.
Maybe that’s the difference between a memorial and a monument: a monument makes a place for a moment and thrusts itself upon you, a memorial makes a place for a memory and lets you discover it.
The actual world trade center memorial in Manhattan is effective in many ways – the idea of leaving large holes where the towers once stood is fitting and helps convey how enormous the towers were (the twin monoliths were built by Minoru Yamasaki and much ridiculed for the simplicity of their massing, effectively ending his skyscraper design career – a distinction he shares with William Van Alen, architect of none other than the equally iconic Chrysler Building). In recent years, at least in the Western world, we’ve tended more towards memorials of absence than memorials of presence, as were more common before the dawn of modern architecture. Back then, there were probably more monuments than memorials, and they were more often erected to celebrate achievements rather than to mourn tragedies – which change is noteworthy in and of itself.
I remember disliking the experience of the World Trade Center memorials when I last went almost a decade ago, however. Back then, timed tickets were needed, there was a store associated with the museum (and I believe there still is) and the site was overcrowded with tourists, despite the timed tickets. Since then, they’ve done away with the ticketing system, and hopefully they’ve kept away some of the street vendors who were selling unauthorized merchandise about the tragedy, taking away from the gravity of the site and lending an upsettingly commercial feeling to the entire thing. I would need to re-visit to make a more honest assessment.
But when I think of the most impactful memorials I’ve come across, they’re usually of a more subtle nature. The Vietnam War memorial in DC, for instance, is incredibly successful at conveying the graveness of war. The Vietnam memorial is made up of polished marble slabs that simply list the names of those who lost their lives in the war. The World War II memorial, by contrast, consists of large stones plinths arranged in two semicircles. Each stone is adorned with a wreath and inscribed with the name of one of the 50 states or one of the minor outlying territories. The wreaths, though mournful, convey a sense of grandeur that is absent from the Vietnam memorial. By stripping away all decoration and only giving the names of the dead, the Vietnam memorial takes on a much different mood. It conveys a sense that the Vietnam War was more personal, while WWII was more collective. One can look for the name of a relative who was killed or MIA at the Vietnam memorial, in a manner that recalls the deeply personal experience of finding a distant relative’s name at the walls of Ellis Island. Perhaps that’s just the difference in our attitude towards the two wars – while we think of the dead in WWII as heroes who sacrificed nobly, we think of those who died in Vietnam as victims who died needlessly, thus the need to emphasize their individuality. Perhaps, if Vietnam had been a successful effort, we might have thought differently about the dead – that they did not die in vain. But since Americans largely view Vietnam as a loss, the end result is that World War II received something more monumental, while Vietnam definitively received a memorial.
There’s two very impactful memorials I’ve come across in Philadelphia that have jumped out at me more than others. The first one is the fallen soldiers of the Pennsylvania Railroad which stands in the east end of 30th St Station. I had probably walked past it close to a hundred times before I stopped to look at it one day while waiting for a train. It is something of a cross between a monument and a memorial. For starters, it rises to a monumental height of 28 feet. It consists of a bronze sculpture standing on a black granite base, and both materials are used to powerful effect. The bronze statue is a depiction of St Michael the Archangel holding the body of a dead soldier in his arms, carrying undertones of Michelangelo’s Pieta. In contrast to Michelangelo’s sculpture, which shows Mary in grief and mourning, St Michael seems simultaneously mournful and exultant, striking an entirely different mood. Underneath the immense sculpture, the black granite base is inscribed with the names of the workers of the Pennsylvania Railroad who lost their lives in World War II. It’s a shockingly long list, revealing both the immense number of people employed by the Pennsylvania Railroad at that time and the vast number of lives that WWII claimed.
The second memorial is decidedly more humble. It’s a small lawn sign, the kind used by political campaigns, stuck in the fork between I-95 and the southbound exit ramp towards the Walt Whitman Bridge. It has a picture of a man in a backwards hat, half smiling, and says “Slow down! DJ lost his life here because of a speeding driver”. It may say something else at the bottom, but I can never read it since it’s on a highway and the lower portion of it is often covered by overgrown grasses and weeds, especially in the summertime. I used to drive past it every day on my commute, and I thought often about DJ and his life and the phone call his family received the night that he died. The reminder to slow down is welcome, even if it seems like nobody ever pays attention to it, indeed many people pass it while driving recklessly, which behavior sadly seems to have only increased since DJ’s death. The sign is simple, and easily missed just like the Pennsylvania Railroad workers’ memorial, yet once I noticed it I couldn’t un-notice it. It always gives me pause, and makes me think about things that wouldn’t otherwise cross my mind, which, presumably, is the ultimate goal of a memorial – to remind us of an event.
The 9/11 memorial on the Schuylkill Trail is equally as effective in this regard. Instead of the enormous reflecting pools of New York, which draw in tourists and have become a destination in and of themselves, this memorial invites you to come to it on your own terms, whenever you may happen to notice it. It doesn’t seek to convey the immensity of 9/11, plenty has already been said about that. Rather, it’s more about the human scale of the tragic attacks, in the vein of the Vietnam Memorial. It deals in small things – a single beam, an identifying inscription, and three names, who share only one thing in common: that all of their final day on earth was September 11, 2001.