20th Anniversary of “Nine-Eleven”

Hello subscribers!

How time flies! Yesterday it was 20 years since “9/11” happened! I marked this with a brand- new Blog post about 9/11 and DT. Do take a look.

Most people old enough can say exactly where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news. Many watched the events unfold live on TV and thus witnessed the second plane hitting the South Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York and the subsequent collapse of both towers.

I am an exception, though. I missed all the live footage on the day. But I can say exactly where I was and what I was doing: I was in our new flat in Vienna screwing together furniture. We had only just moved in and didn’t have TV, radio or Internet connections yet (and remember: 2001 was before smartphones took over the world). My wife, who was at work in the office, where they did have a radio, relayed bits of information to me by mobile phone occasionally. That’s how I learned about the collapsed towers. It all sounded very abstract to me. It wasn’t until I finally saw the images of the second plane flying into the WTC and the towers’ dramatic collapse that the magnitude of what had happened really hit me. Sometimes it really is such images that get you, not just plain information. I saw them first on one of those large station screens as I waited for a metro train – that was after a concert by Depeche Mode that we had been to that evening. The support band (Fad Gadget) said after the intro song that it was a hard day to play a gig. The main act only hinted, very subtly, at this: guitarist and songwriter Martin Gore wore a black mourning ribbon on his arm instead of the usual white feathers he otherwise used on this tour as part of his stage outfit. Otherwise they professionally played their set as normal. My wife says, though, that she has no real recollection of the gig at all; she was too shaken by the events of the day.

The next morning I went out and bought an analogue indoor aerial for our small TV (again, remember this was 2001, before everything went digital … analogue TV signals were still being transmitted back then). It just gave me somewhat shaky access to Austrian TV only, but here too the sole topic for days was 9/11. I kept it all running throughout the day while I continued assembling flat-pack furniture. They were intense days. Eventually I also got the Internet connected and was able to find out that people I knew in New York were all safe and well. One worked for Deutsche Bank at the time, which had offices at the World Trade Center site, but he hadn’t been at work that day for some reason. A lucky escape.
  

I first visited “Ground Zero”, as the site of the destroyed WTC had quickly become known, as early as in August 2002, so before the first anniversary. Back then there were still thousands of missing notes posted on walls and on fences. The photo above shows the fence around St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway, less than one block from Ground Zero, at that time. It too was covered with missing notes, flags, mementoes and all manner of expressions of mourning and solidarity. I remember it was eerily silent. Nobody present was speaking. Beyond the fence to the rear on Church Street, however, early signs of touristification and commercialization were showing. Some souvenir vendors offered a range of postcards, baseball caps with the Twin Towers on, and even tacky trinkets like a little snow globe featuring a mini WTC inside with a fire truck at the bottom. I admit I even bought one – mainly as proof that such dubious items really existed. (One day I’ll make a Blog post about my various DT souvenirs in my collection, few of which are quite so dubious, though.)
  

Almost eight years later I went back to New York, at around Easter in 2010. By then, “Ground Zero”, though still mostly a building site, had become firmly established as a prime mainstream dark-tourism attraction. There was a “Preview Site” outlining the future National 9/11 Memorial that was in the making at the time, and it doubled up as a shop selling a large array of books and souvenirs related to 9/11. Inside St. Paul’s Chapel there was an exhibition about the rescue work, and a dedicated museum covering the events of the day had been set up inside a new “Tribute WTC Visitor Center” (meanwhile renamed “9/11 Tribute Museum”). This also offered walking tours with volunteers who were in different ways directly affected by the tragedy. I went on one and it was very personal, moving and also enlightening.
  

And then I went back a third time in the summer of 2015. By then the official “National 9/11 Memorial and Museum” had opened and I spent the best part of a whole day there. The main museum exhibition alone was so detailed that the five hours I had left before meeting friends as arranged were not enough to take it all in. I regard this part of the memorial as the No.1 of the top dark museums in the world. Yet the 9/11 Memorial & Museum have also attracted much criticism. I cover some of this in the new blog post too. It also features twelve photos taken on my three visits so you can get a glimpse of the changes over time. More will have changed since, so it will be interesting to visit the site again some day.

But so much for this topic on this occasion.
  

Have a good week and, as always, stay safe!

Best,

Peter