Murder and Mayhem on the Bluest of Blue-Sky Days

At the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, art helps us mourn and reflect.

A s you know, I write about art and the preservation of heritage, but today’s topic is the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, so I’ll venture a bit further afield. The attack 25 years ago, after all, is still a thick, gnarled, black thread running through politics as well as culture. I’ll never forget the innocents killed on the planes, the random life and death of people in the towers, the heroic firemen and cops, and the poor people jumping from windows. Horrifying then, still horrifying. September 11 is a teachable moment as well. Evil exists and so does Satan.

People from academics to cab drivers have told me we deserved it, that there were no Jews in the Twin Towers on 9/11, and that Dick Cheney fomented it to trigger a war since he was our Dr. Strangelove, blah, blah, blah. You can’t beat dumb animals. Some ideas are so preposterous that only a tenured humanities professor — or a museum curator — will espouse them. What horrifies me today, aside from those 9/11 memories, are Harvard and Columbia students, many, many hundreds of them, embracing Hamas. Add the horror of those bourgeois people on the Upper West Side tearing down posters with photos of dead Israeli kids just days after October 7.

Many of the killers on September 11 were also well-educated and from chic families. Bin Laden was an aristocrat. Our ruling and academic classes today are thick with rotten people like these, affected, envious, naïve, and hubristic. They’re often educated beyond their intelligence, spoiled and susceptible to crazy views. Many are now running for office. They’re preppy, poised Arafats. The mayor of New York is one.

I also think 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be shot by a military firing squad. Today is not soon enough, though his trial, amazingly, is not even slated to begin until June 2028.

So I did not visit the 9/11 Museum with my usual open mind. I hadn’t been back since I wrote about it in 2021, after my first visit. This time, my eye went to different things than in 2021. I read all the labels, but I found that they now meant less. My eyes, brain, and soul wanted pictures and scenes. “Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words,” Eliza Doolittle says.

The museum caters to this, starting with the outdoor memorial, a commodious park that puts us in a reflective frame of mind through 400 swamp white oak trees. Tough enough to thrive in a city, they are are native to places with wet, poorly drained soil like where Flight 93 crashed, in an open field near Shanksville, Pa. — about 125 miles west of the nation’s capital — and what used to be downtown Manhattan’s mix of oak forests and swamps. The trees grow to 80 feet, and the whole area feels like an urban forest.

Oaks are stately and evoke strength and durability. Their leaves are lustrous dark green in summer and turn a medium orange-yellow in the fall. The sound of waterfalls from the two memorial pools soothes. The water falls into black squares, 30 feet deep, where the two towers stood. They’re voids and containers of grief, but they enlist geometry’s logic and reason as a leaven in bearing loss.

Once in the museum, down, down, down the escalator we go. Narrow screens rising from waist level to near the ceiling line a long, city-street-wide hallway. Each one shows two- or three- second-long stills of people downtown in 2001 as the two towers burned. It’s Golgotha-dark. There are clips of a lot of anguished faces, jaws slack, hands on cheeks, people gasping, turning as they run to see a tower fall, people in workaday wear. We hear screams and sirens, but the volume is low. I felt there, on the spot, but also as if I was leaving hustle, bustle, and turmoil and entering a church.

Then I got to the balcony; from there, looking down about 50 feet to the slurry wall and Foundation Hall, the long, wood rectangular benches below look like coffins. They’re movable, so they’re scattered all over the floor. I thought about the people who jumped, landing in random spots. There’s the slurry wall — massive, totemic, like a Richard Serra sculpture but also like a god of Brutalism that’s tussled with Mad Max. The wall is concrete and rebar, at bedrock, and the remains of the 3,500-foot system that keeps the Hudson River water at bay. It was never meant to be art or even seen, but add enigma and tragedy to it, and it becomes art. The Last Column, a graffiti-packed steel beam, stands nearly 40 feet tall. It’s the last piece of structural steel removed from the disaster area.

Two of the Twin Towers’ multipronged façade columns, 70 feet tall, called tridents, stand in the museum’s glass entrance pavilion. They made the entrance to the towers distinctive. Once stainless steel clad in gleaming aluminum, they’re now worse for wear but intact. The WTC architect, Minoru Yamasaki, called them trees, but they’re three-pronged, so people thought “trident,” which refers to Poseidon’s spear — the prongs meant to shake the earth, summon storms at sea, and protect the oceans.

The most poignant and soothing and searing work is Spencer Finch’s watercolor tile Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning. It has 2,983 tiles, one for each of the dead from the September 11 and 1993 bombings, that run all along the main wall of Memorial Hall. Those of us here in America on 9/11 remember that day’s blue sky, what’s called “severe clear” in aviation slang, cloudless and dry over nearly the entire country, calm, with high visibility. Even New Yorkers stopped to look up. Now we’re at bedrock, deep underground, and think of that blue sky.

Finch (b. 1962) is best known as a light artist, but I love his glass, ceramic, watercolor, and photography work and think he’s our virtuoso colorist, in the league of Bonnard, Gauguin, Helen Frankenthaler, and Milton Avery. Trying to Remember, from 2014, was the only commissioned work of art when the museum opened. Each tile is a different shade of blue, blue for that sky, that forms a chromatic sphinx.

Why blue? It’s relevant because most of us who speak about our memories of September 11 point to the blue sky that day. There are lots of shades of blue, and each survivor has his or her own memories of loved ones who died. “Blue” is a term for sad, but in the early morning of 9/11, the sky was so impossibly blue, a gift from the gods, that you couldn’t be sad. It certainly looked like one of those “glad to be alive” days. “Never saw things shinin’ so bright / Never saw things goin’ so right,” Irving Berlin wrote in Blue Skies a hundred years ago.

“True blue” means trustworthy, stable, harmonious, calm, and having old-time values. It’s the color for conservative parties everywhere except here, and this drives me crazy since red is for commies and the “America deserved 9/11” crowd. Blue is the color of the heavens, or Heaven. Starting in early Christian days, the ceilings in old churches in Italy were often blue. Up in the sky and out to sea, infinity is blue. And blue has biology on its side in that it’s proven to slow the heart rate.

Blue is sincere. We’re more likely to trust people with blue eyes or even wearing blue ties. It’s cerebral. There are very few blue flowers, few birds and animals with blue coloring, and not much blue food. Blue consistently, by 20 points or more, ranks as our favorite color. Crayola tells as that cerulean and robin’s egg blue are their bestsellers.

Trying to Remember also makes our memories of that blue sky surrogates for our memories of that day and for the dead, whether we knew anyone among them or not. The wall is a memorial but a grave, too. Behind it is a repository of nearly 8,000 fragments of human remains. Many of the dead were pulverized. Bits were found over the months and years of excavation and cleanup. Add all of blue’s meanings, and the art works.

A quote from Virgil’s Aeneid — “No Day Will Erase You from the Memory of Time” — stretches like a banner across Finch’s color montage. The museum has been much dinged for it since it refers to two Trojan soldiers who sneak into a Greek camp at night, kill sleeping soldiers, flee, and soon are killed themselves. The quote is part of Virgil’s lament for them. They sound more like the terrorists! One of the pair manages to escape the wrath of those awakened, but he returns to rescue his fellow soldier, who might also have been his lover. I would have left the blue labels unsullied by words. Less is more. It proves again that mixing words with art is usually a bad idea.

The In Memoriam space is the companion piece to Trying to Remember. It’s a montage of photographs, 2,983 headshot portraits of the dead. They’re ages two to 85, but the saddest part of it is the preponderance of young faces. Graduation photos, family photos, pics from work directories, wedding photos, nearly all from places of fresh starts, love, and security — if you think each life is precious and unique, you have to be awed by the scale of loss. Trying to Remember is ethereal and soulful and abstract. These spaces are flesh and blood. They share a modern grid.

The museum has an art gallery, though you’d barely know it judging from an unusually ineffective website with lots of dead ends, “page not found” moments, and babble with no content. It’s got an art collection, too, with thousands of objects sent by artists all over the country. It’s a slog since the art is arranged alphabetically by artist.

There’s art by trained artists and outsider artists, both usually making art for a living, and then there’s vernacular art. There’s a transitional space called the Tribute Walk for this art, which proves that meaning well can be a spur to creativity. The Last Column, decorated mostly with letters and numbers, is an artifact. The mural painted on a garage door from a firehouse in Brooklyn is amateur art that hits home. Six firefighters from Ladder Company 118 and two members of Engine Company 205, which shares the same firehouse, died that day, so it’s likely that everyone sensate in Brooklyn Heights knew someone who died. It’s simple and sweet and profound at the same time.

Lady Liberty started as a fiberglass model of the Statue of Liberty, 11 feet tall, sent by a well-wisher to a Midtown firehouse that had just lost 15 men. Within hours, passersby and locals started to add to it, leaving small American flags, rosary beads, condolence notes, Mass cards, stuffed animals, photographs of the dead firemen and dead residents from the neighborhood, ribbons, and service insignias. When winter came, it went indoors and finally went to the museum. It’s busy and kitschy but effective and communal conceptual art.

I’ll write in a week or so about the debut of the 9/11 Museum’s new film on what September 11 means today, aimed in part at the 125 million Americans who don’t remember it. That’s Gen Z. So many of them. God help us.