World Trade Center

I went to see the World Trade Center site, now home to the newly opened 9/11 memorial museum.   I find the area to be very disconcerting.   There is still a huge police presence, with barbed wire and concrete security barriers everywhere. There are numerous souvenir stores, hawking NY Fire dept. memorabilia, Twin Tower trinkets, flags, t-shirts. etc.   While I was there, a fire truck was parking on the street; hundreds of cell phones were whipped out to take a picture.  Despite signs admonishing us to remember that the site is a memorial, the atmosphere is more like a carnival.   Though I think it is almost impossible to conceive of a public outdoor space that could function as a crowd-stopping memorial space.  Imagine the thousands of workers in the new buildings who descend to the open space for their lunch hour.  Are they really going to be thinking about 9/11 every day?  The two pools marking the footprint of the towers are mostly anodyne,  symbolic but hardly evocative, especially with the very strong smell of chlorine emanating from them.   And then, next to the pools, the newly built tower, bigger and taller than ever; which mostly serves to inflate the egos of those involved.

I am still intrigued, though, by the in-progress state Calatrava's transit hub, and the general architectural jumble of construction.

Some pictures:


I love the orange feeding tubes:

The World Trade Center in a nutshell:

Architectural behemoth and adjacent pool:

My ____ is bigger than yours...