January 25, 2007
Families Against The WTC Memorial
Families of some September 11 victims have started an advertising campaign to express their unhappiness over the planned naming scheme for the World Trade Center Memorial. Last December, Mayor Bloomberg announced that the names of victims would be grouped by company or association. However, civilian employees would not have their employers listed while city workers, like firefighters, would have their companies listed.
The names at the North Pool will have those at Tower 1 and on Flight 11; the names at the South Pool will include those who died at Tower 2, on Flight 175, on Flight 93 (that crashed in Shanksville, PA), on Flight 77 (that crashed into the Pentagon), at the Pentagon, and at the 1993 WTC bombings, plus first responders and people who died at unknown locations.
Edie Lutnick, whose brother Gary Lutnick died at Cantor Fitzegerald, said, "It dawned on me that what the memorial plan the mayor proposed lacks is integrity. It lacks historic integrity and it lacks personal integrity because it does not make human beings of those who lost their lives." She also said "[My brother] will be N.T.-S.-22-9, instead of Gary Lutnick, 36, Cantor Fitzgerald, 101st to 105th floors.”
Mayor Bloomberg, also the WTC Memorial Foundation's chairman, considers the matter closed; he said, "We've addressed the issue. As I said, you can't please everybody." You can see the ads and the proposed idea at the Save the 9/11 Memorial website.
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Who cares? These people desperately need to stop obsessing over the memorial and throwing a fit every time a change is proposed. Just build it, put the names on it and be done with the whole thing.
agreed...
i don't get it. it looks like there's room for 18 people on that thing?
How about ALPHABETICAL ORDER?
If I die in a terrorist attack, I hope that my loved ones don't squander their time on triviality like this.
pretty soon 9/11 families will be telling me when I can go to the bathroom...
Actually, I like this proposal a lot. I agree that adding ages and institutional affiliation would make the memorial more evocative. Though the "save the memorial" rhetoric is too much.
All props to Maya Lin who designed the most affecting memorial in the nation, but look at what this idea of using individual names has brought us. What happened to blank obelisks or guilded wreathes?
I would hate to be memorialized as an employee of [fill in the blank]
I'm glad Bloomberg put his foot down. Enough is enough already. New York is ready to move on already.
Add me to the list of people who would hate to have a "permanent" memorial group me with the company I happened to be working for at the time. These are people who died, not employees.