The Memorials We Deserve

Many people, conservative columnist Michelle Malkin and Rep. Tom Tancredo prominent among them, objected to the “Crescent of Embrace,” seeing it as a sign of capitulation to the enemy. Eager to avoid controversy, the National Park Service and the architects went back to the drawing board and hastily rejiggered the plan, changing its title and adding more trees so as to turn the “crescent” into a “bowl.” Critics of the original design were mostly mollified and the long march toward construction continued.

The crescent flare-up took on the aspect of a skirmish in the culture war, but the process of planning that produced the sadly anti-heroic Flight 93 National Memorial is a more complicated story than a simple conflict between left and right, between conservatives and multi culturalists. Indeed, it is a depressing tale which suggests that, no matter how noble the deed we set out to commemorate, in modern America we are doomed to get unmonumental memorials.

As it happens, although the Flight 93 National Memorial is still in the fundraising stage and won’t break ground for some time, there is already a memorial next to the Flight 93 crash site. Shanksville, population 245, was transformed on September 11. The tiny town in rural Somerset County became famous when the 40 passengers and crew on Flight 93 fought back against the 4 terrorist hijackers. The plane crashed into an empty field situated between a handful of modest residences and an old strip-mining operation. Within hours, Shanksville was overrun by police, emergency responders, the FBI, the National Transportation Safety Board, and other officials and members of the media. The townspeople and nearby residents immediately went into motion providing for these hundreds of workers, bringing them food and welcoming them into their homes for the duration of the investigation and clean-up, which took several weeks.

Towards the end of September, one of the residents of Shanksville set up a small memorial for Flight 93 in her front yard. She woke one morning to find a bouquet of flowers next to it, with a card that read, “Thanks for saving our lives–The Capitol employees.” It was the first of a stream of tributes that would be left in Shanksville.

No one seems to have expected the visitors, but they started coming, by the hundreds, to pay their respects at the crash site. On November 1, 2001, the county established a temporary memorial on a small bluff overlooking the crash site. It was starkly simple: a 60-foot chain-link fence, two poles flying the American and Pennsylvania flags, and a small placard with the names of the dead. After that first winter, the trickle of visitors turned into a large and steady stream. Since then, roughly 130,000 visitors have made their way to Shanksville each year; in 2006, the number grew to 170,000.

The people coming to Shanksville have changed the temporary memorial; visitors have adopted the custom of leaving things behind. The fence is covered with tiny tributes, everything from firemen’s helmets to baseball caps to crucifixes to prayer cards. Near ground-level it is not uncommon to see collections of Matchbox cars and other toys left by children. There is a 15-foot cross by the flagpoles now, an array of benches bearing the names of the dead, and a set of 40 small wooden “Freedom Angels.” The county administers the temporary memorial, removing and storing mementos when they become weather-beaten and keeping a catalogue of every item that has been left behind.

But it is the townspeople who have volunteered to care for the temporary memorial itself. In the weeks after it was first erected, Shanksville resident Donna Glessner noticed people congregating at the temporary memorial. In January 2002, she stood up in church on a Sunday morning and said that she was going to start a group to take care of the memorial and its visitors. Initially, 17 people volunteered to help her. They called themselves the Flight 93 Ambassadors. The group numbers almost 50 now, and they watch over the memorial during daylight hours, 365 days a year. They shovel snow and put down salt in the winter, they bring jugs of cold water to drink in the summer, and they answer questions from visitors using a short, no-nonsense presentation of the events of that dark day.

As much as anything else, the ambassadors serve as an honor guard. As one of them told me nearly four years ago, “There are times when I come here and I’m the only one. And I just stand there and look out over the field and think about them. . . . I guess if that was my family member that had died, I would want somebody to care enough to be here, to watch over them.”

As is its wont, the federal government set out to improve this small piece of perfection. In 2002, Rep. John Murtha and Sen. Arlen Specter assembled the Flight 93 National Memorial Act, calling on the National Park Service to establish a permanent, national memorial in Shanksville. It passed both houses handily and was signed by President Bush on September 24, 2002. The sausage-making then began in earnest.

The act established a governing body called the Flight 93 Advisory Commission, which was charged with collaborating with three other organizations–the National Park Service, the Families of Flight 93 (a non-profit group), and the Flight 93 Memorial Task Force (a collection of some 80 people, mostly from the Somerset County area). They were given three years to submit a report to the secretary of the interior recommending a design and plan for a permanent memorial. The advisory commission was composed of 15 members, ranging from Flight 93 family members to locals such as Donna Glessner and Pamela Tokar-Ickes, the commissioner of Somerset County, to Daniel Sullivan, the president and CEO of FedEx Ground, to Brent Glass, the director of the National Museum of American History. The commission was to be staffed and supported by the National Park Service.

The first thing the commission did was create a flowchart to help them begin the process of crafting a mission statement, which, when completed, ran three pages long. Its preamble stated, “A common field one day. A field of honor forever.”

The mission statement identified seven core goals: honoring the passengers and crew; revering the impact site as their final resting place; commemorating 9/11; celebrating the lives of the passengers and crew; expressing appreciation for their sacrifice; educating visitors; and offering “a place of comfort, hope, and inspiration.” Coming up with this list took, by the commission’s own account, “several months of workshops, an online forum,” and other consensus-building vehicles.

Next, in December 2003, the Park Service filed in the Federal Register a document known in bureaucratese as a Notice of Intent to Prepare a General Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement. This notice was followed by the Flight 93 Advisory Commission’s recommendation to the secretary of the interior that the boundaries for the new memorial be set to include some 2,200 acres surrounding the crash site. With these two bureaucratic boxes checked, the commission announced a design competition for the memorial, which opened on September 11, 2004.

One thousand and eleven entries were received by the close of the competition on January 11, 2005. In addition to the mission statement, designers were given three “objectives” from the commission: (1) “Honor the heroes of Flight 93,” (2) “Contribute to the dialogue of what a national memorial should be,” and (3) “Conceive a message that will reflect on the event that occurred on September 11, 2001, and be timeless in its power and conviction.”

While the mission statement required months to craft, an independent jury “comprised of design professionals, family members, and local and national leaders” whittled the field of monument designs down from 1,011 to 5 in just 24 days. The 5 finalists were invited to further refine and expand their proposals, which were then resubmitted in June 2006.

Clearly, the jury knew what it wanted because the finalists shared remarkably similar sensibilities. The design “Disturbed Harmony” was little more than a knee-high, granite “Bravery Wall,” running through the field leading to the crash site. “(F)Light” proposed a covered walkway tracing the final few seconds of Flight 93’s trajectory. “Memory Trail” was another planned walkway, this time culminating in a visitor’s center. The design of finalist “Fields, Forests, Fences” rivaled the film Snakes on a Plane in the literalism of its title.

Seen in this company, “Crescent of Embrace” may well have been the best choice. The commission announced on September 7, 2005, that they had chosen the design from Paul Murdoch Architects and Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects. Stretching out over 1,300 acres, the memorial begins with a tall “Tower of Voices” (which houses 40 wind chimes) by the entrance. Visitors drive past it and down to the parking area near the Crescent (later reconfigured as the Bowl)–a giant circle defined by 40 groves of trees, each of which contains 40 red and sugar maples. Visitors walk through the bowl, toward the crash site, dubbed “Sacred Ground.” Here is the proposal’s description:

Part of the Bowl is designated “Wetlands”: “The area will be its own kind of healing landscape, as it will be a habitat full of life. . . . Here visitors will be most aware of continuously connected living systems as the circular path literally bridges the hydrology of the Bowl.”

The architects proclaimed that their plan was for a “living memorial” that “offers the visitor space for reflection, learning, social interaction, and healing.” An 8,000-square-foot visitors’ center (the temple of Lincoln Memorial is only 9,228 square feet) is also part of the scheme. The current temporary memorial is not. It will be demolished when the new memorial is erected, its former site marked only by the retention of a few benches where it once stood. The new memorial is projected to cost $44.7 million.

After choosing the Murdoch/Nelson Byrd Woltz design, the Flight 93 Advisory Commission set about justifying the project, compiling a 215-page draft of their General Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement. The conceit of the report was that the commission was evaluating two options: leaving the temporary memorial as is, or building the new memorial. It is no scandal that the commission’s report concluded that building the new memorial was preferred. But the justifications they used were revealing.

The costs of the two alternatives differed enormously, of course. The as-is option did not mean literally leaving the temporary memorial alone. It would have allocated $450,000 for building a small visitor’s center, more parking, and improved access roads. It also would have spent $8 million to formally acquire the 657 acres of land immediately around the crash site (the other 1,605 acres would have been brokered through easements with owners). Since it would have been federalized, the National Park Service would have taken over stewardship from the county and spent $750,000 per year to operate the site.

The proposed new memorial was more expensive. In addition to the $44.7 million construction costs, land acquisition costs were estimated at $10 million and annual operating costs at $1 million.

After detailing these costs, the commission ran through a battery of indexes, gauging the effects of the two alternatives on things such as vegetation and wildlife, public health and safety, visitation to the memorial, and the local economy. These last two categories were of particular interest, since they seemed to be the only two in which the alternatives varied significantly in their impact.

Observing the pattern of visitors to the temporary memorial, the commission estimated that by 2014, the number of visitors would dwindle to just 87,000 annually. By contrast, they projected that the new memorial would raise visitation to a peak of 400,000 people in 2011, before settling at 230,000 yearly thereafter.

Where did these numbers spring from? The commission hired a Penn State economist to create a visitation projection. As a model, two historic sites in Pennsylvania were chosen–the Allegheny Portage Railroad, which underwent a major rehabilitation in 1983, and the Johns town Flood National Memorial, which was renovated in 1989. The analysis compared post-renovation visitor numbers from those two sites with pre-renovation numbers, averaged them, and then applied that factor to the numbers of visitors already recorded at the Flight 93 temporary memorial.

Aside from the fact that both sites are in Pennsylvania and under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, it is difficult to think of any similarity between the Flight 93 memorial and the Allegheny Portage Railroad or, for that matter, the Johnstown Flood Memorial. But however imperfect this model, it at least aspired to social science. The prediction that the temporary memorial’s attendance would drop to 87,000 a year seems to have been based on intuition.

With these academic projections in hand, the commission fed the presumed attendance figures into a computer model (the Impact Analysis for Planning system). The results were eye-popping: The computer predicted that within five years of beginning construction on the new memorial, an additional $90 million would be pumped into the local economy and 1,134 jobs would be created. The as-is alternative, the computer suggested, would add only $29 million of economic value and create only 817 jobs in the first 8 years. In the long run, the numbers looked even more stark:

At the end of this bridge of economic assumptions, the commission decreed that “because of the anticipated low economic benefits that would result,” the impact of leaving the temporary memorial as is would be “major.” Such is the logic of bureaucracy.

The Department of the Interior was satisfied by the arguments of the commission. The planning for the permanent memorial proceeds apace; the Flight 93 National Memorial Capital Campaign has been launched. It needs to raise $30 million before ground can be broken, and, as a practical matter, there seems to be no way to change course now.

At some point in the next few years, the National Park Service will give us its version of the Flight 93 Memorial. It won’t have any of the sentimentality of left-behind crosses or rosaries, motorcycle jackets or matchbox cars. Neither will it have any elements of the heroic or the classical–no obelisks or domes or statuary. Instead it will, as the NPS Flight 93 Memorial newsletter soothingly explains, offer the visitor “space for reflection, learning, social interaction, and healing.” Not to mention wind chimes. And a spacious visitors’ center, too.

To those who prefer their monuments to be monumental, this may come as something of a disappointment, if not an outright betrayal. Even at this late date, seemingly ordinary citizens can perform extraordinary feats, as Flight 93’s heroic epic reminds us. The problem isn’t that we’ve run out of heroes in America. We just don’t know how to honor them anymore.

Jonathan V. Last is online editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.