Place of Tribute Is Planned
By Etta Sanders

They came from Israel, Portugal, Germany, California and Illinois. They came to see the place they call Ground Zero. They had plenty of questions.

At a kiosk near the World Trade Center site's PATH station, tourists get maps and information about the site. Photos: Stephanie Keith

“What are they going to build here?” “Where is the wall with the names?” “Is there more to see?”

On a sunny Saturday last month, those questions, as well as requests for directions to Times Square and the Statute of Liberty, were answered by a young woman who sat in a small, blue information kiosk near the corner of Church and Vesey Streets. Tour buses lined the street and a steady stream of people came up from the nearby subway station that still said “World Trade Center.”

“They’re really not prepared when they come here,” said the woman in the booth, who declined to give her name, as she handed out maps and directed tourists to an exhibit on the rebuilding at the World Financial Center. “They expect to see a lot more. They want more of a memorial right now.”


With the completion of the memorial still more than four years away, the September 11th Families Association plans to open a Tribute Center to give visitors the story of the place and of the people who worked and died there.

Lee Ielpi, the association’s vice president, whose firefighter son died in the Sept. 11 attack, said he saw the need when he looked out at the tourists from the group’s offices above Century 21.

“They look at a hole in the ground,” he said. “There’s no connection to the site, nobody to explain where the towers stood, no connection to the souls that were lost.”

At a workshop last month, Ielpi and others from the association unveiled preliminary plans for the Tribute Center, which will be in a storefront at 120 Liberty Street, across the street from the trade center site. The 6,000-square-foot space, with two levels, will have an information desk, changing exhibits and possibly artifacts that focus on the story of the people rather than the buildings.

“We want to tell people what happened here from a first-person perspective,” said project manager Michael Kuo, whose father died in the attack.

To do that, the group plans to have victims’ family

Information about Sept. 11 is on a fence along Church Street. Photos: Stephanie Keith
members, rescue and recovery workers, and neighborhood residents give tours of the site, putting visitors face to face with people directly affected by the attack.

“We won’t be run-of-the-mill tour guides,” said Joan Krevlin, a Tribeca resident and a partner at BKSK Architects, the designers of the center.

The Families Association signed a lease on the Liberty Street space in December 2004 and hopes the center will open in early 2006. The group is raising money to qualify for a $3 million matching grant from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

The Tribute Center may also have a small gift shop, with educational materials about the site and the attack. But it will not sell the sort of souvenirs hawked by nearby street vendors. “This is not going to be a hat and t-shirt shop,” said Kuo.

The challenge, said Krevlin, “is to get across the story that it was a community that came to an end and not just buildings that fell.”

Eight million tourists come to Lower Manhattan annually, according to the Downtown Alliance. They arrive with a variety of expectations. In interviews last month, one woman said she thought the site would look bigger. Kendon Perry of Idaho thought just the opposite. “It’s a bigger area than I expected,” he said.

Keren Ofer, an Israeli engineer, was surprised there were not more mementos. “I thought I would see flowers,” she said.

Others said they tried to picture what it looked like on that day, from the images they watched on television. “As we were walking we imagined all the people running down this street and looking up and seeing people jump,” said Erin Bernall from California.

One visitor was not a tourist. Tony Mazzeo, a Park Row resident, has lived or worked downtown for more than 30 years. “I saw the towers go up and I saw them come down,” he said.

He had walked down this stretch of Church Street during the three and a half years since the Sept. 11 attack, but this was the first time he had peered through the fence onto the site.

“How do you convey that there was a community?” he said, looking at the crowds of tourists around him. “What do they think they’re going to see?”

Steven McCormack, from Los Angeles, said he had come to pay his respects and didn’t need to see anything. “It’s a just a big wound,” he said. “Just from the mere absence to the space, there’s a sadness.”