N.Y. Site Should Hold Memory of Nation’s Loss

America is haphazard about its history. It took nearly a decade before any concrete steps were taken to memorialize the carnage at Pearl Harbor. It took 40 years to finish the Washington Monument. Congress didn’t declare Memorial Day a national holiday until 1888, 22 years after Civil War veterans began placing flowers on the graves of the fallen every May 30. American life always hurtles forward, often so fast that it tramples the past.

That danger is resurfacing in the debate over what to do with the site of the World Trade Center. Decisions that will shape how future generations see and remember the attacks that destroyed the twin towers last Sept. 11 are taking place haphazardly, with local political and economic interests threatening to eclipse the nation’s stake in recording that terrible day.

For now, the decisions on how--and what--to rebuild on the site are primarily in the hands of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., formed by New York state and city officials to redevelop the area. (The site’s owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, also has a say.) The LMDC’s initial proposals didn’t inspire much confidence: In July it released half a dozen blueprints that all leaned too heavily toward putting office buildings over the shattered ground.

After a volley of criticism, the LMDC now says it will pick five teams to develop new plans by Sept. 30. And it’s planning a separate architectural competition next year to design a memorial to the victims.

In Washington, there’s been much too casual an assumption that this group, even with local elected officials, should make the final decisions on how to use the site. That deference is misplaced. There is a national interest in ensuring that the tragedy is memorialized in the right way, and a national lever to enforce that interest: New York has already received billions in federal dollars for the cleanup and is seeking millions more for the memorial.

At the moment, New Yorkers in Congress want it both ways: Rep. Jerrold Nadler and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, both Democrats, are finishing a bill that would have the federal government match the funds raised locally to construct a memorial. When the memorial is completed, the National Park Service would assume responsibility for running it.

That’s all reasonable enough. But the catch is this: The bill insists that the public, through the federal government, shouldn’t have any say in designing or planning the memorial; it should just foot half the bill for whatever the LMDC produces. Congress should think twice about that deal.

It’s true that Washington signed a no-strings check to build the memorial at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing. In 1997, Congress passed and President Clinton signed legislation committing Washington to pay half the cost of the memorial designed by a local commission, with no input from the federal (or local) government. But that was a commission with no other responsibility except building the memorial.

The group overseeing the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site--mostly local business leaders--is inherently more conflicted. Its charge is to redevelop the area, which means that, even with the best intentions, it must consider commercial as well as historical interests. Compounding the problem, the Port Authority initially demanded that the redesign include as much office space as in the original towers: 11 million square feet.

Amid the uproar against the original proposals, the Port Authority is signaling a retreat from that demand. The pressure to scale back the commercial presence is likely to increase since former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s argument in a Time magazine essay last week that the entire 16-acre site should be set aside as a memorial, with no commercial activity.

As influential as Giuliani is, his won’t be the final word. Mitchell Moss, director of New York University’s Taub Urban Research Center, notes that many people in the surrounding neighborhoods want at least some commercial and retail presence to keep those communities alive. That’s reasonable, to a point.

But this site now belongs not just to the city or the landowners or the neighbors or even the victims’ families; it belongs to the nation. It’s no more appropriate to let New York officials make these decisions alone than it would have been to let the Gettysburg Chamber of Commerce decide what to do with the Civil War battlefield.

In fact, Gettysburg may be the most relevant model for protecting the national interest at the site. In the 1890s, the federal government went to the Supreme Court to stop a private company that wanted to build trolley tracks over a part of the Gettysburg battlefield it owned so it could operate a profit-making tour. In its brief to the high court, the government wrote: “The ground whereon great conflicts have taken place, especially those where great interests or principles were at stake, becomes at once of so much public interest that its preservation is essentially a matter of public concern.”

As Civil War historian James McPherson noted in a recent essay, the Supreme Court agreed--and today, the battlefield, like the nearby cemetery where Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, has been preserved in the national park system.

Washington should be prepared to act just as forcefully again. If the LMDC produces a plan that gives a memorial its due, then fine. But the federal government should intervene if it appears that parochial commercial considerations are overshadowing the national stake in building a lasting monument to the losses of Sept. 11.

The physical monument will be only one part of how we remember that day. Already, communities are establishing their own memorials, with ceremonies this week commemorating the loss. This is the way history breathes, in the organic life of families and neighborhoods. But public decisions will guide these private reflections.

Above all, the signal sent at the World Trade Center site will reverberate for years. Building new office towers there would show a commitment to persevere, but also an eagerness to forget. More powerful would be an empty sky where the towers used to stand, anchored by a memorial of scale to the tragedy. That is how this generation can show all generations to come it understands that what was lost on Sept. 11 can never be replaced.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site: www.latimes.com/brownstein.