Here's one person's comment from a Timeout New York article:
"These selfie-snapping tourists will be looking out at - indeed, from their lofty space they will be right next to - the ghosts and spirits and essences, the lingering screams, of those poor people who died at the adjacent Windows on the World Restaurant. They will be horizontally right across the way - mere feet away - from where those workers and guests perished, busboys and businessmen alike, innocents at that ill-fated early morning Windows on the World breakfast, not a single one who escaped, 1000 feet up, at the very top of the World Trade Center, trapped, no way out, no way up, no way down, the sheer prolonged hour-long anguish and agony of how they died...
All this will no doubt haunt and infuse the vicinity, the site, the atmosphere. All this will shriek and scream in the howling winds and tear-filled rains, all this will scar the ghostly clouds and float in the gloom of enveloping fog, all this will stain every blood red Jersey sunset, all this will remind us of the pulverized dust of their remains, forever filling the very air itself....
In respect, in their memory, to maintain our own dignity, please - let's not make this Observatory into a tourist mini-Disneyland.
This is forever not only a graveyard,
but a gruesome murder scene that can’t be erased or forgotten."
I understand that for some people, it will always be "too soon", or they have their reasons for not wanting to go down there- wounds that never seem to heal. But how long must the rest of us defer to that type of thinking? How long must the rest of us hold ourselves back, and are all of us who feel that going back up there is essential to our own healing somehow disrespectful? We have the memorial plaza and fountains for reflection, as well as the museum. But we can't wallow in collective grief forever, sooner or later we need to wipe away our tears and get on with the business of living. Surely the people we lost wouldn't want us to be sad forever.
Oh, here's the link to the article:
http://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/...04-08T21:26:41