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© St. Petersburg Times, published October 24, 2001
City officials are faced with an awkward question: what to do with the tourists who want to see the most famous sight in New York?
It is awkward because no one wants to think of the World Trade Center ruins as a tourist attraction. The site is still a crime scene under investigation, and no one wants to seem ghoulish. There are still human remains there, and no one wants to desecrate the site.
But people still want to go there. They want to visit for the same historic reasons they want to visit the battlefields of Normandy or the crematoriums of Nazi Germany. And while the notion of turning it into a tourist attraction might sound offensive, in fact the place has already become one.
The police barricades around the site have become the most exclusive velvet rope in town. On the outside are tourists without connections, whose first question in New York is now, "How can I see it?" They've been snapping photographs of the south tower's rubble from two blocks away.
Inside the barricades are other tourists, the VITs ranging from Don King to French President Jacques Chirac. On Sunday, Oprah Winfrey got a personal tour from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, joining Larry King on a list of prominent journalists who visited. Prominence alone was enough to admit Muhammad Ali. Lance Armstrong went on a mayoral helicopter tour with former President Bill Clinton.
Power is the surest ticket for a visit, to gauge from the many politicians who have visited, including a 100-member group from Congress. Money can also make you a VIT, as a Saudi prince demonstrated with a $10-million check (the one indignantly returned by Giuliani).
At some dinner parties in New York and Washington, "Have you been down there?" has become the question most likely to inspire one-upmanship. The more competitive visitors will duel over who got closer and who breathed worse air. Most of those who have visited try not to sound too proud of their feat. But they cannot resist telling the uninitiated what they saw and felt, because the devastation is too large to be captured on TV or in photographs.
Giuliani says he wants the VITs to see the destruction first hand so that they're inspired to use their influence to help the city. By that logic, it makes sense to let the masses get a look, too, because they're potential donors, too. In fact, they could offer direct support by paying fees dedicated to the victims' families and to the recovery effort and memorial.
It's not safe, of course, for tourists to wander around a smoking pile of debris. It's possible for some groups to go there on escorted visits, but arrangements would be tricky, and the numbers would have to be limited. It's not a place where hordes of tour buses belong.
But tourists wouldn't be in anyone's way if they were inside one of the buildings overlooking the site. There's been preliminary talk among city officials of allowing some kind of observatory to be established next to the ruins. Doing it tastefully would be a challenge, but curators have managed to do so at other disaster sites.
Providing an observatory would do more than satisfy people's curiosity. It would give them an outlet for emotions they've been expressing at informal shrines all over New York.
"A lot of groups from around the world want to come here and pay their respects," said Cristyne L. Nicholas, president of NYC & Company. "We've tried to advise them to visit firehouses and places around the city, but some of them won't come unless they can visit the World Trade Center." They want to see history with their own eyes, just like Oprah Winfrey and the other VITs.