I have been trying to finish with the NY trip posts, and get back to our regular lives...
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As I began to post about this moment of our trip, and looking for pictures (to show the BEFORE as well as the after - that I took), I found a photographers web site with a picture and a simple but I think eloquent message, so I am now posting his web link and then I cut and pasted the response I don't know if he will ever see (will he be notified of a response to a blog post he wrote over two years ago now???). I felt it was important... to remember. So for today that is all I will post and the rest of my life will just have to wait a while longer.
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Thank you for this post. I had the opportunity recently to go to NY (I used to live there 20 years ago, and hadn't been back since the tragic events of 9-11). I don't remember the Sphere as it originally stood - for peace - in the fountain in the middle of the World Trade Centers. I'm sure I have seen it, but, I was young and didn't understand the impact of what the artist originally intended. After finding it and feeling the significance of the battered Sphere in Battery Park, I went looking for pictures of it from 'before'... I found it very hard to find! I would type in the artists name or the name of the piece and all that would come up on the internet were picture after picture, post, after post, about the it now residing in Battery Park - temporarily. So, thank you for posting the picture (I think quite stunning) of it as it once stood at the WTC, and for your blog post about your feelings of it. I didn't personally loose anyone close to me on that day, but I lost countrymen/women and sat watching my news (before I went to bed on the eve of 10 Sept in Asia, where I lived at the time with my family on a military post, in a foreign country) and felt torn and broken by what I was seeing. Remembering that when I first moved to NY all those years ago, my friends took me to the City, R worked on Chambers street (I saw that street sign on the ground on the news). They took me up to the top of the Towers to the observation deck... I had personally been in one of those two buildings... my feet had stood where so many were now dying... I felt the attack very personally. My heart ached and I cried for those in peril, as I watched helplessly, waiting for whast it would mean in my life - being locked down on base unable to go ANYWHERE for days. Our children's schools closed for several days until we could figure out the state of the World and how it would personally impact our lives living abroad. What was our 'threat level'? So, again, thank you for posting your thoughts, and your picture. I hope others will take a moment to remember as well...
Below is part of an Essay written about the Sphere.
Endurance, the Sphere and Memories of 9/11 By Eudora Min
"September 11 hit everyone by surprise, and no one was prepared to forget the World Trade Center. After the destruction, the Sphere by Fritz Koenig stood strong, reminding us all of lost lives.Before September 11, 2001, the Sphere stood in the center of the World Trade Center Plaza, as a monument to world peace. After the attack, it was recovered, with holes and dents, and inside it was another story—a Bible, an airline seat and even papers from an office. People found it significant that the statue was able to endure after such a dramatic attack. The Sphere currently resides in Battery Park, alongside an eternal flame, as a memorial to those lost in September 11.The 25-foot statue is hard to miss when you walk in Battery Park. Its once smooth exterior is almost unrecognizable—the Sphere now resembles a broken-down soccer ball. While in old pictures it is proud and shiny, the statue is now dull, perfectly symbolizing the state of the country after September 11. ...
"September 11 hit everyone by surprise, and no one was prepared to forget the World Trade Center. After the destruction, the Sphere by Fritz Koenig stood strong, reminding us all of lost lives.Before September 11, 2001, the Sphere stood in the center of the World Trade Center Plaza, as a monument to world peace. After the attack, it was recovered, with holes and dents, and inside it was another story—a Bible, an airline seat and even papers from an office. People found it significant that the statue was able to endure after such a dramatic attack. The Sphere currently resides in Battery Park, alongside an eternal flame, as a memorial to those lost in September 11.The 25-foot statue is hard to miss when you walk in Battery Park. Its once smooth exterior is almost unrecognizable—the Sphere now resembles a broken-down soccer ball. While in old pictures it is proud and shiny, the statue is now dull, perfectly symbolizing the state of the country after September 11. ...
The Sphere has gone through a major transformation from its first installment in 1971. It was created by the German sculptor Fritz Koenig and was issued to pay tribute to peace through the World Trade Center. Koenig was born in 1924 in Germany and is famous for his metal geometric-form sculptures. Koenig actually created memorials for Nazi concentration camps in Austria and various others in Israel, but he did not want the Sphere to become another memorial for the lost ones. However, after seeing the new worn-down beauty of the Sphere, he commented that it “now has a different beauty, one I could never imagine. It has its own life—different from the one I gave to it.”
With the constant flow of people in and out of Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty ferries and the various acrobats and animated Statues of Liberty, it seems as though the Sphere has become just another tourist attraction for New York City. Battery Park is the perfect place for a tourist attraction, and the placement of the Sphere in that park could not be more appropriate. Along with three other significant memorials in lower Manhattan—one at a firehouse adjacent to ground zero, one at the civil courts building and one across the river at Exchange Place—the Sphere brings together the tourists and the natives, the past and the present."
