By Eric Zelinksi/ The Nittany News
14 years ago, America was forever changed as a nation by the events of 9/11. Port Authority Peter Perrone recalls that, at the time, he was a college student living in Queens. It didn’t matter, he says, where in New York any residents lived that day; everyone there knew the World Trade Center and people who worked there or lived in the immediate area. There was not a single New Yorker who was not affected by the events of that day on an intimate level.
But things have changed in the years since then; the intervening time, coupled with the creation of the memorial site on Ground Zero and the tourists who come to visit have helped to lessen the impact of those memories. While he says that the memorial site will always help New Yorkers keep their memories, the site has become, on many levels, a popular tourist attraction, frequented by families with children born after the events of that day—and, in many ways, it is those children who have lessened the impact of the memories. “They don’t realize,” he says, “that they’re standing on a cemetery,” noting that the energy of the memorial has changed over the years in response to the tourism, becoming less a stark reminder of what happened and more a place to pay respects and to remember privately.
Tourists do come to the memorial site to pay respects as well, though—it is not simply not another stop on the city tour for all of them. Emel Camargo, a temporary resident of the city who was sharing the monument with his family from Colombia, says that he believes the memorial site is something important for everyone to see. The magnitude of loss is something that many people—especially those who were not immediately connected to the World Trade Center and its employees—had to come to understand in the aftermath of the event. Emel says that he feels it is important for people to see the memorial site because they come to pay their respects to the names dedicated on site, adding that “every name has a story.”
Sharing Emel’s opinion of the monument’s importance are two tourists from London, both of whom say that you don’t have to be from New York, or even from America, to connect with the site. One of the tourists adds that he has returned to the monument for the second time in 3 years; the space has opened significantly since then, he says, adding to the natural feel of the area and allowing visitors to connect more readily with it. To them, the scale of the monument is a fitting tribute to the scale of the emotion attached to the site and to the unforgettable memories of watching the Towers fall that day, but much has changed in 14 years. The memorial site stands not just as a tribute to the lives lost that day, but as a symbol of change and adaptation. America has turned a somber reminder of a tragedy into a thing of beauty and respect, a symbol of our perseverance that attracts travelers the world over to pay their respects to people they never knew, uniting in memory and in the creation of a brighter future.
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