Letter from Sam Pesin Re 9/11 Memorial in Liberty State Park

[DMCKEON]

Sam Pesin

75-135 Liberty Ave.
Jersey City, NJ 07306


March 8, 2008
Dear September 11th Family Members,

As the son of Morris Pesin, the “father” of Liberty State Park and a preschool teacher, I have tremendous empathy for the deep pain that you experience for the loss of your loved ones. I have real, heartfelt spiritual compassion for your suffering. The spirit of my father and my love for Liberty State Park, compels me to write to you. I ask that you please take the time to read this letter from my heart and consider my thoughts. I ask for your patience and respect as a fellow human being and American.

I'm writing to you on the first anniversary of The Friends of LSP’s announcing its well-founded lawsuit which The Friends felt it was forced to initiate, to protect Liberty State Park from the memorial’s negative view-obstructing impact. Park lovers feel that the “national shrine views” from the closest and busiest place in LSP to Ground Zero and lower Manhattan are a priceless state and national treasure to be protected and passed on to future generations. People had been able to “take in” this dramatic, spiritually-moving view that got more and more powerful and heart-stirring, the closer they got in their approach by foot, car or bus to the Hudson River, CRRNJ Terminal, and the Public Plaza.

That view, as many people have said for six years, was the best memorial to 9/11 victims, as park users and tourists saw the sacred vista of the entire skyline with the Twin Towers gone. People shouldn't have to walk up or around a 10 foot high by 200 foot long hill or walk through 200 foot long by 30 foot high walls to see those views. This view-blocking design in this location defeats the memorial’s purpose.

The design obstructs sacred, culturally-significant views of Ground Zero and lower Manhattan, and also blocks panoramic views of the NYC skyline, civilization’s signature urban skyline, up to the George Washington Bridge, and blocks the view of the river, on which thousands were evacuated on 9/11.

By the 1960’s, Jersey City’s shoreline was piled high with maritime and industrial debris, the remains of a bustling waterfront that was left to decay by the railroads and shipping companies. The pioneers of Liberty State Park, including my father, created a park with the purpose of cleaning up the waterfront wasteland, and of forever opening to the public, green open space and open skyline vistas, of Emma Lazarus’s “shining city of eternal hope”. The memorial would block awe-inspiring Terminal area views.

This memorial design in this location totally eliminates LSP’s only Public Plaza. This great, active Public Plaza was enjoyed in many ways by people of all ages, for instance by tourists approaching the Terminal ferry ticket office, by people taking wedding photos, by regular park users vista-watching on the flat Public Plaza (or in adjacent green field) and by the mostly senior citizen audience who came to the free Jersey City summer concerts where the music and the breathtaking views of the NYC skyline and the river allowed them to look across at Ground Zero and lower Manhattan, and to reflect with sadness but also with that eternal hope for the future.

It has been expressed that placing the Memorial in and by the path of boisterous, hurrying thousands, with the chatter and noise of tour and school groups, families, etc. on their way to and from the ferries to Lady Liberty /Ellis Island, and next to Terminal festivals (which would extend onto the Public Plaza as LSP’s 1978 Master Plan envisioned) is the wrong place for a solemn memorial for peaceful reflection.

The Public Plaza had been a public commons of this urban state park for the public to enjoy next to the historic landmark 1889 CRRNJ Terminal which is part of the “Historic Trilogy” of the Terminal (from which most Ellis Island immigrants traveled to their new homes), Ellis Island and Lady Liberty.

In the late 19th and early 20th century many of the forebears of those lost at Ground Zero arrived at Ellis Island seeking freedom and a chance for a new beginning; many then went to the Terminal for a journey westward on the Central Railroad of New Jersey Railroad. The memorial design casts aside and overwhelms the important American immigration story of The Historic Trilogy pathway for immigrants. The jury ignored its own criteria that the memorial design should be integrated with LSP’s history.

I also want to express here that the public was given no DEP public meeting or any official opportunity to express views about the memorial design for the Terminal Public Plaza after the jury chose the 6 finalist designs or after the Families Memorial Committee chose the “Empty Sky” walls and hill design.

I ask that you please come to the park and drive up the cobblestone Zapp Drive and look through the construction fence to see the impact of the hill on the NYC skyline and Hudson River, and please envision the 30 ft high by 200 ft long walls there. Those views with the hill and planned massive walls are a very different reality than the deceptive aerial, birds-eye perspective in the rendering by the architect, which the victims’ family committee saw and which is on a nearby construction sign. The architect’s rendering doesn’t even show that the river, used in the evacuation on 9/11 and part of the Terminal area special and important waterfront vista, would be totally blocked off by the hill and walls.

I respectfully urge you to please consider what I have written with the hope that victims’ families and park users can work together to find a solution for a memorial which shows reverence to the people who perished, and also doesn’t obstruct the sacred “national shrine” views or eliminate the Public Plaza.

I ask that you please read the James Ahearn column (included below this letter) from The Record, “A living memorial is best”. I hope you will please consider his Grove of Remembrance solution or relocating this memorial.

My mother Ethel Pesin, now 93, whom I live with, who also treasured those New York City views and LSP’s only Public Plaza, also asks that you consider this letter which expresses her feelings also. I’m the president of The Friends of LSP, but I wrote this letter only on behalf of my mother and myself.


Respectfully,

Sam Pesin, the son of Morris Pesin, the “father” of Liberty State Park

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The Record
Sunday, November 4, 2007
COLUMNIST
A living memorial is best
By JAMES AHEARN
SPECIAL TO THE RECORD

A fitting tribute to New Jerseyans who died on Sept. 11 is already in place, on a restored brownfield, and called the Grove of Remembrance.

THE CONSTRUCTION bids for the Sept. 11, 2001, memorial proposed for Liberty State Park have come in. The bids were expected to be $10 million or so. The low bid turned out to be $22 million. The high bid was $25 million.

The state Treasury Department is negotiating with the architect for revisions that would cut costs but preserve the plan. I submit that that would be wasted energy.

The plan is a grandiose, overblown architectural fantasy that would forever spoil the breathtaking view from the park of the harbor, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan.

I have an alternative memorial in mind. It would cost nothing, because it is already in place in the park, although few know it is there. It is smack where a memorial should be, well back from the water's edge but with a view of the site where the World Trade Center stood.

This installation, on 11 acres of a former brownfield, is called the Grove of Remembrance. It was built with a modest federal forestry grant of $143,000 and with $220,000 in cash and in-kind donations.

The grant paid for 691 mature trees, one for each New Jerseyan who died in Lower Manhattan on that terrible day. The grant also paid for mulch, soil and shrubs, and for a big bronze plaque engraved with the names of the dead.

The grove, a living memorial, is maintained free of cost to the state by volunteers and by Jersey City schoolchildren who grow flowers and plants in classroom conservatories and take them to the grove each spring for planting. The kids learn about gardening and the responsibilities of citizenship.

Every year, there is an Arbor Day contest, for which children write a poem or a short prose piece. The winners read their compositions aloud, in a ceremony in the grove, and plant a tree. It is homey and nice.

The first year this custom was observed was 2003, when then-Gov. James E. McGreevey planted the first tree in the grove, attended by relatives of the New Jersey Sept. 11 victims. Four days later, on April 25, Arbor Day, 300 volunteers planted, mulched and watered another 200 trees. The Grove of Remembrance was thus established.

Vanity

Our Jim had bigger plans, though. A garden was all well and good, but he wanted something monumental, a built structure that would commemorate his own leadership as well as the dead.

In December that year, he announced a national competition for a design for a memorial. Three hundred twenty entries were submitted. These were whittled to a half-dozen by a team of architectural and design professionals. Then a jury of a dozen New Jersey relatives of 9/11 victims picked the winner. It had been submitted by a Manhattan architect, Frederic Schwartz.

He called it "Empty Sky," because it would be open to sun and rain, morning and night. It would consist of two parallel, 30-foot-high concrete walls, faced in stainless steel, 16 feet apart. Each wall would be 200 feet long, the same length as each side of the World Trade Center towers. On the steel would be engraved the names of the 691 New Jersey dead, in random order.

The walls, open at the ends as well as the top, would be built atop a 10-foot-high earthen mound. They would focus the gaze of visitors toward the site where the towers stood, on the other side of the harbor. At night, bright lights atop the walls would shine straight up into the sky.

The installation would cover 1.6 acres, including much of the public, harborside plaza adjoining the historic Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal. The plaza, formerly used for concerts and other public gatherings, is now truncated, ending at a pile of dirt 30 feet high, surrounded by a fence. The pile is to be compressed into the planned 10-foot mound.

Funding source

What has yet to be established is where all the money for the memorial is to come from. The Port Authority is supposed to contribute $7 million and the state $6 million, although it is confronting a deficit of more than $3 billion. McGreevey had spoken vaguely of private donations, but no campaign has been mounted.

Jersey City officials have criticized the scale and location of the memorial, as has Sam Pesin, the indispensable, irrepressible president of Friends of Liberty State Park. He complains, justifiably, that state officials have convened no hearing on the plan since it was chosen. If they did, they would get an earful.

Governor Corzine has supported the plan, and I suppose that, if need be, he could just sit down and write a personal check for whatever was needed. But there is a better solution. It would be to give greater visibility and recognition to what's already there, the Grove of Remembrance. If in addition something more was deemed necessary, it should supplement the grove, not stand between it and the harbor, cutting off the view.

James Ahearn is a contributing editor and former managing editor of The Record.

Correction note on this column(which appears on the Friends of LSP's website): the memorial's hill and walls would obstruct views toward Ground Zero, Lower Manhattan, NYC views up to the George Washington Bridge from the closest and busiest place in LSP, and also block views of the Hudson River and river boat activity but it wouldn't block a view toward Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island).