The slurry wall, once familiarly known as the Bathtub, is essentially a Gargantuan version of a suburban house's cement basement, complete with sump pump. It was built to keep the Hudson River from re-occupying the monstrous hole dug in Lower Manhattan's sludge to hold the Trade Center towers. Like many artifacts of its epoch, the Bathtub is impressive if unlovely -- though it may well be the least unlovely part of the Trade Center complex; the towers themselves were cheesy, unmitigated eyesores, like Holiday Inns in Brobdingnag, but the Bathtub has at least a certain brutalist straightforwardness.
Thus the Times:
"Now that the slurry wall has been laid bare and infused with meaning," said Stefan Pryor, the president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, "it's our obligation to preserve it and ensure that all who come to the site have the opportunity to view it and pay tribute at it."
Infused with meaning? Pay tribute? Sounds like we've confused this hunk of utilitarian cement with the original Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
The wonderful Philip Roth -- or rather, his character Carnovsky -- has some reflections on the more venerable and attractive of the two walls in The Counterlife:
"Standing singly at the Wall, some rapidly swaying and rhythmically bobbing as they recited their prayers, others motionless but for the lightning flutter of their mouths, were seventeen of the world's twelve million Jews, communing with the King of the Universe. To me it looked as though they were communing solely with the stones in whose crevices pigeons were roosting some twenty feet above their heads. I thought (as I am predisposed to think), If there is a God who plays a role in our world, I will eat every hat in this town. Nonetheless, I couldn't help but be gripped by the sight of this rock-worship, exemplifying as it did to me the most awesomely retarded aspect of the human mind. Rock is just right, I thought: what on earth could be less responsive? Even the cloud drifting by overhead. . . appeared less indifferent to our encompassed and uncertain existence. I think that I would have felt less detached from seventeen Jews who openly admitted that they were talking to rock than from these seventeen who imagined themselves telexing the Creator directly; had I known for sure it was rock and rock alone that they knew they were addressing, I might even have joined in."
Personally, I'm more sympathetic to the guys at the Wailing Wall than Carnovsky is; but I have no patience with all this dribble about the World Trade Center. Sending a message in a bottle to the hypothethical Melech ha-Olam seems like a very human response to the general rockiness of the world, but making the relics of the Trade Center into objects of veneration is to mourn all the wrong things. It isn't about the people who died there, who are turned into supporting cast by the cement-and-rebar worship of Pryor and his ilk. It's about something vague, cloudy, American, and institutional -- something that I know I loathe even though I'm not quite sure what it is, and neither are all the flag-wavers paying homage to it.
Those people at the Trade Center were New Yorkers who died for America's sins -- which is probably why, as a New Yorker, I find myself getting very annoyed any time an American from anywhere else in this broad land has the temerity to put on a long face and act sorry about what happened to David and Nelson, the twin Rockefeller totem poles. You Americans, go mourn the Pentagon, I feel like saying. Leave lower Manhattan and its dead to those of us who are still trying to live here, in spite of everything America has done over decades to make it impossible.
If it were up to me, I'd fill the Bathtub with sand and let whatever seeds blow in take root. And maybe carve all the names on a wall somewhere nearby. That would be something worth wailing about.