The Sphere

I went to New York with my sister and her daughter a few years ago. We were only there for a couple of days. We did all the tourist things - Statue of Liberty, Redline Tours, Times Square.

Of course we went to Ground Zero. It was very quiet there. My biggest thought was that as bad as 9/11 was, it could have been so much worse if the buildings hadn't gone straight down. The site was all sanitized by then and looked much like any construction site you can find in downtown LA on any given day. I didn't have any real emotional reaction to the site.

In Battery Park it was a different story however. We were walking back through the park after our trip to the Statue of Liberty, when we came upon this sculpture. It's a winding path that leads to it so you don't see the thing all at once. It was a huge, metal ball and I could see that there were large holes in it. I thought "how sad, vandals have destroyed this piece of art". When we got up to it I could see just how badly this sculpture was damaged.

There is a sign there telling that this sculpture once stood between the twin towers and was removed from the rubble of 9/11 and placed there in Battery Park as a memorial. I cried while I was reading the sign. Maybe as an artist, this touched me more than the empty hole where the buildings used to be. I could see what this sculpture had been and what had been done to it. I could understand the forces needed to create so much damage.

It was a very strange experience. A couple of years after this visit I saw a program on TV about this sculpture and it's strange and sad journey and the message of hope that it offers that although we may have been damaged by the events of 9/11 we're still here and we're still going about our daily lives.