The Terrorists Have Won
I was reading in the latest Courant that they're thinking about putting a chain-link fence around the 9-11 memorial in the Public Garden.
Why?
A picture's worth a thousand words:
These are skateboarders and their groupies (yes, they have groupies!) using Boston's understated 9-11 memorial, which is etched with the names of 205 victims of the terrorist attack from New England, for their personal skate park.
Greg Peverill-Conti, the photographer who surreptitiously snapped this shot (featured in the Courant article) ventured online "maybe I'm just getting old but this doesn't seem cool."
I would go so far as to say it's downright cold.
I'm aware that skateboarders, especially urban skateboarders, have an anti-authority streak. And skateboarding certainly fulfills all of the requisites of teenage behavior tailor-made to drive adults crazy. It's surprisingly noisy and destructive, pointlessly but pointedly antisocial, seemingly designed to put adult nerves on edge.
In other words, it has "adolescent boy" written all over it: the mindless mastery of a useless task with a jackass-inspired element of "danger".
And the pointlessness of it is precisely the point of it. It should be the last phase of the ambling pointlessness of child's play, but shockingly often these days you see actual adults engaging in it. Unfortunately pointlessness becomes fecklessness in adulthood (and, no disrespect, but anyone who has a wife and two kids and dies in a skateboarding mishap really is a jack-ass.)
You have to admit, there seems to be a direct correlation between skateboarders' enjoyment in their sport and the annoyance it produces in others. It would be the punk music of street sports, but it falls a little short. It's more like grunge with its attempts to insinuate political or social critique into the activity. "Repression" and "censorship" are words often heard from skateboarders when the topic of the use of urban space for what is an often destructive pastime comes up.
Skateboarding has been analyzed out the ying-yang because it annoys people. Instead of just accepting that the behavior is ipso facto annoying and so naturally annoys, some have read a lot more into it:
Yadda yadda yadda. Never mind that skateboarding is a multi-billion dollar business these days. Boys will be boys, right? You can't stop it with "socio-spatial censorship". I would love to see the stalled Charles River Skate Park completed. And I'm all for helipops in the mall parking lot. I can even accept the use of, say, the Copley fountain (which actually seems to have been designed as the perfect mini-skate park), or even the steps of the Copley library, where skate punks (some of whom, stripped down to their boardshorts, are redonkulously hot) provide lunchtime entertainment for summer crowds. But I don't think it's unreasonable, much less repressive, to draw a line at a memorial to an unprecedented national tragedy still fresh in the memories of many whose lives were touched by it.The disproportionate alarm caused by skateboarding in comparison to surfing has to do with the space in which it is practiced. Limited to water, surfing is always kept at bay. Because surfing is relegated to the beach and the water, which ultimately are spaces of leisure, surfing poses no threat to the limits of prescribed spatial use. Skateboarding, on the other hand, brings itself onto the land, and thus positions itself within the complex delineations of public and private space. Because the functionality of suburban spaces is premised on the clear definition of public and private space, skateboarding is seen as an irritant. By reconceptualizing the concrete as water, skateboarders threw sand into the lubricant necessary for the city's and the suburbs' smooth operation.
Marxist spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre asserts that “private space is distinct from, but always connected with, public space” and “in the best of circumstances, the outside space of the community is dominated, while the indoor space of family life is appropriated.”Skateboarding may be said to use the already confused delimitation between public and private to its own advantage. It appropriates so-called public spaces that are in reality increasingly dominated by privatization. For those who are invested in—and profit from—the rigidly administered uses of space such as the strip mall, skateboarding is indeed a nuisance. It both creates and functions as “noise” in its interference in commerce. In their alternate use of the strip mall, for instance, a space which is ambiguously both open to the public and designed with a single, non-civic purpose in mind, skateboarders become an unwanted presence precisely for their refusal to take part in consumption, and for obfuscating the architecturally articulated boundaries of permissible and prohibited use.
In fact I think you'd have to be a pretty big dick to deface it with your skateboard.
"They're just looking for a good spot to practice their Ollies and Nollie Cabs" doesn't really cut it either. If these were nine year-olds, maybe. But as you can see from the photo, they're adults, for all intents and purposes, and almost certainly can read. You get to a certain age and thoughtlessness is no longer an excuse for disregarding the thoughtfulness of others, much less destroying the tiny space carved out in a city full of guardrails and jersey barriers for that thoughtfulness to grow.
And to all you Marxist skateboarders out there: whatever you think of the abuse of the memory of that terrible moment in time, the memorial is apolitical, irreligious, and bears no corporate or national seal. It is a simple and heartfelt human gesture of remembrance with the names of 205 victims of the 9-11 attack on it and a simple in memoriam:
The people of Massachusetts
will always remember our families:
our husbands, wives, sons, daughters,
mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers,
granparents, grandchildren,
companions, friends,
and neighbors.
The location of the memorial was carefully and conscientiously chosen, according to Mass. 9-11 Fund Director Linda Plazonja, because it ensured "reverence of space".
It is America's first public botanic garden and a National Historic Landmark, with this being the first redesigned garden area in the Public Garden in recent years. The site is central to the city, historic, quiet, and is guaranteed to be maintained throughout time, which gave the Fund confidence in the ongoing dignity of the site.On the Voices of September 11 website Plazonja elaborated further on whether she felt the memorial would be a sacred place, stressing that it was chosen because the BPG is treated "with dignity and respect", adding:
"because of the City’s compassion for the families, this memorial is as close as Boston comes to a public display of affection. While Bostonians are typically as guarded about jubilation as they are about sheer misery, this memorial is as close as we come to wearing our hearts on our sleeves."Not only has the memorial been defaced by the activity of these few, but the sense of a secular sacred space that it represents is endangered. This is not a case of striking back at The Man. This is not a public space that has been, like so many in recent memory, privatized. It has been appropriated for a particular purpose, though — one that did not seem particularly controversial: remembering the innocent victims of a shared tragedy. Respect for that purpose is part of the challenge of maintaining public space.
A project participant noted that there may be criticism at either extreme for building in the garden or for not doing something monumental enough, but that this memorial is not designed like a monument. It is a quiet place integrated into the landscape, featuring 198 names, vernacular language like "mother" and "brother".
If the really appalling lack of decency in this case is truly disheartening, the response on the part of the City of Boston is not much better. Building a chain link fence around the memorial, one that, according to the Courant "would be installed between the memorial and nearby shrubs, following the contour of the arc, [with] posts ... high enough and close enough to the granite to disrupt a skateboarder riding the rim."
I suppose you have to look at it as a fix for an original design flaw. That no one anticipated that a tiny, dickish crew of skateboarders out to impress their hoes would appropriate a memorial to 205 innocent people who lost their lives in a still inconceivable conflagration merely a decade ago — I guess we should have thought of that, eh? I mean: so obvious. By now we should expect utter disregard of human feeling from each other, right?
And so we build another wall. Yeah, the terrorists have won.
Categories: Boston, That's So Boston!, A Day in the Life
I doubt that there's any anti-establishment motive behind this. It was probably just sitting there with it's perfect smooth top part just "begging" to be slid on.
The way Vancouver solved it's skateboard problem was to make a really nice skateboard park under a viaduct and now you don't see them all over town doing it to buildings and such.
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As I said, Clark: If they were nine year-olds the awe-shucks, boys'll be boys approach would be fine. They're not children. I don't think we have to make excuses for them. They can read. It's callous.
As for the skate park, we are trying to get one built here (there is a link to the Charles River Skate Park in the post). But this particular act of vandalism -- I don't know that it would deter that type of skateboarder. It seems like there may be an additional thrill in damaging something meaningful to others in there.
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It seems unfair to call it vandalism. They aren't carving their initials into it or anything, they're just skateboarding on it. It's outside, in the elements, and is inevitably going to wear down over time. And the additional wearing that skateboarding is limited to the edges, which doesn't effect the functionality of the memorial itself to memorialize; you can still read the names and such.
And more generally, it's not like we can reasonably expect people to bow their heads and mourn every time they go near it. It's in a park, people are going to be playful on it, whether that means eating lunch or skateboarding or whatever. Saying they ought to know better is begging the question.
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Vandalism is the willful of wanton destruction of often shared property. It is precisely the right word for this.
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There was a time when a photo like that would have brought a crew in town to BEAT THE LIVING PISS OUT OF THEM.
Sadly, those people don't live in Boston any more.
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"...there seems to be a direct correlation between skateboarders' enjoyment in their sport and the annoyance it produces in others." That's not true at all. Most skateboarders are decent people. These idiots have just chosen to be dicks.
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Agreed.
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These kids are skating this because it is just there in their/our park. It is not vandalism or callous-driven.
It is smooth and an enjoyable piece of masonry to skate - this is why skaters skate it... not because of some bizarre agenda you are assuming on their behalf.
On a different note, how many more memorials or reminders or 911 do we need? Definitely not one in Boston Common that is for sure....
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The "bizarre agenda" of arrested development, you mean? Because that's what I'd attribute it to.
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Hmm...to take this a bit laterally (I agree, these particular skatekids are being little twats, to get that out of the way...what's actually needed is for someone about their age to go up to them and say "yo, dude, my mom's on that list....you mind?!" Even if not true, they're not going to know that and it might make 'em pause, at least...)
But I digress - the sideways point is that this, like the VAST majority of present-day monuments and supposed public art, is a crap piece of design that a.) fails to inspire the thoughtful mood it should, and, b.) doesn't even take the most basic anti-skateboard measures (those funky little inset jagged bronze edges used to deter people sitting on railings, if set all around the outer edge, would do nicely and look fine...) into account, which is just plain stupid given the form they chose. Heck, raised blocks at each end of the thing (so there's no way to skate off w/o crashing) would do the trick. I'm sitting on an advisory committee for a public institution's urban garden right now, and those issues were among the FIRST to come up (and, yes, I think we're going to get the occasional skater on it, but not on the bits that matter/aren't foot-traffic paving).
Admittedly, great design doesn't always guarantee reverence, esp. from skaterkids - I have a small shattered chunk of travertine from the outdoor steps of Louis Kahn's Kimbell Museum in Ft. Worth - skateboards weren't a cultural factor back when Kahn designed the place, which is gorgeous/iconic/etc...then again, building exterior landscape steps out of 7/8" thick porous travertine was a little stupid/cheap/whatever, too...and all the little "no skateboarding" signs in the world aren't going to stop the damage. Still, if the monument had more presence and weren't so utterly banal, maybe we'd see some more reverence...
Beyond that: embedded caltrops!
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I agree that it is not the most inspired memorial or space, although at least it's not made of polished black granite. I do think it's, designwise, intentionally "banal" -- in order to get it into the Public Gardens in the first place they had to keep it from turning into something political. And you have to admit it is impressively apolitical.
But you are right that they utterly failed Skateboard-Deterrent 101, though pointing it out at this point feels a little like "blaming the victim" to me.
Hopefully sense will prevail and they will go with your caltrops.
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Well, I'm certainly not intending to blame the genuine victims here (nor am I meanin' to get stroppy on you!) I think they'd all rather just be alive than have crap inoffensive (there's the rub!) memorials-by-inexpert-committee all over the place.
This just feeds into a lot of my running snarks on Boston's inoffensive-Disneyfication in general and its intersection with the utterly parlous state of public art and memorials generally...a perfect drizzle?
The committees who perpetrated that big lump of permanent banality (one proposing, one accepting, and heaven knows how many others signing off after nitpicking along the way...at least the Public Garden's not as bad [yet] as the National Mall...inexpert hood ornaments for every national catastrophe...) did the people they sought to memorialize a gross disservice along the lines of the well-meaning morons who name highway overpasses or random street intersections (excuse me, 'squares') after fallen combat soldiers. Gee. Thanks.
I get that the vast majority of public memorials are going to be pedestrian, but they could at least have some dignity and presence (and, yeah, some little wheelbenders) - something to suggest real thought and caring might have been involved, something that MIGHT just make passerby stop and think. Sigh...I know, I know...dream on...but one can go through most of the older parts of Mt. Auburn or Forest Hills (or even any smalltown cemetery) and see better efforts expended on individuals (maybe that's the rub?)...and occasionally the post-WWII crowd get it right - Maya Lin did spectacularly well on Vietnam (even with the sentimental hood ornament later added - and even if that set off the wave of polished black granite among idiots missing the point), and whoever did Samuel Eliot Morrison got it right for the man.
Somehow a vaguely Star-Trek control-console shaped slug of pink granite doesn't say "tragedy" (other than in an aesthetic sense) to me nor, I suspect, will it have ANY lasting impact beyond the generations who were present for the event, which is a real pity and failure on the part of the (sigh) committees involved. I'd like to see them skateboarded-on...maybe that's an updated circle of Dantean Hell...
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Yeah, it's a depressing state of affairs. On the one hand you have something that is designwise utterly banal like this, or you have something that turns into a multimedia extravaganza overloaded with overdetermined symbolism.
I don't know if it's simply that our common language is failing, that we are struggling to find a visual idiom for a certain kind of grief that is not a black polished granite wall (hey, I know! How about PINK GRANITE!). I agree that Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial was absolutely brilliant, and her original sketches are still arresting...
But its success at so perfectly capturing a complex ideas and emotions in what is really the ultimate dissensual monument had the horrifying and unintended consequence, as you mention, of spawning a million mini-walls.
In the good old days, public art used to be flashy and phallic with lotsa naked dudes with clenched butts (current fave), but these days you're more likely to get an abstract black granite slab. And representational monuments, when they're rolled out at all, are decidedly anti-heroic (read: no clenched butts) *sigh*. Sometimes public art can be so vexing.
One recent monument on the Comm Ave Mall down the way from the Public Garden is representative of the trend. The Vendome Memorial, which honors nine firefighters killed in the 1972 Hotel Vendome fire was added in 1997. In fact, over half the statuary on the mall has been added -- at least one relocated from another park -- in roughly the last quarter century, after a nearly eighty-year period where there were only four pieces in the whole park. Personally, I think it's time for another eighty-year moratorium, before the park starts to look like one of those overpopulated post-Soviet scrap heap-cum-sculpture parks in the old Eastern Bloc.
While many of the monuments, though Boston-specific, could have gone up elsewhere in the city, The Vendome Memorial belongs right where it is. It commemorates the worst fire in Boston's history which took place in 1972 at the Vendome Hotel on the corner of Dartmouth and Comm Ave and resulted in the deaths of a staggering nine firefighters. There is no question that a monument to their sacrifice (and the sacrifice of jakes in general) should be there. Just not the one that is there.
The Vendome Memorial
Now, I know I'll get some blowback on this from folks who fought long and hard to get a memorial in there, but what's there is derivative in the worst way, and doesn't remotely convey the magnitude of the tragedy. Which is not to suggest that the memorial needs to be bigger, just better at conveying the magnitude of the tragedy.
The problem with the Vendome Memorial is that it cribs the clichéd elements of The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but without the possibility of replicating the impact as some other design might. It's wrong for the site and wrong for the event it memorializes. But it's understandable that this is the design that got the green light.
In the decades after Maya Lin's stunning Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, polished black granite walls commemorating loss were popping up everywhere. What started as a tribute to the power of Lin's design, became a mindless meme in time. The black granite wall, etched with the names of the dead, has gone from radical to revelatory to de rigueur.
There's no denying the power of the original, but it's a function of a complex of factors, from the historical context to the size and the specific site of the memorial itself. The memorial is a gash in the earth 250 feet long and contains almost 60,000 names. It's located on -- or rather gashed into -- the Washington Mall, which up to then had been dedicated to stately and heroic monuments. Its design and placement was a breathtaking, audacious statement, and remains a radical testament of a war that rended a nation, leaving a wound that still has not healed.
The idea behind the lesser monuments that plagiarize Lin's design is that they can evoke the same emotional response simply through allusion to the original. But applying this visual shorthand to all instances of tragic loss render them clichéd, and the little touches meant to distinguish them actually end up exacerbating the problem. With the Vendome Memorial, the elements of design that diverge from the original (it is 29 feet long, but seems shorter, curved and about knee-high) have no significance here, and are merely functions of the limitations of the site itself.
I want to stress again: a memorial to the tragedy incorporating the names of the nine jakes who lost their lives is a tribute that belongs exactly where this memorial stands. But those who feel this mini-monument is arresting aren't seeing the monument itself, but the original it plagiarizes. The power of that connection will only diminish in time.
Of course memorials and monuments lend themselves to memes. We as society need recognizable ways -- conventions, we call them -- to honor, glorify, mourn and remember. And Lin deserves props for defining those conventions for a generation. But the Wall has had its run. It is (literally) reflective of a monumental mistake that is etched in our nation's history. This subtext is utterly inappropriate for a tragedy like the Vendome, and it certainly would not work for 9-11.
I think the Vendome deserves an oblelisk. If there was ever a case where a heroic -- even phallic -- monument would be entrely appropriate, is it. How about a black granite obelisk?
Towers, obelisks, and columns reined for millennia as monuments, with good reason. Far from being merely phallic, they are arresting because they used to exceed in height the structures around them. (This was, in fact, the ultimate genius of Maya Lin's design -- it is not merely a wall, it is a subterrainian wall.) In ancient Egypt, where they were common, the obelisk symbolized the sun god Ra.
It's hard for me to think of what would arrestingly evoke the enduring emotional impact of 9-11 -- I mean, of the loss of innocent life on 9-11. It was a profound thing, and it will reverberate through our culture for years to come.
Water feature?
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The discussion reminds me of the two Holocaust memorials in Baltimore. The first was designed, I believe, to evoke train cars carrying Jews and other to the death camps. These were massive concrete blocks. Problems with that design included that is was too abstract, that people had sex, were dealing and doing drugs in the area, etc. It was modified in a couple of ways, again if I remember correctly. One was by fencing off the concrete blocks by, if I remember correctly, fencing off the concrete blocks. The other was by installing a completely different sculpture which was a giant flame composed of bodies. Less abstract, easier to read.
So I guess public monuments and memorials, though erected to memorialize, acknowledge and evoke the past, still wind up being objects very much concerned with the present.
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Funny, that godawful Vendome Fire memorial was high in my mind on the candidates' list for "worst public memorials in Boston," though I still think the grossly mawkish sub-Soviet Irish Famine Memorial takes the cake (er, so to speak)...and I should qualify all this by noting that I'm very much in favor of representative art, particularly the hunky sort you cite at the outset (ever checked out the Machine Gunners' Memorial in Hyde Park, London?! Or, even better, the pieta for Lord Kitchener in St. Paul's? Yow!).
If we still had an art education culture that stressed skill and deftness at representation FIRST (Picasso and Dali were both VERY accomplished representational artists first...), rather than 'self expression' [i.e.: wearing black and smoking, like everyone else...], we might get better public art, both representational and non-representational. Maya Lin is the rare talented genius who can pull off truly moving abstraction [thanks for reminding me of those gorgeous sketches!]...most poor sods who eke out a living as artists should stick to honing their skills at representation and the critics should be bashing them for BAD efforts at it, not for doing it at all (though I empathize that they're generally indistinguishable nowadays, and the breakdown of who likes what looks suspiciously like the red state/blue state divide, i.e.: most contemporary representational art is gauged to appeal to the same audience Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh serve, and that's a pity.)
You'll note that, black granite and sub-Soviet bronzework aside, the form of the Vendome and 9/11 memorials is suspiciously similar in its curvy slugginess...
I'm with you: more obelisks, please! But in single arrays, not pairs or other sillinesses as in Copley Sq. Water features are nice, too (but costly in both execution and maintenance...and potential liability...sigh). I'm not sure I'll get into the combinative potentials...(grin).
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Very sad. On my last visit to Boston (summer of 1999), I noticed that some person or persons had spray-painted some four-letter words on the memorial statue to Boston's war dead. Why so much disrespect for public monuments and public spaces?
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If I wasn't the only skateboarder on the Tufts campus in the late 70s, then there were only two others (not to mention the really nasty spills on icy sidewalks, so my travels to class were limited to about 4 months of the school year). But then my skating days as thus evidenced are so FAR in the past as to qualify for geezer status. That the wheels were metal, and the deck mimicked the multi-woods of surfboards should give away the antiquity.
There's not a lot of public art or statues in the cities of SoCal, so I can't do any comparisons. And we have PLENTY of skateparks. The worst incidences occur on private property like malls, govt and commercial buildings, school staircases...but usually during off-hours. I honestly can't recall a situation like this one. I would say that private security and police are quick to shoo the skaterats off. Not to mention property owners themselves.
There's really no excuse for this defacement. Does Boston have posted a No Skating sign with a non-liability clause? Are the mounted patrols through the parks and streets a thing of the past and budget cuts? I seem to recall those horses sure kept the rabble in line: a kick from one of those four legs can kill you.
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