New York City's New Draw for Tourists: Ground Zero - WSJ.com
For $59.99, visitors can see the Statue of Liberty and get a ticket to the National September 11 Memorial as part of the NYC Freedom Tour.
For $10, tourists can join a walking tour of Lower Manhattan led by someone personally affected by the terrorist attacks.
Pedestrians walk by the World Trade Center site Tuesday.
Those seeking a less crowded space to reflect might wander along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, where a faded black-and-white photograph nailed to the railing shows the view when the Twin Towers still stood.
The attacks left an indelible mark on New York City's tourism industry: The number of hotels downtown has tripled in the past decade, and the area attracted a record-breaking nine million visitors in 2010, according to the Downtown Alliance.
Many pilgrims say they want to pay their respects, pass on the story of what happened to their children, and try to make sense of what they witnessed that day.
But the surge of 9/11-related tourism has also raised prickly questions about how to market such destinations without appearing to exploit or diminish the tragedy. Tourism industry leaders and New Yorkers alike have grappled with the right balance for a decade, a task made even more urgent by the planned opening of the 9/11 Memorial to the public on Sept. 12.
"I think that for some reason calling it a tourist site does have some kind of negative connotation, but it's a reflection that a lot of people from all different walks of life want to come visit and want to come learn," said Joe Daniels, President of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. "I would be very concerned if we didn't see this amount of interest—if we were overestimating how much people cared about 9/11 and what happened on that day."
That doesn't appear to be the case. More than 380,000 people have reserved passes to the Memorial since July 11. They come from all 50 states and 70 different countries.
The impulse to convert a family vacation into a pilgrimage to a site of tragedy is hardly new, said scholars who study the tourism industry. It even has a name: "dark tourism."
"The assumption fundamentally with tourism is that it's about escape, fun, leisure recreation," said New York University professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who has studied tourism for 30 years. With "dark tourism, the sun went down. The lights went out," she said, noting that motivations can range from the macabre to the moral.
The 100-foot memorial in Bayonne, N.J., as it was dedicated in 2006.
In that sense, she said, "9/11 is no different from any number of sites in the world where something of cataclysmic importance happened and where there is a moral imperative to remember it, to commemorate it, to feel it."
Still, some tours have refused to incorporate Ground Zero into their official routes.
"It was not appropriate to create a special tour to financially gain from this," said David Chien, the director of marketing for Gray Line New York.
But, he noted, that will change with the opening of the Memorial to the public. For a $5 surcharge per person, groups of 10 or more—and individuals, if there are extra tickets—will be able to visit the memorial as part of the company's hop-on, hop-off bus tours.
Exploring Ground Zero
Take a look at the site today through aerial and 360-degree imagery.
Others had no such qualms: OnBoard Tours has started the NYC Freedom Tour ($59.99) for the tourist who wanted "a general tour of the city, but also wants to see the hot new attraction, which is the brand new memorial," said OnBoard Tours CEO Tom Schmidt.
He defended the tour against the charge of opportunism.
"Everyone that's in the tour business makes money by taking people places and showing them things," he said, noting that tours in other cities include the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. "It's not because we're trying to make money off disasters that occurred in wars, it's because we provide a service to take people to see things they want to see."
He noted the company closes only one day a year: on Sept. 11.
The leaders at the WTC Tribute Center, a nonprofit run by the September 11th Families' Association, created a tour of downtown memorials after watching people peer through the fence at Ground Zero.
"There was a hole in the ground and nobody here to tell anybody anything and it made no sense to us," said Lee Ielpi, president of the September 11th Families' Association. His son Jonathan, a firefighter, died in the attacks.
In 2005, his organization started intimate walking tours led by people directly affected by the attacks. Guides might be a first responder who rushed to the site, a survivor who worked in one of the towers, or a family member who lost a loved one.
A year later, they opened the Tribute WTC Visitor Center. More than 2.3 million people have visited the center ($15 without the tour), Mr. Ielpi said, while more than 200,000 people have taken the tours ($20 for the package).
On the other side of Ground Zero, the free 9/11 Memorial Preview Site has drawn nearly 2.4 million people to its 2,500-square-foot space since opening in 2009. Its visitorship last year exceeded that of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, officials said.
On a recent afternoon, some expressed unease at the flashing cameras and cheerful chattering among visitors.
"When I first came to this building about one and a half years ago, everybody that walked in was really quiet," said John Marcelino, 37 years old, from Jersey City. "Now it seems little more like a Disney World attraction."
His sister, Celia, 33, said she was also disturbed. "There's no emotion behind" the visits, she said. "It's like, Let's walk to the South Street Seaport and then let's walk to the trade towers.' There's something that's been removed."
For those willing to venture beyond the main hubs, a network of quieter memorials exists, woven into the city's daily life. There have been more than 400 street signs renamed in honor of those affected by 9/11, according to the City Council's Parks Committee.
Other memorials mark spots around the region where people watched the towers collapse or honor those lost in the attacks from specific communities.
Tourists seek out the striking 100-foot, 176-ton tear drop memorial rising from the edge of a peninsula in Bayonne, N.J., designed by Russian artist Zurab Tsereteli.
"They come from all over," said Frank Perrucci, chairman of the September 11...Bayonne Remembers Committee.
In the Rockaway, Queens, a former dumping ground for old appliances has been turned into a Tribute Park. A series of planted walkways are studded with memories, including a slab of granite with names of 343 firefighters killed on Sept. 11 and a cupola with a glass mosaic, with the names of those who died from the community etched inside.
It's become "a come and see destination in Rockaway," said John Lepore, the president of the Rockaway Chamber of Commerce.
"I think it's an ancient impulse actually to want to somehow make a pilgrimage or bear witness to things that happen to human beings by other human beings," said Alice Greenwald, director of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, who gained first-hand experience with "dark tourism" while working at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
"We know humans are capable of the most horrific things and yet we're also reminded that humans have this extraordinary capacity to recover and feel empathy and build lives over again," she said.
