Survivors of the September 11 terror attacks and locals have blasted New Jersey’s “unfinished” 9/11 memorial as a “concrete eyesore.”
Officials say the Empty Sky memorial is complete, but one of its designers and the families of those who perished say otherwise.
The monument in Jersey City’s Liberty State Park consists of two brushed stainless steel twin walls, 210 feet long, the width of each side of the World Trade Center Towers.
The names of more than 740 people who lived in or had ties to the state are etched inside the reflective steel but the exterior concrete walls are still bare and have become stained over the years.
“It’s a concrete eyesore. It looks horrible,” Jessica Jamroz, one of the memorial’s designers, told NJ.com. “It gives a sense of abandonment and forgottenness.”
Locals are not only upset over the aesthetics of the concrete walls, but the names of 18 New Jerseyans are still reportedly missing from the memorial, their families said.
And out of the 65 cherry trees that were planted to frame the memorial and bloom each September to symbolize rebirth, only five remain – and are in poor shape, according to the news outlet.
“It feels like the memorial’s spirituality is under attack and no one really cares,” Jamroz added.
Michael Danatos, whose brother-in-law Brian Martineau died in the 9/11 attacks, called it “a disgrace.”
“We’re bumping up against 25 years and this is the best we can do?” Danatos, who approved the original design of the monument, asked.
One of the electronic kiosks for looking up names on the interior panels was not working last week, according to the outlet.
“The risk of leaving the memorial unfinished, and the site neglected, is that it could become over time instead an emblem of forgetting; of the decay of memory,” John J. Farmer Jr., who served as senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission and is the director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, added.
New Jersey officials acknowledged that the memorial is in need of some restoration work, in a statement to NJ.com, but disputed the claim that the memorial is unfinished.
“Unable to secure additional funding for the project, the architect, project manager and the state determined that the memorial must be redesigned to fit the project budget so that New Jersey victims of 9/11 could be honored by the state,” officials said in response to the outlet. “The architectural design team developed a new design that only included stainless-steel cladding on the interior walls.”
Th Department of Environmental Protection manages the memorial and the Treasury funds the upkeep. The departments said the memorial “is considered complete” in a joint statement.
Officials added that the DEP “is consistently working on longer-term projects to improve the condition of the memorial’s trees, lighting, and to modernize the kiosks that assist in locating names on the memorial.”
Danatos disagrees. “It is an irrefutable fact the memorial remains incomplete, even though it was opened to the public in 2011,” she said.
