Ten years after 9/11, what do we call Ground Zero?

A visitor to Lower Manhattan today has to admit: New York City looks a whole lot different than it did on September 12, 2001.

Emerging from what used to be the rubble of America’s most disastrous terrorist attack are the blossoms of a new World Trade Center, a complex comprised of six gleaming new towers, memorial reflective pools and a national museum. And work is well underway. The site’s lead building, World Trade Center One, is already 70 stories high and averaging a new floor every week.

So with all the focus on rebuilding and proving to ourselves (and everyone else) that American ideals and steel girders will continue to prosper, it’s hard not to ask ourselves: why do we still call it Ground Zero? Why do we remember America’s most devastating attack merely for its devastation, and not with a name that puts back some of the bite taken from the Big Apple?

That’s the idea behind a new push to change the name of Ground Zero, just in time for the tenth anniversary of 9/11 next month. Apart from a wide assortment of memorials and remembrances scheduled to mark the solemn occasion, many involved in the site’s reconstruction are pushing to have the name dropped.

“Clearly it has different meaning to different people, but I think most New Yorkers stopped calling it Ground Zero some time ago,” said Larry Silverstein, whose company owns the lease on the site. “Ground Zero is a reference for yesterday, but World Trade Center is the reference for tomorrow. Ten years from today, I suspect very few people will remember it as Ground Zero… It’s inevitable, that’s life.”

For others however, especially those who were directly affected by the attack, 9/11 has remained as raw and painful as ever over the last ten years. And changing the name would symbolize not only a premature desire to move on, but also the desire to forget. That’s just not possible for the families of a lost loved one.

The split here, I think, comes between those who see “Ground Zero” merely as a name and those who see it as an enduring symbol. The phrase itself, of course, has no inherent symbolism other than to “designate the point on the ground directly beneath the point of detonation” — a rather loose definition provided by the US government during its Strategic Bombing Survey of Hiroshima on June, 1946.

Now that it’s used to denote American soil, the phrase is surprisingly self-referential. THIS is where it happened. THIS is where people were killed. It memorializes the tragedy itself, and the explosion and chaos and death it unleashed, not the actual people who perished there. It localizes the hurt. Puts it literally on the map, where we can draw a pinpoint bead on the exact speck of bipartisan dirt containing all our sorrows.

For some that’s comforting. For others it’s unhealthy.

It’s always hard to pick a side in an issue like this. And I’m not going to. But maybe it’s the same dynamic as at a funeral — you’re supposed to talk about the good times and the memories and what the deceased would have wanted for the future, not the tragedy of their death.

In the end, the World Trade Center as a symbol is what matters most. And if the point of rebuilding it is to create anew what has been lost, then a new name would provide just as much foundation as the beams and mortar holding it up.