256 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
On the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen men
hijacked four separate airplanes to commit the worst
terrorist attack in US history. Two of those planes
were flown into the twin towers at the World Trade
Center in New York City, killing nearly 3,000 civilians,
firefighters, and police officers.
The attacks brought most businesses in the area
to a halt, leaving 80,000 people without work. Over
the next few months, rescue and recovery efforts
continued around the clock to clear the sixteen-story-
high pile of debris created by the collapse of the
towers. Laura Kurgan, an architect from South Africa,
had been living in New York since 1985, and in the
weeks following the attack she watched thousands
converge on Ground Zero every day. First came those
posting flyers of missing loved ones, followed by
those who had traveled to see the site for themselves.
All of these visitors, Kurgan realized, were trying to
both process and commemorate this senseless act.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack,
Ground Zero was entirely disorienting. The scope
of the wreckage had left much of the neighborhood
off-limits. Fences erected around the perimeter of
the site made it difficult to see what was going on
inside. Even those who could catch a glimpse had
difficulty understanding the operations within the
site. Moreover, the situation changed almost daily:
barricades went up, viewing platforms moved, and
makeshift memorials appeared everywhere. In such
a shifting, disrupted landscape, existing street maps
were of little use. The neighborhood was in limbo.
Kurgan responded to this logistical confusion
by making a map. The idea of mapping Ground
Zero in the immediate aftermath of the attack may
strike some as macabre, even voyeuristic. But it was
the general sense of confusion that drove Kurgan’s
efforts; she hoped that a map might bring a small
measure of order to this chaos. More importantly,
BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE
Laura Kurgan, “Around Ground Zero,”
2001
she sought to guide visitors, helping them make
sense of what had happened so that Ground Zero
became a site of reflection rather than a spectacle.
Kurgan was not a mapmaker, but as she walked
around Lower Manhattan that fall she was reminded
of a map she had used to navigate war-torn Sarajevo
in the 1990s. The map was designed to record what
had been and what had happened, so that the city
might rebuild. Kurgan began to enlist a cadre of
volunteers in the fall to compile something similar
for Lower Manhattan. A portion of that map is
reproduced here, the result of a collective effort
among architects, designers, and researchers.
This paper map was designed for those visiting
the site. The legend is especially revealing: personal
memorials are mapped and marked even though they
were temporary and regularly removed. The locations
of unobstructed views are identified, as is a walking
path around the entire perimeter. In other words, this
is a map designed to be used by those navigating the
site. But even making this fairly straightforward map
proved challenging: the constantly shifting barricades
and viewing platforms forced one of the volunteers
to redraw the map three times before it went to print.
Such a situation might have suggested the need for a
digital map that could be quickly and easily revised to
reflect changing circumstances. But Kurgan insisted
on a paper map, deliberately producing a permanent
map of an ephemeral site.
On a cold and windy Saturday in late December,
Kurgan distributed thousands of these maps to
visitors around Ground Zero. A few months later,
changes in the site necessitated a new edition. In
this sense Kurgan and her team anticipated the
crowdsourcing efforts of a few years later, where fluid
data contributes to an ever-changing—and hopefully
accurate—map. Her paper map was, of course,
destined to become a historical artifact, even within
a few months. But that was part of the goal. She had
mapped a site somewhere between a battlefield and
a memorial in a moment of time, creating a record
of the past for the future.