Suzanne Berne: My Ticket to the Disaster

My Ticket to the Disaster made me think differently about the site of the World Trade Center in NYC.  This essay made me realize it is in fact a tourist attraction, but not in the conventional definition.  When I think of a tourist attraction, I think of the worlds largest ball of yarn or the Grand Canyon, not a memorial or a disaster site.  It made me hope that people were visiting it for different reasons than normal tourist destinations.

Even though Ground Zero can be compared to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C.,  it is still completely different.  It is not a memorial yet; at present it is more of a spectacle, especially how Suzanne Berne describes it in her essay.  This is apparent when the security guard scoffs at her asking, “You want tickets to the disaster?”  The site is the aftermath of a terrible day in our country’s history.  It is still in its raw form, unlike the nice black granite Vietnam Memorial.

Berne made the site sound even more touristy to me by listing the different nationalities of people she noticed who were visiting.  When I think of visiting Ground Zero, it is from my perspective as a resident of New York.  I had been inside the World Trade Center before when I was younger, and when I saw the site after September 11th all those memories came back to me, along with the news coverage from the day of the attacks.  I hope the tourists visiting the site were there to pay their respects and were not there just to see the scene of destruction.