"But we don’t build over dead bodies in America.”, said the relative of two killed in the collapse of Champlain Towers South.
The emotional debate...is now dominating town meetings here in Surfside while serving as yet another test of how the nation recognizes grief and memorializes victims of tragedies.
From mass shooting scenes and the locations of deadly natural disasters, to newly discovered, centuries-old cemeteries, the question of what should come next has been vexing officials and developers for generations. Although some locations of mass death are ultimately preserved as memorials or historical markings, others have been rebuilt or repurposed as land values soar and communities seek ways to move beyond grief.
*Well, the ugly truth is that we do. It baffles me and I have researched how and if America builds on shadowed ground and I cannot identify a common thread. I first had my head literally turned one time in New York City. I was walking someplace and rounded the corner of a building. A plague at eye level caught my attention. "Site of Triangle Shirt-Waist Factory Fire". 146 girls and young women, died in 1911 when with the de rigeur locked doors and extremely flammable cloth lying about on the shop floors the victims were trapped on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors when the fire broke out. Those who escaped the building went onto a fire escape which promptly collapsed plunging them to their deaths on the street below. I was outraged to learn that those floors had long since been converted to administrative offices for New York University. As I recall, and my memory here may be faulty, I went up to one of the floors to look around. As, or perhaps more likely, I saw photos of the retrofitted office space. The Triangle had all of what I could think to be the indicia of preservation: It spurred the growth of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, a political force in the city for the rest of the 20th century and beyond. But that seemingly sure-fire cocktail of factors pointing powerfully to preservation did not prevent gentrification and the erasure of the horror. I could not make sense of it.
There are many others: The Iroquois Theater Fire in Chicago eight years earlier. A holiday matinee soon after reopening. 602 mostly women and children who had come to see Mr. Bluebird perished. A year later the theater reopened under a new name. I visited that site too. The impressive bronze plague affixed to the building soon after had been moved. "Where?," I asked. In a hallway in City Hall. I own one of the type of fire extinguishers, a Kilfyre, that they had but one on site that day as I recall and it was as completely ineffectual as a toy water pistol. You had to open the end of the Kilfyre and thrown the smothering contents on the fire. The fire started above head level and so they had to throw the contents up at the developing fire.
The Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston in 1942. 492 burned to death on a Thanksgiving weekend celebration of a tremendous upset in college tackle football between Holy Cross and Boston College. There is a foot-burnished plaque in the concrete that was implanted years later. If you're not looking down you'd never see it.
There was the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire in Southgate Kentucky just outside Cincinnati Ohio in 1977. The singer John Davidson was the headline act. An electrical fire started in a room that had had a wedding celebration moments before. There's a poignant photo of the melting wedding cake, from the heat in that room and it was soon to burst into conflagration, fumes and fire racing down the hallway to the main show room. 165 were incinerated or trapped at exits (a common cause of death in building fires) and crushed or asphyxiated. Personally, I like the way the Beverly Hills site has been preserved. But for nature gradually reclaiming the land the site is otherwise as it was when the fire was extinguished. No building has been erected on the site.
There are yet others, the Eastland disaster in 1915. 844 people, again mostly young women on an outing offered by their employer General Electric, on board drowned when the top heavy boat listed to one side, then the other and quietly capsized--still anchored at dock!--in 20 feet of water at its pier in the Chicago River. I've been there too; there's a plaque on the road over the ship's berth memorializing the unspeakable tragedy. I can see the difficulty in properly memorializing a water tragedy but the Eastland was retrofitted and saw action in World War I and I think World War II as a troop transport. I own a deck chair that had been on the Eastland when it rolled over.
There are others that perhaps I am forgetting but those for sure I researched and in three of the four, the Beverly Hills is the only exception, I have traveled to the sites, for whatever it was worth. Not much.
I thought and I wrote previously that every...goddamned town in the South has a monument to its local Civil War hero or heroes--who were not heroes, who fought for the perpetuation of slavery and that maybe we need heroes not "merely" victims in order to memorialize. There's a book, Shadowed Ground, on the general subject and the academic pigeon-holed the various tragedies into categories that seemed to me forced, formulaic, and ultimately unconvincing. It seems to me that when we Americans can't convince ourselves that heroism was involved, "only" victims, that we don't memorialize. "Honor every soldier" but forget innocent victims. It sounds profoundly fucked up to me.
I acknowledge that there seems to be a psychological block at work: Sheer tragedy, unspeakable tragedy, is beyond rationalization and when we cannot understand, the pain is too much for us and so we simply erase it and efface the site that keeps the memory that so pains us.
The town of Surfside does not own the Champlain Towers South site, it was owned by a private developer and has been sold to another, and that is Surfside's defense. But there is the tool of eminent domain. A governmental entity can seize land in the public interest. Surfside should have used eminent domain to seize the shadowed ground of Champlain Towers South and turned it into a beautiful, quiet, contemplative public space. It has only been two years but Surfside is moving on. A luxury condo for the ultra-wealthy will be build over this hallowed and shadowed ground and the memory and the dignity of the 98 victims lost in the collapse will be defaced, debased, and forgotten. It is cruel insult but indeed, we do build over dead bodies in America.
