  Since about October, I'm been temping at InsuraMegaCorp, Inc. down on Wall Street. I go for my lunchtime walks (or sneak out for air if I'm bored or annoyed). Because we're only a block away from the site of the World Trade Center, I walk by there a lot. It's never a non-issue.
I'm not saying I weep and rend my clothing every time, but it's not like passing a Duane Reade, either. Now, I guess it's because it's the first nice day this season I've walked by there at lunch, but I noticed a gruesome thing today. It's GroundZeroLand. Yeah, the vendors are gone, but so has the somber air. I remember being down here a couple of days after the attack, when the air was still smoky and everything was covered in ash. I had to take a timesheet to a temp agency I'd been working for who's offices were on William Street. Because of street closings, barricades formed a Byzantine path through the district, but coming down Nassau Street I suddenly saw what I didn't want to see. I flinched. The last piece of wall was still standing at the end of the end of Maiden Lane. The air was pink, probably from the ash and smoke and artificial light. I froze and I was more than a little afraid. And then people around me, tourists, started snapping pictures.
Gruesome. I wanted to strike out at them, but all I did was stare. And then stumble away. I know it's become a tourist site. I know we have to move forward. But how can they stand there, posing their smiling children in front of the chain link fence, while they snap photographs? How is that acceptable? That place is a wound, flesh dug out of the skin of New York City. Now it's trying to scar over, but it's still sore -- at least to me. Would you run up to a veteran who'd had a limb blown off and ask him to expose it while the gang gathers around it smiling and flashing peace signs? It's the same to me. This spot, whatever it becomes, will never be just real estate to me. September 11, 2001 wasn't the defining moment of our lives, but perhaps the redefining moment. I hate the commercialization of it, the marketing of it. But I deplore and denounce the consumption of that ground as just another tick off the list of tourist spots without any thought to or honoring of what it meant, means, to those of us who lived and worked in and among the people and structures and peace of mind that was lost there.
Go take your grinning wives and disrespectful children to the Statue of Liberty -- you can get a nice shot from the river just two blocks from where you're standing. But if you have nothing to bring to this place, don't take anything either. Sorry, I was horrified by group after group cavorting around as if they were in front of Cinderella's castle.
It's too soon, at least for me, for that kind of casual attitude. On a positive note, I'm the newest bartender at New York's largest, riverside Southwestern outdoor cafe. Y'all c'mon by for a Margarita! 
