From Portraits to Puddles

Surely we can offer the victims of 9/11 a better tribute than Reflecting Absence, a gloomy piece of landscape architecture with lists of names. But what makes an effective tribute? What makes a memorable memorial? The sculptures in nearby Battery Park provide excellent examples of memorials dedicated over the past hundred years. This essay points out lessons from half a dozen of them that can be applied to a memorial for the World Trade Center - and explains how our memorials declined from portr