When I went to New York City in June 2012 for my cousin's wedding, I opted not to go to the World Trade Center site. We've all seen the images before: did I really want to, never mind need to, see them again? Instead, I walked down to the nearby
Zuccotti Park and photographed this statue.
https://abitmoredetail.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/new-york-city-j-seward-johnson-double-check-world-trade-center-public-art-statues-parks/
"Double Check" by
John Seward Johnson II--J. Seward Johnson on the commemorative plaque next to the statue--is a life-size figure in bronze cast in 1982 of a businessman preparing for the workday, a piece of public art that had gained some fame after the World Trade Center attacks for its fortuitous survival in the park wrecked by the towers' collapse.
Stuart Miller's 2004 New York Times piece recounted that story.
On Sept. 11, 2001, with everything in ruins, one figure remained in Liberty Park across the street from the World Trade Center. He was sitting hunched over, staring in his briefcase, a businessman who seemed to be in shock and despair. Rescue workers, it was reported, approached him in the chaos to offer assistance, only to discover that he was not a man at all, but a sculpture.
The sculpture, created by J. Seward Johnson Jr. and placed downtown in 1982, was titled ''Double Check.'' It was named for what it depicted: a businessman making final preparations before heading into a nearby office building. Before 9/11, the sculpture was simply part of the downtown landscape. Afterward, it became an icon, as newspaper and magazine photos showed it covered in ash and, later, by flowers, notes and candles left there by mourners and rescue workers. ''Double Check'' was a memorial to all those who perished. It was also a fitting metaphor for the city: though the sculpture had been knocked loose from its moorings, it had endured.
After the attacks, ''Double Check'' was stored behind a fence in Liberty Park. When plans for its future were not forthcoming, Mr. Johnson, who owns the sculpture and had lent it to Merrill Lynch for display in Liberty Park, took the work back to his studio. There he bronzed the commemorative objects left on the sculpture, adding them to the figure permanently. And there ''Double Check'' has stayed -- largely forgotten, overlooked in the creation of a large-scale memorial design for the World Trade Center site.
The blog Daytonian in Manhattan, meanwhile,
took the statue's story to the present day. (Key to this is the fact that, unbeknownst to me, the park where "Double Check" is located is the
Zuccotti Park made famous by the Occupy movement.)
The original statue was refurbished by Johnson. He left the damages caused by crashing debris of the towers as a permanent reminder to the world of the holocaust of that morning in September. It was returned to Liberty Plaza Park. The businessman sits on a granite bench facing the site of the Towers.
[. . .]
The park took on a new personality about five years later when it became base for the Occupy Wall Street protestors. In their fervor to denounce anything remotely capitalist, they stuffed trash in the sculpture’s briefcase, tied a mask around his face and a bandana on his head. The statue that had become a memorial to the deaths of 3,000 innocent lives became a symbol of decadence to the protestors.
Their misled zeal was widely condemned by shocked and offended New Yorkers.
The garbage in the bronze briefcase has been removed and “Double Check” has regained his dignity. The statue that was intended to be a passing comment on everyday life along Wall Street instead became a poignant symbol of survival and a tribute to the common working man.
Five years later, I still like "Double Check". Even the datedness of the contents of man's briefcase--vintage 1980s tape cassette recorder to the left, oversized calculator to the right, even what seemed to be a package of cigarettes--endears to me. It feels like a perfectly quotidian state, a monument to the everyday, a reminder that despite everything the important can endure. Events like September 11th, or like the
Air India Flight 182 bombing I mentioned this afternoon, happen. They need to be dealt with, somehow. They need to be transcended, somehow.
Most of these words, and these images, come from a post I made
five years ago. I wished that these five years would see a progress back towards some sort of stability, some new equilibrium, some new quotidian. Alas.
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