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Wednesday, January 23, 2002
From a cynical perspective, the controversy over the now-canceled firefighters' statue in New York City may be a sign that the backbiting of pre-Sept. 11 normalcy has returned to that stricken megalopolis four months after terrorists flattened part of its financial district.
The $180,000, 19-foot bronze was to have been erected outside Fire Department Headquarters in Brooklyn. The inspiration for the design was the now-famous photograph of the flag-raising by firefighters on the wreckage of the World Trade Center. But the monument was never meant to portray the event literally.
The three firefighters in the photo were white, as are about 94 percent of New York City's 11,495 firefighters. Only 2.7 percent are black and 3.2 percent Hispanic.
But this ratio is not representative of the city itself, nor of the hundreds of police and firefighters from other venues who came to help, nor of the millions of Americans who donated so much to the relief effort there.
Fire department officials sensibly proposed that the monument, a tribute, too, to 343 firefighters killed in the attack, reflect their diversity and that of the city itself. It would have given black firefighters their due -- they lost 3.8 percent of their own, more than their percentage in the FDNY -- as well as Hispanic firefighters, whose numbers weren't available.
Fire Department officials are looking for another design because of complaints from the three white firefighters in the photo taken by Tom Franklin of the Record of Bergen County, N.J.
In retrospect, the planners of the memorial might have been wiser to conceive of a tribute that did not borrow from such a familiar image. But the sniping at their design is still discouraging. On Sept. 11, the city pulled together as one, overcame differences and subdued past pettiness. Therein lay its inspiration for the rest of the nation.
As Bruce Ratner, president and CEO of Forest City Ratner Cos., which planned to pay for the statue, told the New York Daily News: "Questions about race or ethnicity played no part in the brave deeds firefighters performed on Sept. 11, and it does a disservice to the memory of the thousands lost on that day to raise such issues."