I was living in Manhattan around 9/11 so I managed to visit the site a few weeks afterwards. I also worked for a few weeks in the upper floors of the Woolworth Building near the site. Over the years, I’ve been back and forth through there as they rebuilt the neighborhood and created the memorial. I actually happened to work for a software company that built the customer user interfaces used by the memorial.
We took our kids on the tour of the Gettysburg Battlefield this summer.
When a buddy and I were sent to Poland by our company we took the opportunity to visit Auschwitz.
IMHO, as long as they are treated with respect, no line has been crossed.
And I think it’s important to visit these sites if nothing more to get a scale of the catastrophe.
On my last visit to Vegas, my Uber driver happened to take me past the place where Tupac was shot. I didn’t see anything there that would indicate that it was anything other than just another off-Strip intersection.
Now that I think about it some more, I’ve been to the Nazi parade grounds in Nuremberg, and I think I passed the courthouse where the trials were held. I’ve had a tour of the Coast Guard tall ship Eagle and saw the bunk where Hitler apparently spent the night, once. And on a trip the Grenada I hiked up to an old fort overlooking the entrance to the harbor and saw a marker where people were executed during the coup in the '80s.
I appear to have a very macabre sense of adventure.
Too many to remember, battlefields like Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Tippecanoe, and others. Crime tours about Chicago gangsters, John Gacy’s house site, the Amityville Horror house (Yeah, the haunting story is bullshit, but a mass murder did take place there.). I’ve been to the United 93 crash site.
Hell, just walking around downtown Chicago on my normal daily commute is traversing the grounds of the Great Chicago Fire. I see the Water Tower every weekday.
Visiting the Gettysburg battlefield, standing on Little Round Top where the 20th Maine held the extreme left flank of the Army of the Potomac, and seeing the ground where Pickett’s Charge took place from the perspective of Union defenders was a moving experience.
I wanted to see Gettysburg so bad when I drove back east (wasn’t a vacation, was delivering motorcycles I sold on eBay) and happened to drive past it going and coming in the dead middle of the night.
In general, no. All in all, i prefer to do my touristing at sites where people built great things, or at museums, or at spots where something is currently going on.
But a month after the attack on the world trade center, i visited the city. And in addition to visiting friends (I’d worked within sight of the towers for years) and spending money in the city, i went to see the damage. I was moved by the same general emotion that brings me to funerals. In one of my more macabre moments, i even collected some of the dust that was still everywhere downtown. (At the advise of the friends i was visiting, who still worked next to the site, i also wore a face mask when walking around the area.)
I have some ashes from a couple of cremated relatives, too. It’s a remembrance.
I’ve not been to Hiroshima, but I’ve been to a couple of shrines commemorating it in other Japanese cities. I’d guess it’s very accessible to English-speakers. There are probably informative plaques in both Japanese and English all around. And also, if you pre-load Japanese into Google translate, you can just aim your phone at a plaque in Japanese, and read what it says on your phone. I did that recently at a Buddhist temple in Japan that had plaques in Japanese, Korean, and an alphabet i didn’t recognize. I read the Japanese version on my phone. There were a few points where the translation was odd and probably not ideal, but it was overwhelmingly a clean translation that made sense in the context of the artifacts, construction, and illustrations i could see.