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.
Been to the USS Arizona, Gettysburg and Dachau, but didn’t go to the Flight 93 National Memorial, even though we were close by.
USS Arizona was part of a school tour, we went to Gettysburg because my friend was going to college there, so we wandered around the battleground. I went to Dachau as my parents wanted to see it when we were in Munich.
So I’ve never gone on my own accord, but accompanied others.
I might have gone to the Flight National Memorial if someone else wanted to go there and asked to go with them.
Too soon is when the area is drying out (current flooding in Washington state) or there’s still smoke or people are still picking up the pieces.
Going to an official memorial is acceptable behavior. Showing up at a private residence, whether it’s the house from Breaking Bad, or the scene of a famous murder, is tasteless.
In Germany they have Stolpersteins (stumbling blocks) to show where Nazi victims lived. Even though they are small, they are still an invitation to visit the site.
I’ve been to several “sites of past bad events”, but I don’t think of them that way. Rather, I think I’m paying homage to history, staying humble, and remembering that humanity is capable of some really bad things and we have to be diligent to prevent more bad things in the future. Off the top of my head, I’ve been to Hiroshima and Los Alamos (I know it’s not exceedingly rare but I’m the only person I know who has been to both ends of the Manhattan Project), Gettysburg, Dachau, Twin Towers site, part of the Berlin Wall, and several of the WWII Japanese American incarceration camps. But I’ve also stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial, then turned around and imagined what it must have been like to be there for MLK Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I’ve sat at the Donner Party memorial and marveled in disbelief the horrors and will to live and sheer grit and determination the survivors must have felt. I gazed out over the mouth of the Columbia River where it spills into the Pacific Ocean and thought about the Corps of Discovery, hardly believing that they only lost one member for the entire journey of nearly 2 ½ years. So I prefer to think of my travels as bearing witness to those that came before me, not just ‘visiting sites of past bad events.’
Though I think there is a certain level of “decay” with time. At there is for me.
When I visited places like Mostar in Bosnia (in 2013) I really felt it was a place terrible things happened, they had happened there in my memory (they also sold the mortar shell casings carved into souvenirs). The WW2 sites like Arnhem definitely still feel that way (especially as I have personal connection, it’s not just a WW2 battle its something that had a profound affect on my grandmother and my whole family). WW1 battlefields felt a bit less. Manassas (and earlier still like the English Civil War battlefields) didn’t really feel that way at all. Intellectually I knew terrible things has happen there, but emotionally, for me, it was just a place something important had happened in the past.
Time matters. I’ve passed by the window in Prague that people were thrown from, leading to the 30 Years War, but that was in 1618. Then I went to Berlin and saw remnants of the Wall and Checkpoint Charlie. That shit happened during my lifetime.
This was my first thought. When I was a tourist in Chicago, we got on a converted school bus and rode around town while a guy in a fedora pointed out bullet holes on old buildings.
If I ever make it to London, I’m sure I’ll do the Jack the Ripper tour. But I demand a foggy evening.
About 5 years ago, I drove through the neighborhood where Aeroméxico Flight 498 crashed in 1986. I was frequently driving through that area and made a quick detour one day just to see what was there. There was nothing to show what had happened, but a few homes did look newer than the others.
The story of William Mulholland and the collapse of the St. Francis dam should be included in every engineering curriculum. Engineers, no matter how good, should check each others work when lives could be at stake.
I live about 10 miles from the Buddy Holly plane crash site, it is along a fence row in the middle of a farm field. I have also visited the Oklahoma City bombing site of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building and other sites of “bad” events.
Have no issue if access is free. Otherwise, if they charge admission to visit, I feel they are profiting from other people’s misfortune.
I’ve been to many of the places already mentioned as my father was interested in seeing historical sites. The Tower of London, Dachau, Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, etc.
I would like to see Auschwitz and Hiroshima before I pass on.
Maybe a little off topic here but I often wonder what happens to all the flowers and stuffed animals that people leave at sites where recent tragedies occur?