On the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street in downtown New York, the New York Port Authority has built a large wooden viewing platform for Ground Zero visitors.

To control the crowds of visitors and mourners, the Port Authority is requiring everyone who visits the viewing platform to first get a ticket. The tickets are free, requiring only a 10-minute walk to a ticket booth across downtown.

Every ticket carries a pre-assigned viewing time, with instructions to queue 15 minutes beforehand. The line for both tickets and the platform moves briskly.

In front of the viewing platform is one of the few remaining ad hoc memorials. The memorial is a colorful mixture of personal photos, firefighter memorabilia and patriotic symbols. While reading the notes, poems and obituaries, the wait for the viewing platform feels short.

Once on the platform, there is another wait. This line passes by an oversized American flag filled with visitors’ signatures. Below the platform is an ancient downtown cemetery — eerily symbolic of the much larger graveyard at the end of the podium.

Visitors in line at the platform are in a uniformly somber mood — no one speaks, and people quickly mute ringing cell phones.

When the platform’s balcony clears, a police officer acting as the gatekeeper lets another group of spectators through, asking taller visitors to yield to the “vertically disadvantaged.”

Beyond the platform are the remains of the World Trade Center. The most startling thing is not the empty city blocks below, but the empty sky above. The nothingness of where the Towers once stood is disarming; it feels unnatural for sunlight to bathe downtown Manhattan.

The buildings surrounding Ground Zero are in varying conditions. Several are covered with oversized tarps to cover missing walls and damaged facades. Others have boarded up windows or missing walls.

The actual ground at Ground Zero resembles a large construction pit. Mobile trailers ring the hole, with only a few twisted heaps of steel and cement distinguishing the construction workers as demolition men. Skyways from neighboring buildings end abruptly at the edge of the ditch, and pipes and sewers protrude awkwardly from the brown dirt. By now, the cleanup has advanced to the point where it’s impossible to see the bottom of the hole. In fact, most of the recovery work is now out of sight — the entire view lacks a human presence.

The allotted five minutes pass quickly, and the police officer soon asks everyone to finish taking pictures and paying their respects. The crowd hesitates and then moves in unison down the platform.

On the way off the platform is a large wall displaying the names of the 2,841 dead. Above the names, there is an appropriate quote from Abraham Lincoln’s famous letter to Mrs. Bixby:

“I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”

Upon exiting the site, the world abruptly returns to normal. Visitors, still numb from the experience, are likely to mull about the exit reflecting for a while. But the rest of the city has already moved on — New Yorkers hardly break stride while passing Ground Zero. The survivors’ grit in the face of the constant reminder quickly sweeps up the visitors, and they too return to normal.

Alexander Conant ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in economics.