Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) -- When New York Governor George Pataki decided to banish the Freedom Center museum from the site of the World Trade Center terror attacks, you could say he caved in to a well-organized and sympathetic interest group. Or he belatedly recognized that the memorial precinct is no place for considering the nature of freedom or the controversial agendas of artists.

The political calculation is clear, yet the dynamic of the controversy over the future of Ground Zero is perhaps better understood as one of grief.

For insight, I turned to Indiana University history professor Edward T. Linenthal about this battle over the so- called cultural components at the site. He has long studied how the U.S. comes to terms with tragic events in books such as ``Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum'' (Viking, 1995) and ``The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory'' (Oxford, 2001).

Originally, only the tower footprints were deemed to be part of the memorial's setting. Later, officials set aside an additional 110,000 square feet inside the slurry wall at the western edge of the site for a memorial museum. Once victims' families expanded what the governor now calls the ``memorial quadrant'' to include the Freedom Center, its content became controversial.

What Is Sacred?

I recently called up Linenthal to ask about the families' claim to an ever-enlarging memorial space.

``In places of violence, the fact of human remains changes the rules,'' driving a desire for ``exactitude in what is being remembered,'' he said. Traditional forms of mourning and ``the presentations of faces and objects and stories is the only way we have of protesting the anonymity of mass death.''

It's the reason survivors feel so strongly about messages that dilute the tragic moment or the presence of outside voices that may ascribe different meanings to it.

Linenthal cited a controversy that arose concerning the location of a display of a Japanese serviceman's uniform near the U.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. We shouldn't be surprised that it involved ``feet and inches'' he said.

Unfortunately, New York's memorial quadrant is at the nexus of one of the busiest and most densely settled places in the U.S. Many people -- especially those who live and work downtown -- cannot regard this three-block gash in the fabric of the city as solely a place of burial and remembrance, especially when it isolates much of Manhattan to the south and west of the site. The very proximity of the city's everyday life, Linenthal said, ``increases the desire to establish boundaries of sacred space.''

Leadership Void

Pataki may have pleased a constituency whose aims resonate with many voters. But the exclusion of the Freedom Center signals even greater disarray in the rebuilding effort and a leadership void that discourages private investment in Lower Manhattan. (The cost is already evident in the millions of dollars in concessions the city had to offer to induce Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to build near the Trade Center site.)

The Memorial Foundation is considering an extension of the underground museum attached to the memorial into the building designed for the Freedom Center. But the memorial and its museum have quietly become an $800 million enterprise, $500 million of which must be privately raised.

That's almost five times the figure for the World War II Memorial in Washington, which honored the sacrifice of 400,000 soldiers and the service of some 16 million men and women.

Expressing `Total Horror'

The museum alone is bigger than either the Whitney or the Ellis Island museums; it promises to ``express the total horror of the day,'' according to Jeff Howard, principal for Howard & Revis Design Services, a firm that's developing the content of the museum.

In a recent public presentation, Howard explained that the victims' family members pushed to immerse the visitor ``in the moment'' when the planes crashed, ``experiencing it much the way those 102 minutes unfolded.'' He added: ``We are very caught up in the chaos of it.''

Designers have made space for what Howard called ``the super-scale wreckage'' salvaged from the site, including a steel section that ``looks like sea kelp'' and ``six or seven floors of the World Trade Center collapsed into a one-ton cube of just magma, basically.''

Transformative Event

In this voyeuristic disaster-flick vein, how are we to make sense of a national tragedy?

``We want these environments to reach out and connect,'' observed Linenthal, ``but these events subvert the bedrock convictions that we think of as holding civilization together. We want our commemorations to be as transformative in a humane way as the original event was transformative in a murderous way. It's a heroic and gracefully courageous sentiment, but to be blunt, no museum or monument can ever replace lives murdered.''

What can a memorial then be?

``For me, the most profound and mindful memorial would engage the struggle of coming to terms with the event,'' he said. ``It's not about resolving it or coming to `closure.' It's about enduring.''

To contact the writer of this story: James S. Russell at jamesrussell@earthlink.net .