NEW YORK — The furor over how close is too close to ground zero for a planned Islamic center and mosque has raised a simple question nine years after Sept. 11: Where exactly is ground zero?
The lines marking the site of the 2001 terror attacks change depending on which New Yorker, 9/11 family member and American you talk to. Even those who know it best can't agree on its boundaries. Tourists who come to snap pictures outside of a busy construction site often aren't sure that they're there.
Andrew Slawsky, 22, stood outside the proposed mosque and Islamic center two blocks north of the World Trade Center site. He said ground zero isn't here.
"To me, ground zero is any site that was destroyed or damaged on 9/11 – mostly the hole in the ground," Slawsky said, referring to the ruins of the trade center towers.
But Maureen Santora, whose firefighter son was killed at the trade center, says ground zero extends far beyond the fenced-off construction site where cranes, skyscrapers and a Sept. 11 memorial are rising. It goes through a wide swath of lower Manhattan, where debris was littered on rooftops and body parts were found years later, she says.
"It will always be a place where my son was murdered. I don't care what they call this place," Santora said. "It will be a cemetery."
The evolving boundaries of ground zero have informed – or misinformed – the debate about its proximity to the planned Park51 community center. The farther away from the place, the bigger it seems.
"It's constructed as hallowed ground when people don't actually have a clear boundary for it or a clear sense of what's within the boundary," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania communications professor who studies political rhetoric. "What you have is a classic instance of people responding to a symbol whose meaning is physically divorced from the actual space."
Ground zero for decades had conjured up images of the atomic bomb blasts in 1945. After Sept. 11, it became a journalistic shorthand that evoked war and devastation, with an Associated Press report on the day of the attacks referring to the ruins of the towers as ground zero.
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