OK City memorial grows as public-private partnership

OKLAHOMA CITY-On a recent frigid morning here at 5th and Harvey Streets, a section of chain-link fence leans slightly in the breeze. But this is no ordinary fence. Studded with photographs, notes and stuffed animals, the fence is an impromptu memorial to the 168 men, women and children who died on the morning of April 19, 1995 when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was blown up by a truck bomb. Suddenly, the sound of a dump truck shatters the quiet. The truck is in the process of constructing a new memorial-this time a permanent one.

Nearby, a church, an apartment building and a post office have already been rebuilt, partially with federal money. Then, last October, the Murrah site itself was host to groundbreaking ceremonies for the Oklahoma City National Memorial, a landmark federal-private partnership that will memorialize the victims of the blast and house an interactive museum and an institute for the prevention of terrorism. The memorial-whose design was chosen from more than 600 alternatives submitted from every state and 23 countries-is expected to be completed by the fifth anniversary of the bombing in 2000. The museum is slated to open later that year.

The memorial's design-by Hans and Torrey Butzer and Sven Berg of an architectural firm in Cambridge, Mass.-is imbued with symbolism. It calls for a block-long reflecting pool surrounded grass and trees, including an American elm known as the "survivor tree" because it somehow made it through the blast unscathed. The facade of a newspaper building adjoining the site will be preserved as is, but a new structure behind it will be built to house the museum. The names of survivors will be listed on the Murrah Building's only remaining wall. Most notably, 168 empty chairs with lighted glass bases will be organized in nine rows, representing the floors on which the victims died.

The state of Oklahoma appropriated $5 million for the memorial and Congress came up with an additional $5 million to establish it as the Park Service's 376th unit, to be run in partnership with a private trust. "We wanted the National Park Service involved," said trust chairman Robert M. Johnson. "When we approached Congress in 1997, we were aware of the budgeting crisis, and we didn't want to subject this to uncertainty."

In tight budgetary times, the Park Service has increasingly turned to private-sector partnerships. Sometimes they have turned rancorous, as when city officials in Albuquerque, N.M., sought to build a road through the Petroglyph National Monument over the Park Service's objections. More often, the partnerships have been cordial-including, all participants here agree, the one in Oklahoma City.

The trust, run by a nine-person board, will raise money and be responsible for managing the site's operations. But the trust will also, in essence, subcontract out a portion of the work to the Park Service, which will be reimbursed for its efforts through private funds collected by the trust. Patrick McCrary, the Park Service superintendent for the Oklahoma City National Memorial, said the current plan is to leave the management of the outdoor areas to the Park Service and operation of the museum and the other indoor functions to the trust. Officials are currently trying to work out the memorial's expected annual operating costs.

"It's worked out very, very well," McCrary said. "A lot of times when there's a new unit of the Park Service we come in as the senior partner. This time we're not, so it's a difficult role. But we've been working very well with the trust."

Project organizers-most of them volunteers-pride themselves on the degree of input they've had from the community, starting with the 1995 appointment of a 350-member Murrah Federal Building Task Force made up of survivors, the victims' families and rescue workers. After nine months, the task force arrived at a mission statement that was approved unanimously.

Some of the ideas for the memorial crystallized after the construction of a small proto-museum in a corner of garage that survived the blast, said Richard E. Williams-himself a blast survivor and a General Services Administration employee-on a tour of the now-closed exhibit. There, task force members viewed a video collage of the damage and the rescue effort, followed by displays of a pile of rubble, a rescuer's cot, letters from children that poured into Oklahoma City and trinkets and toys that were left spontaneously by mourners at the fence.

After public inspection of the design proposals, a committee winnowed them to five finalists and then, eventually, to one. "The entire process was consensus-based," Johnson said. "Months were spent focusing not on what it should be but on what visitors should feel and encounter."

"Early on, we met with Jan Scruggs, the head of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington," said foundation spokesperson Kari Ferguson. "He told us it was critical to have the families and survivors be part of the decisionmaking. He said they'd missed out on that, and they had to do several things later on to make it work. We wanted to avoid that problem. We never considered making decisions without involving them."

Outsiders agree that the project has been handled gracefully. "I think the community is real, real pleased with the way the foundation handled it," said Garner Stoll, director of the city's planning department. "They did an incredible job working through a complex, emotionally charged issue."

Still, organizers acknowledge that they face a number of challenges. Simply recording and preserving up to a million-item archive of offerings left at the fence is no easy task. In addition, finding the right balance to promote the site tastefully will take require some care. Organizers have studied similarly situated memorials for guidance, such as the motel-turned-museum in Memphis where Martin Luther King was assassinated, and the plaza in Dallas where President Kennedy was shot.

The memorial must also blend successfully into its surroundings, which-before a recent uptick in post-bombing development-had been decaying for decades. "We can create the most beautiful memorial," Ferguson says, "but if we don't help the neighborhood around it, we won't have accomplished our vision, because people won't come here and learn."

Officials gathered their neighbors for advice in helping to improve the area. "In October 1996, we called the neighborhood's property owners-banks, the General Services Administration, churches, stamp shops," Ferguson said. "It was a year and a half after the bombing, and it was the first time they'd ever seen each other's faces in a room. It was mind-boggling to me. We fed them lunch and talked for three hours about what they'd lost and what they'd gained-and, most importantly, how to work together to bring the neighborhood back."

"Obviously," said Devery Youngblood of the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce, "the bombing has forced a lot of these issues upon us in a way we would like not to have happened."