What on earth is going on at Rockefeller Center? Once upon a time – not so long ago, in fact – you could visit this most typical New York destination and enjoy its architecture and its urbanism as they were intended to be seen. But those days are long past. And what is left offers no sense of all that has been lost.

If you visit Rockefeller Center today, you will find that its grand plaza – the culmination of the entire site – has been besieged by the huge and horrible NBC broadcasting booth that will be present for the duration of the summer. It squats like a menacing water bug over the half of the plaza that has not been consecrated to a life-size mock-up of a sailing vessel, apparently intended to publicize the America’s Cup. Only a few days earlier, the management cleared out from the same site something called Art Rock, an exhibition of unimportant contemporary art that threatens to become an annual event.

At other times of the year, other problems arise. The basin that in winter contains the ice-skating rink is given over, in early spring, to a humongous tent intended to conceal its yearly harvest of orchids from the eyes of anyone unwilling to cough up the $20 to get in. Meanwhile, the promenade that leads to the plaza from Fifth Avenue has become the site of a weekly film festival, which requires that all the flowering plants be periodically removed.

In the midst of all this tumult is that irremovable fixture of life in contemporary Gotham: the hideous crowd-controlling fences and wires intended to keep our citizens and tourists from breaking out into anarchy. Back in the ’30s, the planners of Rockefeller Center, led by Wallace K. Harrison, exerted all their imagination to orchestrate, to choreograph a massive architectural spectacle that would lead visitors through the grooves of its grand walkways to a still grander culmination. Now we are injected like lab rats into a twisting labyrinth of detours and roadblocks. And Rockefeller Center is no longer a pleasant place to be.

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To understand and appreciate the new memorial in honor of the 343 firefighters who died in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, to understand its power, you have to go there. Photographs give no sense of the thing. In its conception, the monument is simplicity itself: a 6-foot-tall, 56-foot-long bronze plaque unfurled along a forlorn side street perpendicular to the World Trade Center site. It is affixed to the brick outer wall of Engine Company 10/Ladder Company 10, the firehouse closest to the area.

The running bas relief frieze invokes one of the most ancient forms of sculpture. What its three panels depict, in the touching simplicity of its gestures, are the sundry events of that dark day: fire engines racing to the scene, the tumultuous burning of the towers, images of devastation and triage.Though generally realistic in modeling, the scenes have been schematized just enough to shed the hard edge of fact. They are reborn as something between history and myth.

All of this is embedded in a glowing, ruddy golden bronze that recalls fire itself – not the destructive element but rather that Promethean gift and enabler of human progress. In between these scenes are two legends: “Dedicated to those who fell and to those who carry on” and “May we never forget.” The classical typography, with its august serifs, is echoed in the 343 names of the fallen engraved into the base of the frieze, together with the engine and ladder companies to which they belonged.

Part of the effectiveness of the monument derives, surely, from the fact that it was not created by a committee – and the artists of Rambusch Decorating, a firm that specializes in decorative metalwork, did not have to answer to the input of self-interested officials or a self-righteous public. Also, its simplicity is such that it will never suffer the closures of the foolishly ambitious and ultimately mismanaged Irish Famine Memorial, which opened four years ago – and was fenced off scarcely a year later – in Battery Park City. The plans for the World Trade Center monument suggest that – in their spatial and mechanical complexity, in their desire to fracture the message by answering to every constituency – the monument will behave more like the Irish Famine Memorial than like this firefighter’s monument.

Already the firefighter’s monument is visited by hushed tourists and natives alike, who have spontaneously taken to tracing the names onto paper. Already it has become part of this great city.

jgardner@nysun.com