Paying Our Respects to the World Trade Center

Friday, November 14, was the day of our arrival in New York City to join our Brit friends Jane and Kim for a mad tour of Manhattan before the play we saw Saturday.  We decided to spend Friday afternoon visiting the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, also known as the World Trade Center Memorial.

The memorial and museum commemorate the attacks on September 11, 2001 that killed 2,977 people, and the earlier World Trade Center bombing of 1993, which killed six. The memorial and museum are located at the World Trade Center site, on the former location of the Twin Towers that were destroyed in two of the four attacks on 9/11.  One other attack damaged the Pentagon, and the fourth attack, Flight 93, was foiled by passengers and crew and crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.  In saying all this, we recognize that most readers already know this, but it is always important to remember the key facts that are being memorialized.

The National September 11 Memorial is intended to be a tribute of remembrance and honor to the people killed in the attacks.  The memorial consists of a large, open plaza containing a field of trees, interrupted by two large voids containing recessed pools that mark the footprints of the Twin Towers. The names of 2,983 victims are inscribed on 76 bronze plates attached to the parapet walls that form the edges of the Memorial pools.  The name of its design is, "Reflecting Absence." It was dedicated on September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of the attacks, and officially opened the next day.  It had over 1 million visitors in the first three months it was open.  It would be hard to imagine the number of visitors it has seen in the three years since 2011.

The National September 11 Memorial Museum is intended to serve as the country’s principal institution for examining the implications of the events of 9/11, documenting the impact of those events and exploring the continuing significance of September 11, 2001.   The Museum is an underground museum which has various artifacts of the attacks and pieces of steel from the Twin Towers, such as the final steel, which was the last piece of steel to leave Ground Zero in May 2002. It is built on top of the former location of the Sphere, a large metallic sculpture by German sculptor Fritz Koenig of a globe.  It stood in the middle of a large pool between the twin towers:

The Sphere was battered but intact after the September 11 attacks, and has since been moved to nearby Battery Park.  The following photo by Mario Kaupe shows the Sphere in its present location and condition:

A smaller sculpture of the Sphere greets visitors as they enter the main hall of the Museum.  Two of the original tridents from the Twin Towers are located in this pavilion. One of the walls of the underground museum is an exposed side of the slurry wall, the retaining wall that holds back the Hudson River and that had remained unbreached during and after September 11. Other artifacts from Ground Zero include wrecked emergency vehicles, including a fire engine bent completely out of shape from the collapse, pieces of metal from all seven World Trade Center buildings, recordings of survivors and first responders including 911 phone calls, pictures of all victims, photographs from the wreckage, and other media tools used to detail the destruction including the crashes, collapse, fires, jumpers, and clean-up.  The museum, which is part of the Memorial and accessible from the plaza, was dedicated on May 15, 2014 and opened on May 21, 2014.

On May 10, 2014, the long-unidentified remains of 1,115 victims were transferred from the city medical examiner's office to Ground Zero, where they were placed in a space in the bedrock 70 feet below ground, as part of the 9/11 Museum.

We started our visit at the pools amid the field of trees.  From the Memorial, there are striking views of the new One World Trade Center, which was nicknamed "Freedom Tower" during initial work.  It is now the tallest skyscraper in the U.S. and the fourth-tallest in the world. Its steel structure was topped out on August 30, 2012, and on May 10, 2013 the final component of its spire was installed, allowing it to reach a symbolic height of 1,776 feet in reference to the year of signing of the Declaration of Independence. The building just opened on November 3, 2014 - only 11 days before we visited.

We captured several views of the striking new building, which is to the left in this first photo:



The Memorial Pools are themselves very striking, and we could not help pausing and reflecting on the losses of September 11 when we thought of the fact that the pools sit on the footprints of the original World Trade Center towers:

Two of the names etched on the borders of the pools were particularly touching because someone had left remembrances in each of them:

Here, Kim and Jane are photographing one of the pools:

You enter the Museum from the street level, and it is marked by a building above ground, but the vast majority of the Museum lies below ground.  It extends all the way to the bedrock that originally underlay the Twin Towers.  The photo below shows part of the slurry wall that bounded the "bathtub" created to hold the waters of the Hudson River back from the foundations of the towers.  Also in the photo below is the "Last Column" to be removed from the WTC site in the demolition and reconstruction:

One touching part of the Museum is devoted to photos and memorabilia for each of the victims of the attacks:

For us, perhaps the most powerful exhibit in the Museum was the one memorializing the losses on Flight 93 when it crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.  The exhibit features recordings and transcripts from the cockpit, crew and passengers' cell phone calls to family members as the slow realization came over them, first, that they had been hijacked, and, then, that the hijacking was part of a larger attack, and, finally, that they were undoubtedly to be sacrificed in one last attack on the nation's capital - probably the U.S. Capitol Building.  The recordings preserve the poignancy of the passengers' feelings as they realized they must take action to save others, while they themselves had no hope.

We came out of the Museum dazed and sobered.  Night had fallen, and we took one last look at the new WTC tower --

-- and one last look at the Memorial Pools:



The organization of the Museum left a great deal to be desired.  The exhibits did not flow well and did not start out with an understandable overview and timeline of the events.  Artifacts were simply thrown at visitors without context, and it was only at the end of the visit that the portion of the Museum that described the sequence of events could even be reached.  We felt that this clearly was the work of a committee of competing interests and intentions, and we hope that the Museum will be reorganized by a unifying vision as soon as possible.  However, despite the Museum's substantial weaknesses of presentation, it is an incredibly powerful story that must be experienced.  We were extremely grateful that we had had a chance to visit the entire Memorial and Museum.