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New York — New Yorkers who toured the museum that commemorates the violent attacks of September 11, 2001, on Wednesday, the first day it was open to the public, said they expected a somber visit but found themselves emotionally overwhelmed. The National September 11 Memorial Museum in downtown Manhattan, featuring displays and artifacts related to the attacks and the nearly 3,000 victims, opened its doors to the general public after eight years of planning and building. Alyson Slattery, an executive assistant at a nearby insurance company, went with a friend during her lunch hour to search victims’ biographies and photographs for someone they knew.
She emerged from the subterranean museum ashen-faced. “It was too much for me,” said Slattery, 27. “I wouldn’t want to go through that again.” Her friend Susan Cottingham, 35, agreed it was a difficult visit but said she found the museum “beautifully done.” “It’s lucid. It’s bittersweet,” she said. President Barack Obama last week joined victims’ families, first responders and dignitaries for a dedication ceremony at the $700 million (R7.2bn at R10.38/dollar) museum that documents the day hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and an open field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
On display are a wide range of artifacts, from half-crushed fire trucks and twisted masses of architectural steel to bloodstained personal items such as shoes, wallets and lipstick tubes. Michael Cotton, 43, an architect who works at Snøhetta, the firm that designed the museum’s glassy atrium, said he made the visit largely to appraise his colleagues’ work, but found himself overcome by the exhibits. “I wasn’t really prepared,” Cotton said.
“You start off in a place that’s light and airy, and then you descend, and even the wood gets darker,” he said, describing going down to the exhibition halls at bedrock level around the foundations of the fallen World Trade Centre towers. “It’s really intense.”
The most poignant of all were the audio exhibits, Cotton and several other visitors said. A recording of a husband calling his wife from the Trade Centre’s north tower, telling her the south tower had just been hit, made a deep impression on Marianne Ludlam. The audio was almost too much to hear, but its inclusion is justified, the 68-year-old retiree said.
“You can’t not include anything because that’s what this is about. It’s about the reality of that day,” she said. Meanwhile, Relatives of the 3,000 victims gathered in New York, Pennsylvania and outside Washington yesterday to mark the 14th anniversary of the hijacked airliner strikes carried out by al Qaeda militants.
The ceremony in New York will follow a familiar pattern. The names of those killed will be read aloud at the empty footprint of the World Trade Centre Twin Towers toppled by two hijacked airliners on the sunny morning in 2001. Hijackers crashed two other commercial jets into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia and into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The New York ceremony will be punctuated by moments of silence to mark the times when each of the four planes crashed and the towers fell. In Washington, President Barack Obama is set to observe a moment of silence to mark the anniversary at the White House. Obama also will hold a town hall-style meeting with military service members at Fort Meade, an army base in Maryland. Defence Secretary Ash Carter hosted a private remembrance for relatives of those killed at the Pentagon.
Relatives of the 40 passengers and crew members who died aboard United Airlines Flight 93 are set to gather at the newly dedicated Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville. The passengers are believed to have fought back against the hijackers, who crashed the plane upside down at nearly 965 kph.
In New York, the buzz of increased commerce from new residential and business towers has returned a large degree of normalcy to the area known after the attacks as Ground Zero. Next to the 16-acre site where the Twin Towers stood is the newly opened 1 World Trade Centre, the tallest skyscraper in the Western hemisphere.
“We’re not going to deviate from how it was done in the past. We’ll start at 8:46AM. and the reading of names by family members won’t likely be done for a few hours,” Michael Frazier, a spokesman for the 9/11 Memorial in New York, said of yesterday’s ceremony. The first plane slammed into the North tower at 8:46 AM., followed by a second plane hitting the South tower at 9:03 AM.
The Justice Department said on Thursday a 20-year-old Florida man had been arrested and accused of plotting to detonate a pressure-cooker bomb at a memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, to commemorate the September 11 attacks. — Al Jazeera
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