The horror, the heroism, the love, the loss, the monstrousness, the resolve, the tears for 2,983 murdered souls — all too powerfully the story is called forth from memory and told as it demands to be told forever.
To descend into the 9/11 Memorial Museum is to weep, to rage and to struggle anew with the terrible scope of the evil, and to bow in awe before the greater nobility that confronted it.
The museum’s design is breathtaking, keeping faith with the reverence for the bedrock that became the last resting place for so, so many.
It is large, as the World Trade Center’s two towers were large. The visitor feels appropriately humbled in the face of a tragedy on a scale never before experienced in our city, as small and helpless as we all felt on that day more than a dozen years ago.
And then there are the exhibits. By assembling and artfully arranging artifacts — many of them small and telling — at the very scene of the crime, the museum conveys the incomprehensible scope of the terror attack, its human cost and its aftermath.
The museum’s above-ground presence sits on the Memorial site, between the two square pools of cascading water, the voids, where the towers once stood and where the names of those who died on 9/11 and in the first World Trade Center attack are cut in the brass.
The two-story building is but the entryway into a wrenching journey to the eternal stone.
As magnificently guided by museum director Alice Greenwald and her staff, a visitor first sees two tridents, five-story steel fragments that once were part of the WTC’s distinctive façade. Then you descend, down, down, down to seven stories below grade, to the granite that undergirded the towers.
The slurry wall, which was built as the western wall of the WTC basement, then held back the Hudson when the towers fell, is now on its third mission, as a centerpiece of the museum.
The wall meets another that was once part of the garage where a truck bomb, intended to topple one tower into the other, exploded in 1993.
The Towers stood, and though six were murdered and more than a thousand injured, the attack was soon mostly forgotten. And because it faded from memory — even as its perpetrators swore to come back and finish the job — the killing returned on a massive scale.
Across from the wall, a visitor comes next to the unforgettable sight of a crushed fire truck. Past that are huge chunks of twisted steel and, hanging from above, the bottoms of the Memorial voids — immense squares, 210 feet and 11 inches on a side, the exact size of the tower footprints.
The vastness is overwhelming.
The core exhibit sits beneath the North Tower footprint. It is a chronological retelling, opening with an ordinary Tuesday morning in September, primary election day, in fact. Then things start happening. Planes disappear from radar. There are sketchy reports of a crash downtown.
Through explanatory texts, photos, video, audio and artifacts — including many personal effects donated by surviving family members — the minutes and hours unfold.
There’s a handwritten note: “84th floor . . . West Office . . . 12 people trapped”
It was from Randolph Scott, who died. The museum traced the note back to him, and his family verified his handwriting 10 years after 9/11.
There are disturbing pictures of those who, facing death by fire, chose to jump.
There are the voices of firemen who climbed 78 stories to rescue others, and who would not live to climb back to safety themselves.
There are the photos of suited-up doctors waiting for injured who never came.
There is a time-lapse display showing dots for every flight in U.S. airspace. As the skies were cleared of planes, the thousands of dots vanished.
There are posters for the missing that blanketed the city, missing who never came home.
There is the video of the scene witnessed by astronaut Frank Culbertson, then orbiting the earth, with him seeing the smoke plume but reassuring New Yorkers that their “city still looks very beautiful from space.”
There is one of the rescue baskets used to carry bodies out of the Pit.
And there are boxes of tissues throughout, and four discreet doors spaced along the walk to help the overwhelmed make their way out.
But you don’t leave early. You can’t.
You see how and why Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda did this, and the Museum was right to reject objections from the Council on American-Islamic Relations and others upset about a video on Al Qaeda narrated by NBC’s Brian Williams.
They are bothered by his use of terms such as “Islamist extremism” and “jihadism” to describe the extreme Islamist jihadists who attacked America.
Perhaps these critics should watch the display on Flight 93. As the passengers stormed the cockpit, the terrorists crashed the jet in Pennsylvania, repeatedly shouting, “Allah is the greatest!”
When you finish, you are still on the bedrock, before The Last Column, the final piece of debris removed after an heroic rescue and recovery.
Before you ascend, you can see a wall covered with blue squares, 2,983 individual watercolor drawings, one for each life taken.
Behind them is a private room for those human remains still in possession of the city’s medical examiner, which we lack the technology to identify but hold in this sacred space in the hope that we will be able to do so — and give spirits and families rest and release at last — in the future.
Respecting the objections of some families to housing remains there, the space is fitting.
President Obama and the First Lady are scheduled to visit on Thursday, at the start of a dedication period that will run 24 hours a day for six days, to allow 35,000 family members to visit. The museum then opens to the public May 21.
Chairman Michael Bloomberg, who has contributed tireless work as well as $ 15 million to the Museum, captured its spirit perfectly:
“The museum is a place where you can come to understand 9/11, the lives of those who were killed and the lives of those who rushed here to help. It will help ensure that all future generations know what happened on that day and why it happened, so that they will never again allow this country to ignore those who wish to destroy us, as we did after the first World Trade Center attack.”
With the doors at last open on this extraordinary space, one wrong remains to be corrected: Congress has refused to appropriate $ 60 million a year so Americans and visitors from around the world can experience the museum free of charge.
Every one of the 535 Washington representatives needs to visit — so they can understand how disgraceful it is that this national site of profound remembrance has a $ 24 admission fee for the public. The United States is much better than that.
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