9/11 Museum

After the birthday celebration, Ben’s parents took the big kids home for the weekend and Ben and I had an “alone” weekend with Henry.  It’s been…too long.  We went away for our five year anniversary (3.5 years ago), and we had a week of orientation for the mission board. 

We took the opportunity to visit the 9/11 Museum.  I have been wanting to go for a while, and this was our opportunity to go on the cheap!  We arrived at 6 p.m., and the average visit takes two hours.  I could have spent an extra two hours, but the museum needed to close. 

I was very impressed with the Museum.  It is VERY well done.  Though I was not personally affected by the tragedy in 2001 as so many of my NYC friends were, I was still touched and affected as an American.  The museum not only had many artifacts and treasures to remember the Twin Towers and the people who were there that day in the tragedy of 9/11, but it did an excellent job remembering the lost lives (as individuals, not just a collective 3,000).  There was one room which had a picture of every person who gave his life that day.  In the center of the room there were benches and loop of video and audio reading each name and telling about the person who had died.  It was a quiet place where you could reflect, remember, and learn more about those people.  There were multiple kiosks with touch screen computers where you could select a person at random or search for a sepcific individual.  It displayed the biography of each person, often including auido from friends or family. 

The museum also laid out the timeline of events clearly and I understood some things a little better.  The more graphic, difficult images from that day were often behind a column or around a corner, so that even young children could enjoy the museum.

Here are a few of the pictures I snapped.

This photo hung at the etnrace of the exhibits, depicting the Manhattan skyline with the twin WTC towers.

This sign stood outside of the WTC since 1995.  Some amazing facts: 200 elevators (express and “local” system, like the subways), 1200 restrooms, 40,000 doorknobs, 200,000 lighting fixtures, 7 million square feet of ceiling tiles, and more structural steel than the Verrazano Bridge.  Every workday 50,000 people came to work at the WTC in 12 million square feet of office space, joined by 80,000 visitors.

Part of the original slurry wall to hold back the waters of the Hudson River (from the North Tower I believe).

  
The Last Column – one beam which remained intact after the towers collapsed, and it was the last column to be removed from the recovery site in May 2002.

This is a neat wall.  It includes one square for each victim of the 9/11 terrorist attack, each one a different shade of blue.  The artist was trying to remember what color the sky was on that September morning, and also highlighting the fact that we all view the events differently.  The quote say, “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.”

Ladder 3 truck – story below

One of the beams, twisted

This is the National 9/11 Flag.  What a story and unique idea!  As the battered flag from the 9/11 recovery site traveled the country, different places which were also affected by disaster sewed or patched threads into the flag from their own tattered flags.  There are strands from the flag which hung in Ford’s Theatre the night President Lincoln was assassinated, the Pearl Harbor flag, as well as from the original Betsy Ross flag and the flag from the Oklahoma City Bombings.  You should read more about it!

 
When we exited the museum evening had fallen…and the memorial was spectacular in light!