9/11 Memorial and Museum (NYC)

On the Saturday of Veteran's Day weekend I went with my sister to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City. It was a strange experience, visiting such a huge space dedicated to memorializing something that happened so recently.

The outside pools, in the physical locations of the old towers, are massive. The water flows down the sides of the recessed squares, falling into a hole where the bottom is purposefully just below the sight line, where the names of those who died in the attacks and punched out of brass, around the edges. It's a lot of empty, empty space.

The museum houses pieces—“memorabilia” isn't the right word; “artifacts" seems inappropriate for things of such a recent history—from the events of 9/11: coats, shoes, and gear from first responders; photographs and video, mostly from amateur photographers and journalists who happened to be close to the towers on that morning; and wreckage. The debris was… otherworldly. It looked like set pieces left over from a monster movie or a Japanese anime film: a section of the antenna from the second tower, looking like a piece of a crashed spacecraft; a fire engine, with the front cab and ladder smashed and twisted into a gnarled mess of steel tentacles.

There was a display of the stairs that were one of the final escapes taken by people fleeing one of the burning towers, titled the “Survivor’s Stairs.” The jagged slab was recovered and transported, whole, to the museum, where it is displayed parallel to a set of stairs still in use—but behind Plexiglas, like how you would view the stones from an Egyptian archeological artifact, and not a crumbled mess of cement and rebar.

Audio recording were interspersed throughout the exhibit: snippets of black-box recordings from the hijacked flights; messages left for loved ones from passengers calling from the pay-mobile phones on the planes. (Many recordings of “tell the kids I love them.”) The two most memorable were: 1) a woman describing fleeing from the debris of the falling towers, where she said she literally “ran out of her shoes,” and 2) a woman who was taken away in an ambulance, covered in debris after the second tower fell, who describes being told by the medical staff they need to make way for the expected rush of the injured. She said she looked at her companions and said, “Nobody’s coming…” because anyone who was trapped in the buildings when they fell didn’t survive.

It was all very affecting.