NEW YORK: A museum memorializing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks opens this week to victims’ family members and next week to the public, displaying artifacts from mangled columns recalling the enormity of that fateful day to shattered eyeglasses recalling its personal pain.
Visitors to the National September 11 Memorial Museum in downtown Manhattan descend to exhibitions several stories below street level to be greeted by a Hudson River retaining wall that survived the attacks and a column scrawled with numbers of the police and firefighters who did not.
The museum is the culmination of eight years’ work designing the exhibits, collecting artifacts and settling innumerable disputes over how best to document the day when hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and an open field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people.
Battles over oversight and funding slowed construction even as reconstruction of the larger World Trade Center site was getting under way. In October 2012, the museum’s lower levels were flooded in Superstorm Sandy.
“The museum is a place where you can come to understand 9/11 through the lives of those who were killed and the lives of those who rushed here to help,” said former Mayor Michael Bloomberg as he introduced the museum to members of the media on Wednesday.
Controversies
A recent controversy involved moving unidentified remains of victims to the museum site. Some family members said it was wrong to store them at what is essentially a tourist site.
“Part of the ongoing drama of the site is that you have 3,000 families, and they don’t agree with each other,” said Richard Hankin, director of a documentary film “16 Acres” that traced the contentious rebuilding process.
More than half of the $700 million needed to build the museum and memorial was raised privately, and about $250 million came from federal disaster funding.
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