Two giant rusted supports of the Twin Towers: first look inside New York's 9/11 museum

A crushed fire truck, house keys, a credit card receipt and the two giant rusted original supports of the Twin Towers - Robert Bevan took the first tour around Ground Zero's finally completed museum ahead of Obama's dedication tomorrow
Sorrowful sight: two of the "tridents" that formed the base of the towers
Robert Bevan15 May 2014

Down a dark, twisting ramp that leads deep under the streets of New York is Marisa Dinardo Schorpp’s battered and charred leather handbag. The display case holding her bag also contains a yellow credit card receipt from the night before. It paid for a birthday meal treat for her mother at the Twin Towers’ Windows on the World restaurant. Despite the late night she was back at the towers early next morning for work — September 11, 2001 — and died at her office on the 105th floor.

On that awful day almost 3,000 people perished. The difficult fact that it happened on some very valuable New York real estate and the inevitable politicking that followed has meant that it is only now that the museum element of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum has been finished.

President Obama will officially dedicate the cavernous underground space at Ground Zero tomorrow. It opens to the public on May 21.

Memorial: the entrance pavilion viewed across one of the vast memorial pools

Controversy has dogged its every step, from a change to its original purpose and designers (the original idea of a human rights and arts centre looked a bit iffy in the Guantánamo era) to what one of its architects calls a “Wild West land grab” over who could rebuild where and the museum’s steep $24 admission charge. Families of victims are also divided over the decision to incorporate into the complex the several thousand body parts from the almost 40 per cent of victims’ bodies that are unidentified.

The museum is reached via an angular metal and glass entrance pavilion between the two waterfall-filled pools contained within the acre-sized square footprints of the Twin Towers that comprise the memorial itself. Designed by the Norwegian architecture practice Snøhetta, the pavilion is an unmemorable thing that could easily be the reception for an office or the smarter type of hospital but is dignified by two of the giant rusted steel “tridents” — the supporting fork-shaped structures that once formed the base of the old towers. These weigh up to 70 tons each and the pavilion had to be built around them.

Missing persons: a rack still holding the bicycles of people who were killed in the attack

These tridents have been placed next to the staircase leading down to the subterranean museum proper, carved out of the underground spaces of the World Trade Center by US architects David Brody Bond. The tridents are massive artefacts and among the hundreds of items rescued from the rubble that are on display. A special team was sent in on September 12 to rescue potential memorabilia, from a crushed red fire truck to house keys and dented gilt lipstick tubes.

From the foot of the pavilion staircase you are led slowly down into the earth through a spare concrete reception level via a long ramp sheathed in dark timber past projected texts and voices recalling their experiences of 9/11. You emerge first on a balcony halfway up a vast 70ft high chamber to face the concrete “slurry” wall that was built to hold back the Hudson River and which had to be anchored in place when the towers fell.

The space, created by uniting the six basement levels of the area below the World Trade Center’s plaza, is designed to inspire awe. It is almost the size of the concourse of Grand Central Station and empty save for “The Last Column” another giant steel relic, the last to be rescued from the site, graffitied by fire and police crews, stuck with photographs and messages and removed with reverence. It is a dramatic architectural moment.

Here you also begin to see more clearly what was only glimpsed before — the length of the square forms of the two towers from below the memorial pools down to their very foundations on the bedrock below. Their volumes have been recreated and clad in panels made from a gleaming aluminum foam. Within the base of one tower is the “In Memoriam” commemorative area, in the other, the September 11, 2001 exhibition that tells the story of tragedy.

Haunting: an ambulance that survived

The ramp leads you down again between them past projected images of the homemade “missing” posters taped up in the aftermath of the attack by those desperate to find their loved ones. Their presence, after all the impressive scale, is an indication of the human, intimate tales to be told ahead.

To reach the exhibition spaces on the lowest level, you pass the “Survivors’ Staircase”, down which many people escaped from the Twin Towers’ plaza and which was, by federal decree, craned from the debris instead of being demolished with the rest of Ground Zero.

Opposite is the huge concrete wall hiding a repository holding the remaining body parts, interred this week at the end of a solemn five-mile procession from their previous storage in refrigerated trucks at the Medical Examiner’s office. It is intended that genetic testing to put names to these pulverised human traces will continue.

Large letters fixed to the repository’s outside wall forged from Twin-Towers steel form a quote from Virgil: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.” It’s at this point that things start to feel uncomfortable. What is this place, this 11,500 sq m museum that’s larger than the Whitney or the Guggenheim? A tomb to the unknown — a cenotaph? A commemoration of the known? An educational attraction?

The official line is that the repository ia a store for an ongoing investigation, not an underground grave as some victim families have complained. Even the Virgil quotation from his Aeneid has angered some given that, in its original context, it celebrated two warriors dying gloriously together rather than an attack on a mass of civilians going about their daily lives.

Inside 9/11 Museum

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There is fuzzy thinking here, a result in part from trying to satisfy many hard to reconcile interests and purposes. More than this, however, there are times when an understandable sentimentality tips over into the mawkish — the christening of the “Survivors’ Staircase” for instance, as if it were a sacred object. At the staircase’s foot is a glass case housing an old Honda motorbike that a fireman who died on September 11 never got around to fixing up. His colleagues have restored it to gleaming splendour. This is touching but describing it as the “bike of healing” is simply saccharine.

Early critics of proposals to retain what remained standing of the felled towers as an in situ ruin argued that this amounted to the “aestheticisation of murder”. But the ruin as memorial is a well understood tradition while turning everyday objects into relics is more complicated.

Undoubtedly, this approach has its role. Within the “In Memoriam” space, lined with photographs of every victim, is a moving inner sanctum, a holy of holies, where the names, potted biographies and photographs of the thousands of victims are, one by one, projected. Sometimes the images — old ladies to toddlers — are joined by the recorded voices of families bearing witness to lost loves. Equally poignant are those personal items such as the wallet of Englishman Richard Dawson, who died while at a conference. It contains his UK driving licence and Sainsbury’s reward card and makes world-wrenching events personal.

In the historic exhibition, meanwhile, there are no vast screens showing looped images of planes hitting towers, which suggests both subtlety in the presentation but also an unwillingness to revisit too strongly a moment of trauma — the visceral and violent act itself. Equally missing from the long story of 9/11’s aftermath, otherwise followed in great detail, is much information about, for example, the untold deaths in the Iraq War. The reasons behind the attacks are dealt with just as sketchily.

Above all, this is a place dedicated to triumph over tragedy, to heroism, and heroic stories need to be told simply. There are no images of dead bodies — death itself, rather than people’s reactions to it, is missing.

For all its complexities and operatic scale the 9/11 museum is too tidy in the tale it tells. This is reflected in its architecture. Anyone who saw these soaring damp concrete spaces before they were fitted-out as galleries would have seen their raw power contrasted with the smoothly finished recreated voids that have eventually resulted. But New York, for all its desire to remember, clearly has difficulties living with the potency of real ruins.

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