The 9/11 Memorial Museum is almost entirely underground, like a descent into hell. Here's the view from the ground floor.
The artifacts on the way down are mostly unremarkable except for their mammoth size. This slurry wall prevented water from the Hudson River rushing into the World Trade Center foundation before the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Rusty steel girders have been artfully arranged.
A display of "missing" fliers, posted by family members and friends in Lower Manhattan after 9/11, conveys the desperate hope they struggled to keep long after the collapse of the buildings.
My favorite part of the museum is the most abstract element. The designers have tried to capture the extraordinary brightness of the blue sky, so at odds with the devastation that began at 8:46 a.m., by commissioning hundreds of colored panels, each a shade different from all the others.
"No day shall erase you from the memory of time" - Virgil
An escalator runs along the side of the "survivor's staircase."
A mangled fire truck is parked on lower level.
A gallery displays commemorative items including a motorcycle a fireman had been restoring before he was killed. The survivors of his ladder company completed the restoration in tribute.
An artist engraved the names of nearly 3,000 people killed by the terrorists killed on a simple urn. The same names appear outside the memorial around the perimeter of the north and south reflecting pools.
The faces of most of the victims stare out at you from an enormous quilt.
Larger versions of many of these images line the walls of the family room where photos aren't permitted. A darkened room within that room provides heartbreaking biographical information about each of the victims.
Debris recovered from the site pre-dates the World Trade Center, in some cases by centuries.
The museum's designers then thrust you into the chaos that New Yorkers experienced that day. The next gallery is noisy, crowded and overwhelming.
There's an incinerated fire truck.
Imagine rushing down a crowded staircase in footwear like this.
Some bikes never got ridden back home.
A Looney Tunes sign-off offers some sardonic commentary on the museum visit.
Zoltan, the son of my college roommate Tom, was 11 on September 11, 2001. Today he's a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army.
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