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

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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
ROBERT BEVAN | Wednesday 14 May 2014 |

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Sorrowful sight: two of the "tridents" that formed the base of the towers

Down a dark, twisting ramp that leads deep under the streets
of New York is Marisa Dinardo Schorpps 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

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Two giant rusted supports of the Twin Towers: first look inside New York's 9/11 museum | World | News | London Evening Standard

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 oce on the
105th floor.

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On that awful day almost 3,000 people perished. The dicult 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 ocially dedicate the cavernous
underground space at Ground Zero tomorrow. It opens to the
public on May 21.

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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 iy in the Guantnamo era) to what one of its
architects calls a Wild West land grab over who could rebuild
where and the museums 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 Snhetta, the pavilion is an unmemorable thing that could
easily be the reception for an oce 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.

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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.

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The space, created by uniting the six basement levels of the area
below the World Trade Centers 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, gratied 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.

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Two giant rusted supports of the Twin Towers: first look inside New York's 9/11 museum | World | News | London Evening Standard

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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 Examiners oce. It is intended that genetic
testing to put names to these pulverised human traces will
continue.
Large letters fixed to the repositorys outside wall forged from
Twin-Towers steel form a quote from Virgil: No day shall erase you
from the memory of time. Its at this point that things start to feel
uncomfortable. What is this place, this 11,500 sq m museum thats
larger than the Whitney or the Guggenheim? A tomb to the
unknown a cenotaph? A commemoration of the known? An
educational attraction?
The ocial 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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19

show all

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
staircases 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 Sainsburys 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 9/11s 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
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Two giant rusted supports of the Twin Towers: first look inside New York's 9/11 museum | World | News | London Evening Standard

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images of dead bodies death itself, rather than peoples 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
diculties living with the potency of real ruins.

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