As thousands of hardhats work to create a new World Trade Center, the memory of the old Twin Towers and the events of Sept. 11 are coming back to life in a massive subterranean museum that is quickly taking shape.
Museum officials yesterday opened the doors for a preview of the enormous exhibition space that will take an estimated 5 million visitors a year down to bedrock where they will see the last remnants of the Twin Towers’ foundations.
The enormity of the space, stretching 70 feet below the eight-acre memorial plaza, recreates the scale of the former towers and will include artifacts pulled from the wreckage, including the “Last Column” removed from the site.
“It’s as if you are visiting a battleground,” said museum director Alice Greenwald, standing on bedrock near the “Survivors’ Stair,” the remnant of the Vesey Street staircase in the north tower that led hundreds to safety on 9/11.
“You know you have come to a place that has been sanctified by the people who lost their lives here,” Greenwald said.
Opposite the relocated staircase, a wall has been erected that will seal off from the public the holding place for unidentified remains. On that wall, Greenwald said, will be a quote from Roman poet Vergil: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.”
Behind the wall, the museum has created space for the Medical Examiner to continue work to identify remains. Only family members will be allowed inside, and officials hope that some day all the remains will be identified and removed.
The National September 11 Memorial Museum is scheduled to open in the fall of 2012, a year after the Memorial Plaza opens on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. The memorial and museum are also within the $500 million budget.
A key feature of the exhibit will be a section of the iconic slurry wall that’s been preserved and will be viewed from bedrock, rising 60 feet. It was the slurry wall that held strong after the attacks, preventing ground from around the site from collapsing.
Walking through the museum, Paula Grant-Berry, whose husband David Berry died in the South tower, said that seeing the museum so far along “took my breath away.”
“It’s so powerful, I’m so proud of it,” said Berry, who has helped move the project along as a member of the Memorial Foundation’s board.
Anthoula Katsimatides, whose brother John Katsimatides died on Sept. 11, said the project would do her brother justice.
“I miss my brother so much and it’s so hard to be here. But at the same time, I’m overwhelmed by how hard people are working to make this happen,” she said after touring the museum construction site.
While work has moved forward, most of the public hasn’t been able to see the progress because the entire project is below grade, said architect Steven Davis of the firm Davis, Brody, Bond, which designed the museum.
“If this were a typical museum, everyone would have been aware of the progress because they would see a building rising,” said Davis. “But here, all the work is below ground. And there’s been very tangible progress.”