An enormous piece of damaged steel from the Twin Towers will be put back to work at the World Trade Center’s museum, where it will be used as a screen to display moving images of the attack’s aftermath, museum officials said yesterday.
The steel artifact — one of the three-pronged “tridents” that formed the base of the Twin Towers — will be set in a gallery dedicated to the cleanup effort that began on Sept. 12, 2001, said the museum’s director, Alice Greenwald.
“It’s as if the steel is telling its own story,” said Greenwald.
Among the video that will be projected on the trident are images of that same column still standing after the towers were destroyed and surrounded by rescue workers.
Greenwald said the novel use of the column, one of dozens of mammoth pieces of steel housed at Hangar 17 at Kennedy Airport, came as museum officials tried to come up with compelling ways to give their trove of videos stronger links to the event itself.
“Doing it with the steel seems to be the right marriage between content and context,” she said.
During a meeting of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. yesterday, Greenwald unveiled new details about three of the many planned exhibits for the memorial museum set to open in 2012, a year after the memorial plaza.
As visitors enter the museum, they will be surrounded by the recorded voices as part of “Where were you on 9/11?” exhibit.
The LMDC’s board voted to give the museum $2.29 million toward construction of the exhibits.
“Our mission has always been twofold,” said Joseph Daniels, president of National September 11 Memorial & Museum. “First, to honor the innocent victims of the 9/11 attacks, and second, to educate future generations about what happened that day.”
So far, the museum has collected more than 1,200 recordings from people around the world who recount their 9/11 experiences, Greenwald said.