The long-planned September 11 museum is due to open for the
first time tomorrow when President Obama and relatives of the
victims are welcomed into the site in lower
Manhattan.
Heart-wrenching artifacts like personal momentos and the
mangled steel beams from the collapsed towers are among the most
moving displays.
The museum will open to the public on May 21 but the
President will be on hand, along with a number of New York
politicians, for the dedication ceremony on Thursday.
The steel and glass museum houses more than 10,000 artifacts,
23,000 photographs, 1,900 oral histories and 500 hours of film and
video.
Part of the slurry wall that held back Hudson River water is
among the moving artifacts.
The public symbols of survival and loss include the battered
'survivors' staircase' that hundreds used to escape as the
skyscrapers burned and crumbled.
The last column removed from ground zero is covered with
missing-person posters and memorial inscriptions by ironworkers and
rescue personnel.
The museum faced financing squabbles and construction
challenges.
Conflicts over its content underlined the sensitivity of
memorializing the dead while honoring survivors and rescuers, of
balancing the intimate with the international.
The museum harbors both personal possessions and artifacts
that became public symbols of survival and
loss.
One of the more controversial inclusions is the cross-shaped
steel beam that became an emblem of remembrance. (An atheists'
group has sued, so far unsuccessfully, seeking to stop the display
of the cross).
Portraits and profiles describe the nearly 3,000 people
killed by the September 11 attacks and the 1993 trade center
bombing.
Nearly 2,000 oral histories give voice to the memories of
survivors, first responders, victims' relatives and
others.
In one, a mother remembers a birthday dinner at the trade
center's Windows on the World restaurant the night before her
daughter died at work at the towers.
The museum also looks at the lead-up to September 11 and its
legacy.
Members of the museum's interfaith clergy advisory panel
raised concerns that it plans to show a documentary film, about al
Qaeda, that they said unfairly links Islam and terrorism. The
museum has said the documentary is objective and its scholarship
solid.
While some September 11 victims' relatives have embraced the
museum, others have denounced its $24 general-public ticket price
as unseemly and its underground location as disrespectful,
particularly because unidentified remains are being stored in a
private repository there. Other victims' families see it as a
fitting resting place.
The museum and the memorial plaza above it cost a total of
$700million to build.
They will cost $60million a year to run, more than Arlington
National Cemetery and more than 15 times as much as the museum that
memorializes the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
September 11 museum organizers have noted that security alone
costs about $10 million a year
Years of work: Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was on
hand as the chairman of the National September 11 Memorial &
Museum Chairman when the dedication ceremony took place today