After
a decade marked by deep grief, partisan rancor, war, financial
boondoggles and inundation from Hurricane Sandy, the National September
11 Memorial Museum at ground zero is finally opening
ceremonially on Thursday, with President Obama present, and officially
to the public next Wednesday. It delivers a gut-punch experience —
though if ever a new museum had looked, right along, like a disaster in
the making, this one did, beginning with its trifurcated identity.
Was
it going to be primarily a historical document, a monument to the dead
or a theme-park-style tourist attraction? How many historical museums
are built around an active repository of human remains, still being
added to? How many cemeteries have a $24 entrance fee and sell souvenir
T-shirts? How many theme parks bring you, repeatedly, to tears?
Because
that’s what the museum does. The first thing to say about it, and maybe
the last, is that it’s emotionally overwhelming, particularly, I
expect, for New Yorkers who were in the city on that apocalyptic
September day and the paranoia-fraught weeks that followed, but almost
as certainly for the estimated two billion people around the globe who
followed the horror unfolding on television, radio and the Internet.
Video Feature: 9/11 Artifacts, and the Stories They Tell
While
the accompanying National September 11 Memorial — two granite basins of
cascading water that fill the twin tower footprints — is viewable from a
street-level plaza, the museum is almost entirely subterranean. The
bulk of it, some 10,000 square feet of gallery space, is 70 feet below
ground, where the foundations of the towers met raw Manhattan schist.
Invisibility
can make for strong drama. A descent into darkness is the stuff of
suspense. It’s also the classic route of religious ritual and
regeneration, bringing images of the tomb and the seedbed to mind. The
museum makes full use of these associations and reveals itself slowly.
The
drama starts, low key, on the plaza level with an aboveground entry
pavilion midway between the memorial fountains. Designed by the
Norwegian architectural firm Snohetta,
it’s a glass box set at a sharp, dizzy tilt, like a tipping building or
a listing ship. The blond-wood atrium, with its coat checks, a small
cafe and a closed-off room for the use of Sept. 11 families, is
atmospherically neutral, even bland, but offers an unmistakable sight:
two of the immense steel trident columns that were the signature
features of the twin tower facades.
Once
aluminum-covered, now rusted, this pair survived the collapse of the
north tower. And although they dwarf the atrium, you’re only seeing a
small section of them. Peer over a balcony, and you can follow their
lines plunging several stories down, the direction you will now take to a
second lobby area below plaza level, out of the range of natural light,
and not so neutral in feeling.
Among
other things, the fraught global politics of Sept. 11 and the World
Trade Center are hinted at here in an astonishing quotation, emblazoned
on a wall, by Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the towers, in which he
declares the buildings “a monument to world peace.” Suffice it to say,
not everyone bought this utopian gloss. To many people, these
quarter-mile-high structures were at best two cold, giant vertical bars
of silver bullion, at worst obscene gestures of capitalist might.
And
even as you read the architect’s words, you hear the Sept. 11 narrative
being introduced nearby in a dark hallway leading farther into the
museum. Projections of global maps and stricken faces line the path.
Voices of people giving clipped, urgent accounts of catastrophe crowd
the air.
Recorded
sound, once inadmissible in conventional museums, plays a major role in
this one. So does scale. You emerge from the corridor’s close,
oppressive aural cloud onto a platform overlooking a yawning space and
an archaeological monolith: a 60-foot-high exposed section of the World
Trade Center’s slurry wall. This thick, foundational barrier of poured
concrete, laid before construction began in 1966, was, and is, the
bulwark between the trade center and the Hudson River.
When
the twin towers collapsed, there was fear that the wall would give,
flooding the site. It didn’t give. It cracked, but held, and was quickly
claimed as an emblem of indomitability and resilience. Daniel
Libeskind, when he was hired as master planner for a new trade center
complex in 2003, spoke of the slurry wall as the soul of his design, and
by then it had already served as a multipurpose symbol of urban
recovery, democracy, communal strength, the human spirit, not to mention
the virtues of sound engineering.
Map: The National September 11 Memorial Museum
Metaphorical
thinking was rife in the days and months after Sept. 11. Everything was
framed in terms of darkness and light, wounding and healing, death and
rebirth. The interior design of the museum, by the New York firm Davis Brody Bond,
preserves this kind of thinking in several of its features, notably in a
long, descending ramp that leads visitors down seven stories, between
the gigantic sunken cubes of the memorial pool basins, to true ground
zero.
The
ramp was inspired by an access road that was created during the early
recovery phase and eventually took on a sacral aura. But in the museum
context, the ramp becomes a processional path, lined with anticipatory
vistas and projected versions of the “Missing” posters that papered the
post-Sept. 11 city for weeks.
And
when the path finally ends at bedrock, it leaves a choice of ways to
go, toward a subdued exhibition commemorating those killed by the
terrorist attacks or toward a disturbingly vivid evocation of the events
themselves. It’s at this point that the conflicted character of the
museum starts to become clear.
The
commemorative display is, basically, the equivalent of a communal,
life-honoring memorial service perpetually in progress. Photographs of
nearly 3,000 people cover the walls of a gallery. The same faces, along
with biographical portraits and spoken reminiscences, can be pulled up
on touch screens and projected large in another room. Some 14,000 still
unidentified or unclaimed Sept. 11 remains reside, unseen, in an
adjacent repository, at the request of a vast majority of families.
A
smaller group has protested the presence of the remains here. Families
of some victims have balked at the idea of a museum — especially one
that will inevitably swarm with casual tourists — doubling as a
mortuary. Others fear that a building that took on 11 feet of water
during Hurricane Sandy could flood again. Finally, the fact that the
remains are not technically entombed but in storage, and subject to
removal for testing, under the auspices of the city’s chief medical
examiner, inevitably compromises any sense of repose.
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Repose
is the last word you’d associate with the museum’s other, larger
exhibition, addressing that September day itself. Winding through
several galleries, it calls on videos, audio recordings, photographs and
hundreds of objects to document, minute by minute, the events of that
Tuesday, from 8:46 a.m., when American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into
the north tower, and on past 10:28 a.m., when that tower fell, by which
time three other planes were pulverized, the Pentagon was in flames, and
thousands of people were gone.
The installation is the work of a team of designers led by the museum’s director, Alice M. Greenwald,
formerly an official at the United States Holocaust Museum in
Washington. It is culled from over 10,000 artifacts in the museum’s
collection, and some of them are devastating: recordings of last phone
calls; photographs of doomed firefighters heading into action;
surveillance videos of hijackers passing — no problem — undetected
through airport security. Certain material, like video stills of people
leaping from the towers, are set in alcoves with advisory notices, but
even things not usually considered shocking can leave you dumbstruck.
For some reason, the largest objects — an intact fire truck with
carefully folded hoses but a burned-out cab; a steel column plastered
with prayer cards; a storefront jeans display still covered with World
Trade Center ashes — are the easiest to take, maybe because of their
public identity, or even their resemblance to contemporary sculpture.
The hundreds of small, battered personal items, many donated by families
of the victims, are another story. Their natural realm is the purse,
the pocket, the bedside drawer at home; they feel too ordinary and
intimate to have ended up under plexiglass. Infused with lost life, they
make the experience of moving through this museum at once theatrical,
voyeuristic and devotional.
Its
nearest equivalent I can think of is the dynamic of religious
pilgrimage sites, whether Christian churches, Buddhist temples or Sufi
shrines. There, the mortal remains of saints, and objects sanctified by
their touch, are the focus of attention. Here, you also walk a long,
sanctified route, stopping at the equivalent of side chapels and altars,
contemplating icons, talismans and embodied miracles: a pair of crossed
steel ground zero girders that to some eyes formed a crucifix, a Bible
found fused to a hunk of steel and opened to a passage that warns
against repaying violence with violence.
The
prevailing story in the museum, as in a church, is framed in moral
terms, as a story of angels and devils. In this telling, the angels are
many and heroic, the devils few and vile, a band of Islamist radicals,
as they are identified in a cut-and-dried, contextless and unnuanced
film called “The Rise of Al Qaeda,” seen at the end of the exhibition.
The
narrative is not so much wrong as drastically incomplete. It is useful
history, not deep history; news, not analysis. This approach is probably
inevitable in a museum that is, to an unusual degree, still living the
history it is documenting; still working through the bereavement it is
memorializing; still attached to the idea that, for better and worse,
Sept. 11 “changed everything,” though there is plenty of evidence that,
for better and worse, this is not so. The amped-up patriotism set off by
the attacks has largely subsided. So has the tender, in-this-together
generosity that Americans extended to one another at the time.
Still,
within its narrow perspective, maybe because of it, the museum has done
something powerful. And, fortunately, it seems to regard itself as a
work in progress, involved in investigation, not summation. I hope so.
If it stops growing and freezes its narrative, it will become, however
affecting, just another Sept. 11 artifact. If it tackles the reality
that its story is as much about global politics as about architecture,
about a bellicose epoch as much as about a violent event, it could
deepen all our thinking about politics, morality and devotion.
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