9/11 memorial museum to handle 5 mn visitors

NEW YORK - A cavernous subterranean museum being built here to revive the memories of the World Trade Center is expected to attract five million visitors a year, said an official who added that “it’s as if you are visiting a battleground”.

Officials of the National September 11 Memorial Museum Tuesday held a preview of the massive exhibition space that will take visitors to bedrock where they will see the last remnants of the Twin Towers’ foundations.

The space stretches 70 feet below the eight-acre memorial plaza and it recreates the scale of the former towers. It would also include artefacts pulled from the wreckage, including the “Last Column” removed from the site.

“It’s as if you are visiting a battleground,” New York Post quoted museum director Alice Greenwald as saying.

“You know you have come to a place that has been sanctified by the people who lost their lives here.”

Paula Grant-Berry, whose husband David Berry died in the 9/11 terror strike, said that seeing the museum took her breath away.

“It’s so powerful, I’m so proud of it,” she said.

A wall, which has been erected to seal off the holding place for unidentified remains, will bear a quote from Roman poet Vergil: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.”

Behind that wall, there will be space for the medical experts to continue working to identify remains. Only family members will be allowed inside.

Architect Steven Davis of the firm Davis, Brody, Bond, which designed the museum, observed that while work has moved forward, people haven’t been able to see the progress because the entire project is below ground.

“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.”

The museum is slated to open in 2012, a year after the memorial plaza opens on the 10th anniversary of the attacks.

Anthoula Katsimatides, whose brother John Katsimatides died Sep 11, said the museum 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 was quoted as saying.