The 9/11 Museum Has Opened

The museum portion of New York City’s National September 11 Memorial Museum complex opened its doors to the public last week, offering 110,000 square feet of exhibits, including various artifacts of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Artifacts and exhibits at the museum contrast the grandly horrifying with the heart-breakingly intimate: massive, bent girders and ruined emergency vehicles share space with personal items, including the neatly packed pajamas of a child who had boarded one of the airliners that subsequently crashed into the World Trade Center’s twin towers.

Other exhibits serve as a living history of that day, as survivors tell their stories in pictures and recorded remembrances.

Visiting the museum is literally a descent into the depths of tragedy. A visitor’s journey begins at ground level, at the 16-acre September 11 Memorial site. From there, he or she descends 70 feet, to the very bedrock of the World Trade Center site.

Designed by Davis Brody Bond, the Museum is meant to evoke the humanity, and the horrors, of that day. By all accounts it does that, and potential visitors should prepare themselves for a moving and memorably experience.