Culture Chronicle

9/11 Museum Shows Progress
The Wall Street Journal - August 11, 2010
By Joseph De Avila

The way that 9/11 is remembered will soon be transformed.

Located beneath a maze of construction at Ground Zero, the National September 11 Memorial Museum is taking shape and has made significant progress. Members of the media took a tour of the cavernous, 120,000-square-foot museum site on Tuesday.

The museum opening is slated for Sept. 11, 2012. Museum officials expect it to become one of the city's most popular tourist destinations, drawing as many as seven million visitors a year.

The museum will be located beneath an eight-acre memorial plaza, which will open next Sept 11. The entire project will cost about $610 million.

n contrast with museums where viewing the building exterior is part of the experience, the memorial museum will be underground and unseen from the surface, said Steven M. Davis, the museum's architect and partner of Davis Brody Bond LLP.

"The exhibits are the icon. It's the inverse of a traditional museum in those respects," Mr. Davis said. Artifacts will be used to personalize the nearly 3,000 people who died on 9/11. Wedding rings, the base of the antenna that topped the north tower, and elevator motors from the towers will be among the exhibits, said Alice Greenwald, director of the memorial museum, a nonprofit organization that worked with the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. on the site's design and construction plan. For the full article, click here