By Julie Shapiro
Alice Greenwald, director of the National September 11 Memorial Museum, took Community Board 1 members on a virtual tour of the museum at a meeting last week.
Greenwald, who directed programs at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. before joining the museum, said a key element of the 9/11 museum will be its inclusiveness.
“Nine-eleven was the point when the world changed for almost everybody, even children not born yet,” she said. “Everyone’s experience will be honored.”
First Greenwald showed the small glass building through which visitors will enter the museum, representing “the absence of verticality,” she said. The security checkpoint there will be programmatic as well as functional. “It is because of 9/11 that you have to be cleared,” she said.
The entry will also display two pieces of the buildings’ original trident facade.
“They are our sentries,” Greenwald said. “They are binary in remembrance of the two towers.”
From the entrance, visitors will descend to a cavernous belowground space that is largely determined by the sunken memorial pools above it. Greenwald calls this “the most strangely shaped museum on the planet,” with ceilings that soar to 68 feet and present challenges in lighting and humidity control.
Looking up, visitors will see the bottom of the reflecting pools in the tower footprints. Sheathed in recycled aluminum foam, the structure will look misty, “like the ghost of a building,” Greenwald said.
The museum will display several parts of the W.T.C. site, including the slurry wall and box column remnants. The Port Authority is now working to excavate the Survivors’ Stairway, which hundreds of people used as an escape route to Vesey St. on 9/11. Greenwald showed a rendering of the stairway installed in the museum, between an escalator and a regular staircase. In descending adjacent to the Survivors’ Stairway, Greenwald hopes visitors experience the ascendant feeling of survival.
“We all live in a post-9/11 world,” she said. “We are all, in fact, survivors.”
The North Tower gallery will host the primary exhibition, which has three goals: tell the events of the day, explain what led up to the attack and describe the aftermath. The South Tower gallery will host an exhibit friendlier to children and families.
The museum will also house a repository for the unidentified remains of victims of the attack. That space, between the tower footprints, will not be public.
The program decisions are still a work in progress, as the project enters the design development stage, Greenwald said. Decisions about large display objects that won’t fit through the front door must be made before the museum is entirely built. As Greenwald put it, “You can’t bring a fire truck in later.”
Tom Goodkind, a C.B. 1 member, asked Greenwald if the two-year delay in the museum opening hurt her work.
Greenwald replied that the original September 2009 opening date would have been difficult, if not impossible, to meet. The Holocaust Museum, she said, took 14 years to put together.
“The extra two years is a gift,” she said. The time will allow the team “to create the museum we want to create.”
Julie@DowntownExpress.com
