9/11 Memorial museum Opens to the public
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The long-planned September 11 museum is due to open for the first time tomorrow when President Obama and relatives of the victims are welcomed into the site in lower Manhattan.
Heart-wrenching artifacts like personal momentos and the mangled steel beams from the collapsed towers are among the most moving displays.
The museum will open to the public on May 21 but the President will be on hand, along with a number of New York politicians, for the dedication ceremony on Thursday.
The steel and glass museum houses more than 10,000 artifacts, 23,000 photographs, 1,900 oral histories and 500 hours of film and video.
Part of the slurry wall that held back Hudson River water is among the moving artifacts.
The public symbols of survival and loss include the battered 'survivors' staircase' that hundreds used to escape as the skyscrapers burned and crumbled.
The last column removed from ground zero is covered with missing-person posters and memorial inscriptions by ironworkers and rescue personnel.
The museum faced financing squabbles and construction challenges.
Conflicts over its content underlined the sensitivity of memorializing the dead while honoring survivors and rescuers, of balancing the intimate with the international.
The museum harbors both personal possessions and artifacts that became public symbols of survival and loss.
One of the more controversial inclusions is the cross-shaped steel beam that became an emblem of remembrance. (An atheists' group has sued, so far unsuccessfully, seeking to stop the display of the cross).
Portraits and profiles describe the nearly 3,000 people killed by the September 11 attacks and the 1993 trade center bombing.
Nearly 2,000 oral histories give voice to the memories of survivors, first responders, victims' relatives and others.
In one, a mother remembers a birthday dinner at the trade center's Windows on the World restaurant the night before her daughter died at work at the towers.
The museum also looks at the lead-up to September 11 and its legacy.
Members of the museum's interfaith clergy advisory panel raised concerns that it plans to show a documentary film, about al Qaeda, that they said unfairly links Islam and terrorism. The museum has said the documentary is objective and its scholarship solid.
While some September 11 victims' relatives have embraced the museum, others have denounced its $24 general-public ticket price as unseemly and its underground location as disrespectful, particularly because unidentified remains are being stored in a private repository there. Other victims' families see it as a fitting resting place.
The museum and the memorial plaza above it cost a total of $700million to build.
They will cost $60million a year to run, more than Arlington National Cemetery and more than 15 times as much as the museum that memorializes the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
September 11 museum organizers have noted that security alone costs about $10 million a year
Years of work: Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was on hand as the chairman of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum Chairman when the dedication ceremony took place today