What to Expect at the 9/11 Museum and Memorial

Last week, while Amber was here visiting, we decided to spend a day in New York City. We made time for a couple of things while we were there, and the 9/11 Museum and Memorial was at the top of our lists. It did not disappoint.

Take the subway to the One World Trade Center stop, and it puts you out in this fantastic white building. It looks sort of like an ice-skating rink, but it’s just a subway stop. It felt so up high and overwhelming in there, I had a short-lived panic attack getting onto the escalator. Amber was all, “Oooo, let’s get on the glass elevator!”

“No,” I staunchly refused to get onto that elevator, which isn’t like me. I was all sorts of clammed up. New York City stresses me out anyway, plus I don’t love heights. I was frantically looking all around for quick exits, but there were none. All I knew was there was no way I was getting on a glass elevator. This place made me feel like I was falling, and I have no logical explanation for it, other than to say it was just an odd panic moment.

We arrived to the museum around 4pm, but that was okay because it is open until 8pm on weeknights and 9 pm on Friday and Saturday night. We were there on Saturday evening and hardly even had to wait in line.

Also, it’s worth mentioning, since many of my readers are military, that admission is free for active duty and retired U.S. military members, Of course, several 9/11 related groups such as 9/11 rescue workers and 9/11 family members also get free admission.

If you go on Tuesday evening, after 4 pm, EVERYONE is free.

Otherwise, general adult admission is $26, and it is worth it.

No plans to ever make it to New York City? No worries. I’m going to show you most of it right here.

When you first go in, you go through metal detectors and bag checks and proceed into a large hall with stairs and some steel remains of the twin towers. You immediately pass through a dark hallway with photo displays of people’s faces reacting to the scene of 9/11 taken on that day.

Most areas of the museum allow you to take pictures, but the most emotional, personal part of the museum does not. This is the section that has photographs of every single victim of that terrible day, and it has audio recordings of people talking about the victims as well as slideshows of some of their stories.

According to this CNN article, written in November 2019, 2,753 people died at the World Trade Center site in New York City on September 11, 2001. That is remarkable considering that this sign in the photo above reports that 50,000 people worked in the towers everyday. Those rescue workers, 403 of whom were part of the numbered casualties, did an incredible job of saving lives.

Victims ranged from age 2 to 85 years.

Every single one of us has a 9/11 story. It changed America. We all know exactly where we were when we first heard the news.

If you know me personally, or have read the blog long, you know Alan served in the War on Terrorism for 3 tours of duty overseas. One thing that burned me up the most was when Alan brought home a silver lighter the souvenir stands in Iraq were selling back in 2003 to celebrate what had happened to the U.S. on September 11. The lighter had a picture of the twin towers with a picture of the airplane on the flip-lid. When you flipped the lid, the towers lit up like they were on fire. Oh, and Osama bin Laden’s photo was on the box. Seeing this display glorying over what happened on that day was infuriating.

I couldn’t help but think about things like that and memories related to 9/11 as we toured the museum. It’s amazing how much you kind of forget.

You pass by this large wall with the blue tiles and the haunting quote several times, and you don’t think too much of it, and then boom. There’s this plaque that reads:

Wow. That took us by surprise. Suddenly, you look at the wall completely differently, in a whole new light of deep respect and awe.

Our Best People

What struck me most watching the ladder truck videos and seeing the walls of photos of the victims was just how many of them were rescue workers. So many of the people in the photos had on a fireman hat or a police uniform. They didn’t take just anyone from us. No, they took some of our very best people.

At the end of the museum, you walk through the area with these timelines on the wall and the final column mentioned in the photos above. The timeline doesn’t seem like an emotional thing to gaze at. That seems safe, but by this point in the tour you’ve already faced all of your memories of the event, all the victim stories, their photographs, and the firefighter video, and this was the tipping point for me.

I looked at the timeline, which stretched on to the present day, and I thought, “Yes. Yes. It DOES stretch on to the present day.” On September 11th, 2001, it never occurred to me that I would be directly impacted by the events of that day, other than the same fears everyone else felt back then of, “What will happen next? Where will they attack us next time?”

In 2001, I didn’t realize that a year later I’d be married to an Army lieutenant who was actively training to go join the war effort, a war that was precipitated by this day in history. Standing before this 9/11 timeline, I thought of all the deployments, of the soldiers who never came back, of the day my child ran to the wrong man at the airport because it’d been 15 months since he’d seen his daddy and he didn’t know which one he was.

There was no power to hold back the tears. I stood there and cried. Amber was dealing with these same emotions, I’m sure. Her husband also served overseas in this war. She came over and put an arm around me. And yet, I didn’t leave angry. I mean, yes, I was angry for a few minutes, but that’s not the overriding lesson or feeling of all of this. It isn’t, “Get mad. Look what these people did.”

The lesson is, “Look at how each world event shapes each one of us. How are you going to respond?”

It was sad. I cried at this museum, big ugly tears of dealing with a past I try not to think about. It must be 100 billion times harder for the families who lost loved ones.

But let us not forget why the sacrifices we made. We fought so that this would never happen again, and I am ever so proud of the small part that we got to play in supporting Alan in the War on Terrorism.

They could take away our buildings and even some of our best people, but they couldn’t take away who we are, a nation of good, God-fearing people. Do you remember the way we all pulled together in those days? All those prayer circles we had? I remember standing around Denny Chimes on the University of Alabama campus praying with people, many of whom had probably rarely prayed before, some Christians, some Jews, some just searching, but we all felt the same on that day. We were uncertain as all get out, but we were a determined and united people, and we turned to God for help.

America needed that capture, and I was thankful we didn’t have to drag through any court proceedings because he was dead on the spot, how it should’ve been, if you ask me. I also thought it was fitting they put this display at the end of the museum. We didn’t defeat all of the terrorists. Is that even possible? But we caught many, and we got the mastermind behind 9/11 that day when our special forces took down Osama bin Laden.

By the time we were through with the museum, Amber would probably agree, we were both emotionally, mentally, and physically shot. Also we were hungry. It was nearing 7, so a pretzel from a street vendor would just have to do because we had a bus to catch.

It had been an urgent matter to me to see the 9/11 Memorial (as in the fountains, not just the museum) earlier that day, but by the time we finished the museum I had totally forgotten about the memorial. We walked out the doors of the museum. Amber said, “Hmm, I wonder where the memorial part is though,” and I saw it, half of it. I was in front of Amber, and it was so close I almost could’ve tripped right into it. There was a ginormous water fountain with reflection pool, in a perfect square. The names of the victims are engraved around the fountain.

We gazed into the first fountain for a few minutes before realizing that actually there are two, one for each tower. They give the impression of two giant square holes, standing where the towers once stood. They aren’t as large as the towers, but they are in the exact locations.

I don’t know why staring into water is soothing, but this was yet another awe-inspiring reminder of that day, and it felt like a perfect way to close out our tour. It is all definitely worth visiting when you are in New York City.

I hope this answered many of your questions about the museum and memorial. A list below provides my sources of information for this article, in addition to the tour itself. You can click on those links to learn more.

September 11 Fast Facts, CNN.com, November 13, 2019, CNN editorial research

Memorial Pools Will Not Quite Fill Twin Footprints, NYTimes.com, December, 2005, David Dunlap

One World Trade Center, en.wikipedia.org

911 Memorial and Mususem, 911memorial.org