9/11 Memorial

The 9/11 Memorial at the site of the World Trade Center buildings has been opened to the public for the past few days, since the day after the 10th anniversary of the fall of the towers.  The whole area is still a construction site really, but the memorial pools and immediate vicinity are complete.  Right now, the noise of that construction on all sides does rather overwhelm the serenity of the memorial at times, but that can't be helped.

I had worried about the type of place that it would be, but I was very pleasantly surprised.  It is simple, classy, not at all US-biased, no pictures, no quotes, just all the names.  In fact, it's actually in really good taste.

I'd not seen TV pictures of it (you'll remember I avoided the TV a lot the first week of my trip!)  The pictures that I'd seen had been stills on the web and primarily without people in them, or they were expected outcomes or something.  The first thing that struck me was just how large the two pools were.  From ground level you cannot see the bottom of the central level of each pool, which makes it seem as if it's dropping away infinitely.  The names of the people have been placed around the two pools, each pool is an identical design, just with different names on each one.  Each pool is square with 18 slabs full of names on each side of the square and four corner pieces.  The names are engraved, cut right through to a void underneath to permit underlighting so the names light up at night (there's a small cheat for dots though - they each have a tiny LED in their holes!)   The names are grouped in various ways, with the groupings annotated by embossed lettering.  This, plus the level of the name tablets makes the memorial extremely friendly to wheelchair users and the blind.  They will allow you to take rubbings of names that interest you - the numerous memorial staff have rolls of paper to give people bits of and rubbing pencils to lend people so they can take away their copy of what's there.

The oak trees that are being planted and about 8-10m tall at the moment and quite well spread, as the intention is that they will grow rapidly and form quite a lot of shade, but that's just going to have to come with time.  However, some of them are just starting now to drop their acorns on top of people!

The only thing that is open right now is the pools and the garden around them.  The small original visitor centre about the building of the memorial is still there, but the new ones should be finished in a year or so.

I fully support the time-controlled access that they are using whilst access is so limited by all the building work going on - it would be chaos otherwise, and it is quite well organised too.  It probably took 5-10 minutes from the moment of entering to walking past the final check and into the memorial itself - some of this is on uneven streets as you're actually walking around the outside to get around to the far side from the entrance, so that the security stuff can be done inside.

Visitor tip: if you have some kind of plastic name badge holder capable to holding your ticket (or for print-at-home passes, it'll need to be the third of a height of A4), with an attached lanyard, you might need fewer hands to carry everything!)   Don't take any bags at all - you'll get through quicker!

Pictures later.