Located on the footprint of the South Tower, the In Memoriam exhibition is a photographic gallery of the people killed in the 1993 and 2001 World Trade Center attacks. Using touchscreens, visitors can learn more about each person, accessing additional photographs and testimonies, some of which were recorded by StoryCorps, a national oral history initiative. A darkened inner chamber presents visual and audio profiles of individual victims.
What Remained
What was stunning, after the collapse of the largest human-made structures ever destroyed, was how little was left. Within two weeks of the attacks, the Port Authority charged architect Bartholomew Voorsanger of Voorsanger & Associates, Marilyn Jordan Taylor of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Saul Wenegrat, curator of the Port Authority’s art collection, with tagging objects that might appropriately be included in an interpretive museum.
Architect Mark Wagner, who worked for Voorsanger and now works for Davis Brody Bond, did most of the tagging, scouring the seven-story mountain of rubble before it was hauled off to Fresh Kills, a 2,200-acre (890.3 ha) landfill on Staten Island. His tags included sections of the broadcast mast from the North Tower, which once loomed almost one third of a mile (0.5 km) over lower Manhattan, crumpled red pieces from Alexander Calder’s sculpture Bent Propeller, twenty vehicles crushed beyond recognition, PATH station turnstiles—anything that might be of importance in the future narrative of that day. These items were stored at Hangar 17, a vast space at Kennedy International Airport, and some of them eventually were returned and are now on display at the museum.
Wagner went on his gut, selecting pieces that “connected with me as a New Yorker, as an architect, as an artist, as a human being experiencing 9/11.” He said that as others learned what he was doing, especially the construction crews, “they’d say, ‘Hey, Mark, you have to come and take a look at this. I’d like you to save this piece of steel.’ It might not have meant anything to me, but the point was that it connected with someone, so I would try to save it.”
Early on, he tagged a bicycle rack that is now on view at the museum. “I thought it was so poignant that a bike messenger or someone rode their bike to work, locked their bike up on Vesey Street right by 5WTC and then, at the end of the day, could not get it back because they were dead or not coming back,” Wagner said. “There was an article in the New York Post in January of 2002 that mentioned the bike rack. A week or so later, a guy shows up at Hangar 17 and says, ‘I hear you have my bike.’ We’re like, ‘OK, which one is yours?’ He took out his key and unlocked the bike and asked, ‘What are you going to do with it?’ I said it would probably go to a museum or a memorial, something along those lines. He said, ‘The bike is pretty banged up; you can keep it, but I want my lock back.’ The lock was still in good shape and it was an expensive lock.… That’s the way it was. Some things have value to people that they will take home and keep as a remembrance. Others see the value of leaving it for the museum. In this particular case, ‘Yeah, leave the bike on the rack. It means more on the rack than it does to me.’”