National September 11 Memorial
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
The National September 11 Memorial occupies the footprints of the Twin Towers, destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Nearly three thousand people were killed in the attacks in New York, at the Pentagon and aboard Flight 93. The memorial also includes the names of six people killed in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker designed two enormous voids with waterfalls descending into square pools. The design refuses to rebuild the towers symbolically. Instead, it marks absence at their exact footprints.
Names are arranged according to meaningful adjacencies rather than simple alphabetical order, reflecting relationships such as workplaces, flight crews and family requests. That makes the memorial a designed social map of loss.
Ground Zero is also a place of contested rebuilding. Security, architecture, transportation, commerce and commemoration had to coexist on some of the most valuable land in the world. The surrounding site therefore demonstrates how cities rebuild without being able to return to “before.”
This is recent history with living grief. Keep your voice low and treat the parapets as gravesites in all but legal form. NarRoam can explain the design; it cannot improve on silence when someone beside you is finding a name.