I woke up early and took the Subway to the 9/11 memorial and museum today. Mostly it has been sunny in New York, but I was gifted overcast skies for this somber activity.
This memoral is built right on the footprint of the 2 World Trade Center buildings and the museum artifacts are underground, below the memorial. The museum features the architecture of both the city as well as the buildings that experienced the attack that day, too. I did not take many photos and there are many areas where photos are not allowed anyway.
The slurry wall. Protected surrounding underground entities, like the subway, from harm.
Vesey Street Stairs: many survivors used these stairs to flee the World Trade Center Plaza and get to safety.
The museum tells a story, about a day that started out bright and sunny with a sky that was described as so many kinds of blue an atrist made a mural of of just blue squares in multiple hues of sky blue.
Then the unthinkable happened and the result lead to lives lost on 4 planes. The things I thought about the most were the lives lost within specific agencies whether it be financial firms or local firehouses. I can’t imagine going into work and realizing that many or most of my coworkers were just gone. In some cases, whole families perished on planes. That was another aweful thing to think about. I am grateful to have these places to go and sit in reverence and think about what symbolic ways people can be memorialized. I found myself expanding my appreciation for the human experience of violence. All over the world, people experience family, intimate partner, stranger, job related, institutional, racial, ethnic, gender, atmospheric and many other types of violence. Some of these events happen on a grander scale than others, and some never get memorialized in any grand way, but they are, nonetheless, important.
Joanie On My Mind 