The National September 11 Memorial in New York City (link) at the new
Liberty Tower sells, in the gift shop, National Geographic’s “A Place of
Remembrance: Official Book of the National September 11 Memorial”, a glossy and
heavy paperback, authored by Allison Blais and Lynn Rasic, with a Foreword by
Michael R. Bloomberg, and an Afterword by Joe Daniels. The book runs 228 pages and has 8 chapters.
The biggest value of the book is the myriad professional
photos, including almost all of the contents of the Memorial. Flash photography is not allowed in the
Museum, and a major sanctum at the Museum does not allow photography at
all. But many small items are shown in
the book, as on p. 77.
The most interesting part of the text is the early part,
giving the history of the World Trade Center. The early engineering work in the 1960s as
advanced for its time, as were the problems of displacing people from “Radio
Row”. I had taken the ride to the top in
the summer of 1970 myself, when I had started my first employement gig in New
Jersey. I wasn’t aware that the Port
Authority was getting out of the real estate business and selling the building
in the summer of 2001.
Of course, the book recreates the details of September 11,
2001 in both New York City and at the Pentagon in detail (as well as Flight
93). One detail that is often overlooked
is the displacement of many lower Manhattan residents. Some were not able to return to their
apartments or condos for weeks to months, some as long as a year. Since property insurance typically doesn’t
cover acts of war or terror, I’m not sure how these residents would have fared
or whether the Bush administration or Congress arranged to compensate
them. Possessions would have been
irretrievable and lost (including work, as with artists) in some cases.
About the last half of the book describes rebuilding the site
(including Liberty Tower) and the Memorial and Museum themselves (there is an
outdoor fountain Memorial area which can be visited without going into the
Museum). I recall that designs were
submitted in 2002, and that originally the site was to be rebuilt by 2008, but
in fact the Liberty Tower wasn’t finished until 2013 and it is still not quite
open yet. A subplot of one of my
screenplay scripts (“American Epic”), deals with the effort to plan the
rebuilding, but that thread has become obsolete.
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