The National September 11 Memorial & Museum commemorates the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001, in which two airplanes, hijacked by Al-Qaeda terrorists, flew into the Twin Towers killing all 157 passengers and 2,606 people in the World Trade Center. Although the memorial is dedicated to the victims of the World Trade Center attacks, there were two other hijacked planes that also struck targets in the United States on the same day. One flew into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the US Department of Defense, killing all 64 passengers and 125 people in the building. The other crashed in Pennsylvania, as passengers fought with the terrorists in the cockpit, killing all 44 people on board.
The memorial and museum also commemorates the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, in which a truck bomb was detonated in the North Tower intending to have the building fall onto the South Tower. The explosion was not as big as the terrorists had hoped and as a result only the underground parking and ground floor were damaged. However, six people died and over a thousand were injured.
The 9/11 incident in New York created the biggest panic in the world since America's use of the Atomic bomb in Japan in 1945 or the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Many people thought that 9/11 signaled the beginning of World War 3. Televisions in every town across the globe were continuously rolling images of the two planes crashing into the 110-floor Twin Towers and then, about a half hour later, the towers collapsing. Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden stated that the reasons for the attacks were US support for Israel, sanctions against Iraq and US troops in Saudi Arabia, among others. A month after the destruction of the Twin Towers the US, and later other NATO members, invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban regime, which had been harboring many important Al-Qaeda members. Bin Laden, however, was found and killed only in 2011 in Pakistan.
The early-morning attacks of September 11, 2001 were not only a moral shock for residents, visitors and lovers of New York, they had literally paralyzed Lower Manhattan. Several other buildings in or around the World Trade Center were either completely destroyed or heavily damaged, bringing the total property loss to about $10 billion. The New York Stock Exchange remained closed for almost a week, having a detrimental effect on global markets. The various closings, cancellations and evacuations in and around the area halted business operations for many days and the psychological terror remains in the minds of many New Yorkers to this day. The World Trade Center was fully cleaned in May 2002 and in November 2006 the first stone of the One World Trade Center skyscraper was laid.
The construction of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum began in March 2006 and opened to the victims' families on September 11, 2011, and a day later to the public. The memorial, known by the name of Reflecting Absence, consists of two black square marble pools that stand exactly on the site where the Twin Towers had stood. It was designed by architects Michael Arad, Peter Walker and Davis Brody Bond and had a cost of $500 million. Each pool - an exact footprint of the tower. Water runs from the edges several meters down to the bottom and then flow towards the center of the pool and into a square opening, the bottom of which cannot be seen. At night the pools are illuminated from within, creating two large craters of white light. The names of all the 2,983 people killed in the 1993 and 2001 attacks are inscribed on the 76 bronze plates that are fixed to the edges of the pool. The names are arranged so as to indicate which passengers crashed into which tower and which bystanders stood next to which tower when they collapsed. About 400 sweet gum and swamp white oak trees stand in the Memorial Plaza around the two pools and a special spot it dedicated to the Survivor Tree, a callery pear tree that was found in the debris of the World Trade Center site during the cleanup. It was removed and taken to a Bronx plant nursery, where it remained for nine years before being replanted in the Memorial Plaza symbolizing rebirth.
Next to the two pools, on the eastern side of the Memorial Plaza, stands the 9/11 Museum, an irregular building built in the deconstructivist style by Davis Brody Bond. It was inaugurated in May 2014, first opening for the victims' family and then the public, as the memorial itself. The museum itself is located 21 meters underground and contains over 10,000 artifacts, 23,000 photographs, over 500 hours of video and almost 2,000 oral stories dedicated to the victims. Among the artifacts we can find pieces of metal from all the damaged World Trade Center buildings, emergency vehicles present during the fall of the skyscrapers, recordings of people responding to the emergency calls, as well as images of the Twin Towers as they had stood before the attacks.
The Twin Towers were built in 1973 and were two of the seven buildings located in the new World Trade Center. For a year they were the tallest buildings in the world - the North Tower's roof being 417 meters high and the South Tower's roof 415 meters. With its antenna the North Tower reached a height of 526 meters, which is 15 meters lower than the height of the One World Trade Center skyscraper that we see today. The total cost of the World Trade Center, which was completed in 1985, was $400 million, which is roughly $2.3 billion in today's money. Originally property of the city, the World Trade Center was leased to Silverstein Properties in 1998, three years before the destruction of the towers during 9/11.
The Twin Towers had been an icon in New York, symbolizing the ceaselessly striving spirit of American entrepreneurship. They were as famous as the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building and other landmarks. Their fame came early in their existence, in 1974, when French high-wire artist Philippe Petit made eight passages back and forth on his tightrope between the tower roofs. The performance was talked about in the whole world and gave the World Trade Center the publicity it needed, for no one had shown interest in renting office space there before.
During an average workday about 50,000 people worked in the Twin Towers and about 200,000 passed in and out. The South Tower observation deck offered breathtaking views of Upper New York Bay, which is located between Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the State of New Jersey. Being the only two major skyscrapers in downtown Manhattan, they sharply stood out from the rest of the buildings and were a marvel if viewed from a passing plane. The plume of smoke that rose after their destruction in 2001 was so high that it was captured by a NASA satellite photograph taken from space. Many New Yorkers still cannot get used to their disappearance.