9/11 Memorial Museum

Wednesday was the first day that the 9/11 Memorial Museum was open to the public and my friend Alisha was able to get free tickets through work. I am adamantly against the regular admission price ($24) to begin with — I feel like it should be suggested donation, if anything at all — but I was curious to see the museum.

9/11 is the first huge, historical event that I was actually very much alive for — I was 16 and watched the horrible events unfold live during my high school Spanish class. I had first been to New York (and had fallen madly in love with the city) two years earlier, although we never visited the World Trade Towers. My love of New York has only grown in leaps and bounds with each passing year, and now that I can finally call myself a resident seeing the museum felt like something I needed to do.

I hesitate to describe the museum with any adjectives that would come across as disrespectful — I wasn't excited to go, but I was interested. I didn't have an awesome time, but it was, I thought, a very moving experience. It was also incredibly heartbreaking, terrifying, abstract, emotional and every other word that comes to mind when you think of a museum devoted entirely to remembering a great national tragedy.

I think the design of the museum is very well done, and beautiful in its openness, stark spaces and industrial feel. There are, of course, objects, both enormous (part of the antennae, a tangled firetruck, twisted steel beams) and tiny (shoes worn by evacuees, Metrocards that were used that day, Yankees tickets for a game that never happened that night) but it's the stories and the faces that hurt the most.

None of us left the memorial rooms filled with photos of the victims with dry eyes, and the recordings of voice messages from people within in the towers were the hardest to bear. There are tissue boxes placed in nearly every room, and for good reason — you won't question their necessity at all — in fact there were times we wondered why there weren't more of them around (maybe they ran out?).

The events of 9/11 are so crazy complicated and emotional that it's hard to know how I feel about any of it — sad, confused, angry, scared, detached or all of the above. I do know, however, how I feel about the museum gift shop selling 9/11-themed magnets, silk scarves and cheese boards — embarrassed, for those who buy those things as well as for those who profit from them.

I wish, of course, that 9/11 had never happened but unfortunately we can only go forward, not back. I can't say that I'll be returning to the museum anytime soon, and I'll likely be recovering from my first visit for a long time, but if the true goal of the memorial is that we "never forget," then, at least in my experience, the museum is a success.