Everyone remembers what they were doing on September 11, 2001.
At the time I was living in the UK. I was working on a project in rural Lincolnshire and spent that afternoon in some long (and frankly rather tedious) meetings, oblivious to what was unfolding on the other side of the Atlantic. At the end of the day, my colleague went to pick up our car from where we had parked it down the road. I waited on the narrow street with our clients, making small talk. It seemed to take an unusually long while for my colleague to show up – we were in an English market town and it was hardly rush hour – but eventually the car pulled up. He got out with a look of shock on his face. “Sorry – I was listening to the radio and missed the turning. Some planes have flown into the World Trade Center in New York and the towers have collapsed.”
We made the two hour journey home in near silence, listening to the news on BBC Radio as we let what had happened sink in. It was too soon to know whether our worst fears were irrational or a harbinger of what was to come. As we speculated as to what would happen next, and how the USA, a wounded military giant, would respond, I suddenly felt a long way away from home indeed.
Fast forward 11 years to today. Yes the world has changed, although perhaps not to the extent of my darkest fears that day. We have adjusted to the ‘new normal’ of heightened security with grim resignation. The ‘war on terror’ continues, but it has faded to the background of most people’s day to day lives. A new tower is reaching skywards above Ground Zero.
I imagine there has been much reflection, discussion and debate in the US about how to record and interpret such a significant historic event, particularly since it is such a painfully recent chapter. What objects should be preserved, how should they be interpreted – and who decides?
On my travels to the US I saw objects salvaged from the wreckage of the towers in several places, including the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the Newseum, the New York Public Library, and a visitor centre right near the current 9/11 memorial (the museum on the memorial site is not yet opened).
The 9/11 memorial site is open to the public and free, although for the moment you need a timed ticket to enter because the surrounding area is still a building site. In the footprint of each of the buildings are enormous fountains, surrounded by the names of those who perished in the towers (as well as the Pentagon, Flight 93, and the victims of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center). Rather than an alphabetical listing, people are grouped by flight crew or workplace. This juxtaposition of friends and colleagues, developed in consultation with next of kin and survivors, is a unique characteristic of the memorial.
For me, the most poignant part of the memorial site was the ‘survival tree’ – this tree was originally on the WTC site and miraculously survived the collapse of the adjacent buildings. It was removed, rehabilitated and now reinstated in the memorial site where it is gradually reestablishing itself. To me it was a symbol of continuity; the resilience of nature in the face of destructive forces unleashed by humanity.
In a museum setting, it’s a very different experience encountering objects from an event that you vividly remember, compared to something that’s safely abstracted in the past. As well as the twisted girders, plane parts and dust, there were displays that had a distinctly chilling edge:
Another thing that sticks in my mind from this experience was the realisation that one person’s vivid memory is another one’s history. When I was in the 9/11 exhibition in the Newseum, there was a another woman about my age with a couple of children in tow. They would have been about 10 or 11 years of age. While I quietly pondered the wreckage on display, I overheard her explain to her children what we were looking at – that once there were these bad men in planes, they flew into buildings, the buildings collapsed, and so on. I was struck by the fact that there is now a generation that is (just about) old enough to understand what happened, but too young to remember. 9/11 is probably as remote a concept to them as the World War II air raids over Britain are to me.
And so it goes – soon enough I won’t be able to say that everyone remembers what they were doing on September 11, 2001.
Thank you Regan, for this thoughtful and perceptive post. It reveals me as the word nerd I truly am; amongst all those big issues that you so deftly highlight there was a bit of me jumping up and down going ‘But look! Look! That’s a really great interpretive object caption and they are so very hard to write well’. Sometimes I don’t know whather to laugh or cry at what a lifetime of interpretive writing has made me!!
Hi Susan,
Don’t worry I noticed that as well, but it was tangential to the point of this post so I decided to leave it unsaid 🙂
I think the phones display is actually a good example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. The words on their own would not be so powerful without those dust-encrusted phones that really bring reality home. And of course the text brings a whole new dimension to the objects – it gives them an active part in the story rather than them just being silent bystanders to the tragedy.