The Freedom Tower

This reflection on Ground Zero is from Ali’s Blog, a mixture
of personal anecdotes, observations…

“After visiting Liberty Island and the Statue of Liberty, it was sobering to walk back through Downtown Manhattan and visit the Ground Zero site. Now that the clean up operation has been completed and they have started to rebuild in the area, it has been renamed as the World Trade Centre site (back to its original name). Looking at the site it was hard to imagine the atrocities that happened there, it truly seemed unbelievable that such huge towers, buildings that I had visited on past trips to NY, were just no longer there.

The site itself felt very much in a renewal phase, with the train station operational again and with the commencement in April 2006 of the building of the new Freedom Tower.
In addition, construction has begun to build the World Trade Centre Memorial and Museum at the site. This is intended as a solemn space where visitors can remember the thousands of lives lost during the 2001 (and also the 1993) terrorist attacks. The memorial is scheduled to open on September 11, 2009. The museum is scheduled to follow, opening in 2010, and the Freedom Tower in 2011.
After walking round the outside of the site we visited the recently opened Tribute WTC Centre, something which I would recommend to anyone visiting that area. 
The Tribute Centre is a project of the September 11th Families Association. The Association was set up to establish a viable communications network among families of all the victims.

n 2004 the Association expanded its mission when it initiated the concept of Tribute WTC Visitor Center, a place where members of the September 11th community could connect with the thousands of visitors who come to the site daily by offering exhibits and walking tours.

It is scheduled to remain open until the permanent WTC Memorial and Museum are completed. Any tributes left at the WTC site are removed daily (for safety reasons as it is now a working building site) and some are rehoused in this centre. I found this an incredibly moving place- it documents the events of Sept 11th from the perspective of both emergency workers and people who worked in the area. All are tastefully and respectfully displayed in various medium, such as video, audio, text, personal belongings and photos. The wall of “Missing” posters and then Gallery 4, where photos of the victims are displayed, really brought home to me the enormity of the event. Before it had been about a place, the Twin Towers, but seeing this memorial personalized it, this was not about buildings, it was about the 3,000+ people who lost their lives that day. I must admit that a few tears were shed there, as I looked at the photos and saw the lives and families of those victims.