NY plans Sept. 11 museum to remember experience

NEW YORK -- Visitors to the Sept. 11 memorial museum could relive the 2001 terrorist attacks in an "immersive" area that surrounds them with pictures of the falling towers, the sounds of police sirens and the last words of some of those who died at the World Trade Center.\nThe first piece of steel to be hit by a hijacked jet -- as well as lottery tickets and keys pulled from Ground Zero, and a contemplative area where visitors can leave personal messages -- are among other proposed exhibits for the museum.\nThe plans, presented in public workshops over the past month, offer the first glimpse of an institution that is likely to become one of the country's most visited museums. The ideas are also likely to prompt sensitive questions of how to tell the story of Sept. 11.\nRecently, a proposed freedom museum was removed from the space that had been reserved for it at Ground Zero, after the World Trade Center families and others bitterly complained that the museum could foster inappropriate debate about Sept. 11 at the site of the attacks.\nThe memorial museum would be built around the twin towers' footprints and a slurry wall that are the last remnants of the trade center. Visitors would view exhibits while descending to the footprints 70 feet below street level, and then walk up again.\n"The idea is to move people from devastation to renewal to recovery," said museum planner Jeff Howard.\nHoward, hired to develop exhibits by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., the agency overseeing the rebuilding, said the museum would have an "iconic artifact" such as a large piece of steel from the trade center near the entrance. Family members who want to privately mourn their loved ones will be able to board an elevator directly to a separate room where victims' unidentified remains will be encased.\nOne exhibit would focus on a fact-based account of the attack in New York, as well as the crashes of hijacked jets into the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania, field. The other, "immersive" experience would try to make visitors feel as if they were in the towers, with the sounds of sirens and even voicemail messages left on Sept. 11 by those who died. The exhibit "is not necessarily appropriate for children," Howard said.\n"We are very, very concerned about revisionist history," said Charles Wolf, whose wife died at the trade center. "While we that lived through it are there, we want this thing nailed down in the next five years."\nWolf said he does not know yet whether he would like to go through the you-are-there exhibit. But he said it is important that the museum accurately depict the attacks.\n"You can't, in any way, shape or form, sugarcoat any of it," said Lee Ielpi, who lost his firefighter son at the trade center. "Reality is, probably 99.9 percent of the country didn't lose anybody there, except they lost a little piece of America, and they need to understand what happened that day."\nA separate room would allow visitors to "contribute one's own experience and impression" by leaving written messages or drawings about Sept. 11, Howard said.