If ever there was a no-brainer decision to make about a potential national park, this is it: accepting the donation of The National September 11 Memorial & Museum as a unit of the National Park Service.
The memorial opened at the site of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2011 (9/11), ten years after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center toppled the twin towers and killed nearly 3,000 people. The memorial serves as a tribute to the people who died at the World Trade Center, as well as in the crash of United Airlines flight 93 in Shanksville, Penn., and at the Pentagon in Washington, DC. It also remembers the six people who died in the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993.
Two reflecting pools now sit within the footprints of the Twin Towers, each covering nearly an acre and featuring “the largest manmade waterfalls in the North America,” according to the memorial’s website. Edging the pools are bronze panels inscribed with the names of every person who died in the 1993 and 2001 attacks. The tranquil memorial serves as “a powerful reminder of the largest loss of life resulting from a foreign attack on American soil and the greatest single loss of rescue personnel in American history,” the website continues.
The 110,000-square-foot museum, scheduled to open in 2012, will tell the story of 9/11 “through multimedia displays, archives, narratives and a collection of monumental and authentic artifacts,” the museum’s website notes. Parallel to the facts of the attack are “intimate stories of loss, compassion, reckoning, and recovery that are central to telling the story of the attacks and the aftermath.”
It's no surprise that the memorial has already become one of the most visited sites of its kind in the United States. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and 9/11 Memorial President Joe Daniels announced the memorial’s millionth visitor on December 29, 2011, just 116 days after it opened to the public. Visitors have come from countries on six continents, and have included Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, President of Chile Sebastián Piñera, First Lady of Mexico Margarita Zavala, Princess Lalla Salma of Morocco, King Harald V and Queen Sonja of Norway, King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia of Sweden, and Denmark’s Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Mary, according to a news release from the memorial’s press office and a report at royaltyinthenews.com.
Given the meaning of this memorial and museum to American citizens and to people all over the world, it seems that the process of turning over this site to the National Park Service would move swiftly. The companion bills to complete this transaction (S 1537 and HR 2882), introduced on September 9, 2011 in both houses, are still in committee. Hearings on the Senate bill were held on October 19, but the House bill has not yet received a hearing by the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forest and Public Lands. (The press office at the 9/11 Memorial did not respond to my emailed questions about the status of the Congressional bills.)
The two nearly identical bills call for the Board of Directors of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum to donate the title to the property to the Department of the Interior. Once the memorial becomes a unit of the National Park Service, the bills call for an appropriation of $20 million per fiscal year for their administration, with the stipulation that “any funds appropriated to carry out this Act shall be matched with funds from non-Federal sources.”
The requirement to match federal funds is based on the foundation’s past success: the funds to establish and construct the memorial and museum came largely from 300,000 private donations raised by the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center Foundation.
In a year when any appropriation meets with opposition in the House and Senate, these bills may be forced to languish. In the meantime, the 9/11 Memorial continues to draw thousands of visitors every day. Advance visitor passes (which are free) are required; these can be ordered through the Memorial’s online reservation system.
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