9/11 Museum Funding Held Up by One Senator

9/11 Memorial Offers Quiet Amid New York Chaos, Designer Says

Sep 112012

DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — Michael Arad, the architect behind the 9/11 memorial that opened a year ago this week, wanted to create a space for quiet reflection on those who died in the attacks in the midst of the chaos of New York City.

Arad’s design, called Reflecting Absence, beat out 5,000 submitted proposals to become the memorial tribute at the site of the attacks that killed nearly 2,700 people. The site has now been visited by 4.5 million people.

“I wanted to capture that and create a place that allowed people to come together to reflect on what happened here, not alone but as a community in a public space where people gather and congregate,” Arad told ABC News.

Arad, a native of Israel who was raised in the United Kingdom, the United States and Mexico, had only lived in New York for 2.5 years when the north and south towers of the World Trade Center complex were attacked.

“It changed who I am,” he said. “I became a New Yorker because of what happened here.”

Reflecting Absence, which was chosen as the winning design in January 2004, consists of a plaza containing waterfalls above reflecting pools where the original north and south towers stood. The names of all those killed on Sept. 11, 2001, and in the earlier World Trade Center attack on Feb. 26, 1993, are inscribed on bronze parapets surrounding the waterfalls.

In arranging the names, Arad and his team queried close to 3,000 families, and received more than 1,200 requests asking that certain names of people that knew each other be placed next to or near one another.

“[The names] are arranged according to what I call a system of meaningful adjacency. When you walk up to these panels, you don’t see the order but, in fact, they are very carefully organized,” he said.

The “survivor tree” — a callery pear saved from the rubble of the fallen World Trade Center towers — is also featured prominently in the memorial. After it was salvaged from Ground Zero, the tree was sent to a Bronx nursery, where it was not expected to survive. But it survived an uprooting and now stands 30 feet tall. It has come to symbolize hope and rebirth.

“There was just something incredibly beautiful about that story of its survival,” Arad said.

Arad’s ultimate goal with the memorial’s centerpiece of waterfalls, which flow into the voids left by the original towers, was to create a place where visitors can experience the magnitude of the voids.

“I wanted to know: Could I bring that idea of emptiness, this continuous presence, and making absence present and visible, and tangible to the site?” he said. “And that’s really what these spaces are about — making what is no longer here, here for all of us as we stand around the voids.”

Garbage-Throwing Incident at 9/11 Memorial Outrages New Yorkers

Jun 262012

DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — New Yorkers are outraged over a report that kids from Brooklyn’s Junior High School 292 got so bored during a visit to the 9/11 Museum and Memorial at the site where the World Trade Center towers were brought down by terrorists that they tossed baseballs and empty soda bottles into the reflecting pools.

One student tried to justify the action of classmates by saying, “No one was disrespecting. It wasn’t nothing like that. No one was being serious. Everyone was kind of bored and it was just something to do.”

Whatever the explanation, a teacher from Junior High School 292 called the incident “a total disgrace.”

The Department of Education has promised to look into the alleged incidents.

9/11 Museum Funding Held Up by One Senator

Feb 012012

David Handschuh-Pool/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — There’s a controversy brewing in the halls of Congress, pitting budget hawk Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., against two New York senators and touching on a politically and emotionally sensitive subject.

Coburn is singlehandedly holding up federal funding for the 9/11 memorial museum at Ground Zero.

Legislation before the Senate calls for $20 million a year, $200 million total over the next 10 years in federal funding for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at Ground Zero.

Coburn is calling for equivalent cuts to be made to pay for the added government spending on the project.

In a letter sent to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Wednesday, Coburn says that while the “merits” of the museum project are not in question, he has “concerns” about the legislation.

“This legislation authorizes at least $200 million over the next 10 years for the effort, but does not include any provisions to pay for these potential costs, adding to our more than $15 trillion debt,” Coburn wrote.

Coburn’s office said the dispute could be solved “in minutes” if the sponsors would just look for areas of waste and duplication in the general government already identified by the Government Accountability Office.

“Coburn believes we can best honor the heroism and sacrifices of 9/11 by making hard choices and reducing spending on less-vital priorities, rather than borrowing money,” Coburn spokesman John Hart told ABC News Wednesday. “Finding $20 million in savings is the least we can do to demonstrate that Congress also understands the value of service and sacrifice.”

Even better would be if members of Congress could encourage the effort to fund the project using local sources, or — as is the case with the Oklahoma City bombing memorial — private sources, Coburn’s office said.

His office noted that the 9/11 museum is “already receiving generous private support from hundreds of patriotic Americans, businesses and corporations across the country,” so it shouldn’t need the extra federal money.

Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, two of the co-sponsors of the bill, on Wednesday responded in anger to the lone senator standing in the way of government funding for the museum.

Schumer said the project needs to be funded with some federal money in substance and for the sake of symbolism.

“This is sacred ground not only to New Yorkers but to Americans, and to have the memorial, the museum, in as good a way as possible not limited by lack of funding makes eminent sense,” Schumer told reporters Wednesday. “Clearly, if you talk to [New York] Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg and others, and there’s been very generous support from the private sector, there is not enough money to keep, to have the memorial function in the way it should.”

Schumer and Gillibrand plan to sit down with Coburn “soon” to discuss his concerns.

“We hope that Sen. Coburn will relent,” Schumer said.

Coburn, in his letter Wednesday, demanded a “full accounting of previously awarded federal funding” for the museum, as well as a “detailed breakdown of the project with itemized cost estimates.”

“It is, after all, our obligation as stewards of the treasury to scrutinize for taxpayers how every penny we spend is put to use,” Coburn wrote, “even for the best intentioned projects.”