National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Memorial and history museum in Lower Manhattan, New York, United States
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum occupies the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. Its design, Reflecting Absence by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, sets two large square recessed pools in the footprints of the Twin Towers, with water falling in thin sheets down four sheer walls around a central void. Swamp white oaks are planted in rows and clusters around the pools, and the victims' names are cut into the parapets surrounding the waterfalls.
The memorial grew from the 2003 World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition, won in January 2004 by Michael Arad and Peter Walker's "Reflecting Absence". Heavy construction began in August 2006; the memorial was dedicated on September 11, 2011, and opened the next day. The museum was dedicated on May 15, 2014, and opened six days later.
The names ringing the pools are ordered by "meaningful adjacencies": company, floor and the bonds families requested, so co-workers and friends lie near one another. Each September 11 the memorial holds a reading of the names, and white roses are placed on the panels to mark birthdays.
The memorial plaza sits at street level above the museum, entered from the surrounding streets of the World Trade Center site, bounded by Vesey, Liberty, Church and West Side Highway. The pools are recessed 30 feet below street level, so names on the parapets are read looking down. The museum entrance is separate, on the plaza.
The Survivor Tree is a callery pear found in the rubble in October 2001, badly burned with only one living branch. It showed new growth the next spring, and in December 2010 the roughly 30-foot tree was returned to the site.
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