9/11 museum to include personal objects
Charles Adrian Duran (left) along with brother Winston Arthur Grant II, and his mother, Joyce Grant, lost their loved one Winston Arther Grant on 9/11. They cherish an image of him seen going down a flight of stairs, in Tower One, with other people, taken by Andre Lamberston for Time. (Aug. 16, 2011) Credit: Newsday/Jessica Rotkiewicz
When the museum portion of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum opens next year, it will display more than 17,000 personal objects donated by victims' families or recovered from the site of the World Trade Center.
An exhibition designed to convey the terrible violence of that day and the fullness of the lost lives needs both, said curator Jan Ramirez.
The collection includes things like much-used Rollerblades and a rosary, but also a heavily damaged firefighter's helmet from the site, keys, identification cards and golf balls from offices. Larger objects were crushed, she said.
"A lot of people were very involved with sports, weekend golf and fishing," she said. "People also sent in some signature of personality: a favorite hat that a man wore to work every day, or the rabbit's foot he always had in his pocket, the perfume that was her signature scent."
Ramirez and her staff are racing to catalog the items and prepare the exhibition, which will also include video, text and photographs.
It is, she said, grueling, but unexpectedly comforting work. "At every stage of the economic ladder, these are people who were bettering themselves for the sake of the people they loved," she said. "What I take away from it is that humanity is 99.9 percent pretty darn good and pretty generous and pretty talented and incredibly committed to their life values."
