NYC 9/11 memorial to feature audiovisual display

NEW YORK — Audiovisual tributes to the thousands of Sept. 11 victims — accompanied with stories from their lives — will form the core of the memorial museum, officials announced Wednesday.

Victims’ families have been asked to share materials for the underground exhibit within the footprint of the World Trade Center’s south tower. They also must confirm the accuracy of the names to be inscribed around two aboveground memorial pools, surrounded by a park.

“The key to this part of the museum is participation by friends and families of the victims,” said Joseph C. Daniels, president and chief executive of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. “We’re asking them to leave us recordings and images or remembrances of those they lost.”

Through a new telephone initiative — called Call to Remember — relatives and friends are being asked “to pick up the phone and spend time reflecting on those they lost,” Daniels said.

More than 3,000 packets announcing the effort have been mailed.

The resulting materials will be at the core of tributes to victims including names and photographs flashed on a wall of the museum 70 feet underground. In an adjacent mini-theater Daniels calls the exhibit’s “inner sanctum,” visitors will view continuous movies, images and narration commemorating each of the more than 2,900 victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack.

Visitors wishing to see individual tributes to loved ones will be accommodated.

Another section of the museum will “tell the story of 9/11,” Daniels said.

To enter the exhibit, visitors will cross a footbridge and pass remnants of the south tower’s columns. They will then see a 12-foot-high wall of portraits, with display consoles offering details about individuals’ lives.

Those remembered will include victims of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people, and those who died on Sept. 11 at the Pentagon, in the four hijacked planes and aboard the airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania.

“This exhibit will show that each and every one of these victims was living a full and rich life,” Daniels said. “They were just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The memorial is expected to open by the 10th anniversary of the 2001 attacks, and the museum a year later.

Daniels said no victim will be left out. Anyone for whom materials are not submitted will be honored using portraits used in the 2006 trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, who is serving a life sentence for conspiring to kill U.S. citizens as part of the Sept. 11 attacks.

More than $800 million has been committed from public and private and sources to build the memorial, including $350 million in donations.

“Every stakeholder at the World Trade Center site is focused on making sure that the museum opens on time,” Daniels said. “Everyone’s being cooperative because this is the heart of the redevelopment of the World Trade Center.”

On the Net:

Memorial Exhibition Archive: newmuseumme.national911memorial.org

(This version CORRECTS name of organization to National September 11 Memorial & Museum, formerly World Trade Center Memorial Foundation; ADDS photo links)