Inside the Freedom Tower

What would it have been like to be in the Twin Towers?

I’ll never know, but I got a chance to visit the 9/11 Museum and the new Freedom Tower.

We didn’t have a guide for the museum. He left, glad I think, that he no longer had to be videoed by an annoying Canadian. The climb down into the museum was impressive itself. There was a broken and rusted beam from tower 1. The East tower. It was no small thing, made of hardened steel, and yet gravity and weight had snapped it like a small easily snapped thingee.

The farther down we went, the darker it got. That was a nice touch. At the start, we found informational displays about the towers, about the attack, and a cool picture of the NYC skyline when the towers dominated it.

The museum featured many stories of the victims and survivors. There was a metal pillar at the bottom of it with the names of first responders who died painted on it. PAPD 37. NYPD 23. FDNY 343.

Sitting at the base of that pillar, The-Youngest found himself crying. Not because of the numbers, but because he sat near it and listened to the voices of the people who had died. It made it all so tragically real.

Ordinary people living ordinary lives, lives lost.

The museum seemed to understand space. The long hallways had extremely high ceilings. It made me feel small. Insignificant. Along one wall were tiles with all the names of the lost. The names surrounded a plaque that read, NO DAY SHALL ERASE YOU FROM THE MEMORY OF TIME.

Beautiful.

For The-Prettiest-Girl-in-the-World, there were more tears. Tears for those lost and those left behind.

For our cousins, it was a truly emotional experience that brought back so many bad memories, but man, they were so brave to venture into a time of such pain and trauma.

As much as we could connect with the experience, they lived it. Felt it. It was burned into them.

My most moving moment was seeing ladder 3, a fire engine crushed by falling debris. More twisted steel hung from walls at various points, a testament to the total destruction.

We spent hours there, and could have spent hours more –  there’s a lot to read and a lot to see. I loved seeing the artwork people had created. Our cousins spent a long time looking at the pictures of the people killed.

All of us sagged a little by the time we left, like the anguish of all those souls weighed upon us. We all felt exhausted.

But we still had to see the Freedom Tower. Unlike the Empire State, it was shiny and new, with another spectacular view of NYC. Now that we knew the city a bit, we could point out things. Oh, there’s Governor’s Island. There’s Ellis Island. The Brooklyn Bridge. There’s that huge, massively tall tower that no one could remember the name of. There’s a water tower.

We did a slow walk around the viewing level, while The-Youngest, with the Freedom Tower iPad did his best to tell us what we were looking at. Sadly, often by the time he had found it, we had walked halfway around the floor.

As I said, seeing New York from this high is something. A MUST-SEE.

We had some nice chats with our cousins while we wandered the viewing level.

Both are such amazing people and we were so happy to have had this time with them. They are New Yorkers through and through. Funny. Tough. Kind.

Visiting the 9/11 memorial, the museum, and the Freedom Tower would have been a great experience if we’d done it ourselves, but seeing it with them, listening to their stories, and sharing the moments with them was priceless.

It made the day just a little beyond great.