September 11th Memorial United States

Legendary

A memorial to those killed in the 9/11 attacks and World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

Photo by JJBers

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Michael Arad was 32 years old on the morning of September 11, 2001. He stood on the roof of his apartment building in New York and watched the Twin Towers fall.

He was an architect, but he wasn't famous. When the city held a contest two years later to design a memorial, 5,201 people from 63 countries sent in ideas.

His won.

Arad's design was called Reflecting Absence. He worked on it with a landscape architect named Peter Walker, and the idea was to make the emptiness left by the towers into something people could actually see.

The memorial sits in Lower Manhattan, where the World Trade Center once stood. On September 11, 2001, terrorists flew two hijacked planes into the Twin Towers, and both buildings collapsed.

Nearly 3,000 people died that day, at the towers, at the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., and in a field in Pennsylvania where passengers fought back against the hijackers.

The memorial's two pools sit exactly where the towers stood. Each one is nearly an acre wide and sunk 30 feet into the ground.

Water pours down all four sides in the largest human-made waterfalls in North America. At the bottom, it drops again into a smaller square hole in the middle and disappears.

Arad called the pools "absence made visible." Water keeps flowing in, but they can never be filled.

Around the edges of both pools, 2,983 names are cut into bronze panels. They include everyone killed on 9/11 and six people killed in an earlier bombing at the World Trade Center in 1993.

Names aren't in alphabetical order. Families asked for coworkers, friends, and relatives to be placed next to each other, so people who died together rest together.

About 400 swamp white oak trees fill the plaza around the pools. One tree is different: a Callery pear that workers found burned and broken in the rubble.

The city's parks department nursed it back to health and replanted it in 2010. People call it the Survivor Tree.

The memorial opened on September 11, 2011, ten years after the attacks. The museum next to it opened in 2014.

Stand at the edge of a pool and let the sound of the water block out the city. Look for white roses tucked into the names, placed by staff on each person's birthday. Find the Survivor Tree, which blooms with white flowers every spring, and visit the museum below the plaza if your family is ready for it.