Twenty years later, Americans are preparing to commemorate the terrorist attacks that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001. While the Kennedy Center in Washington is hosting a concert and the Shanksville Memorial in Pennsylvania is preparing a ceremony, the museum and New York Memorial announced for its part not to make any special event.
In question, the health crisis which forced the place to make drastic budget cuts, reports the
New York Times
.
Built from 2006, the World Trace Center memorial was inaugurated in 2011, in time for the ten years of the terrorist attack.
Three years later, in 2014, a museum also opened its doors on the scene of the tragedy.
The memorial consists of a park with two square pools located on the site of the two destroyed towers.
As for the museum, located underground, just below the memorial, it allows visitors to understand in detail what happened.
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To evoke the memory of the tragedy and its victims, the museum's curators had considered the preparation of several special events, including a major anniversary exhibition focusing on the unifying role of music for Americans. But emptied of its visitors for more than a year, the museum had to force itself to lay off more than half of the exhibition service and to drop the project, reports the American daily. Because if the museum welcomed more than 8,500 people per day in 2019, the pandemic brought a violent stop. Its temporary closure and limited capacity have left the institution with a deficit of $ 18 million, and current attendance is only "
around 25%
".
New York Times report
.
Lee Cochran, spokesperson for the museum, said their priority was to focus on "
the basic experience
", namely the permanent exhibitions, while other officials said that the music exhibition was "
in waiting
”.
Other projects in progress have been greatly reduced.
Thus, a traveling exhibition to retrace the history of September 11 has been replaced by posters downloadable online, reports the daily.
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But according to some, the abandonment of the commemoration program could not be explained only by budget cuts. According to Michael Shulan, former artistic director of the museum, the current persons in charge would be reluctant to launch these anniversary events which could call into question the existing narrative: "
twenty years mark a turning point where we begin to look at things with a certain distance
", he told the
New York Times
. However, according to other former officials and some families of victims, the museum tells a “
reductive story
” and does not ask “
enough questions about terrorism and the consequences
”.