Part 2: the extensive collection of 9-11 artifacts on display at the Ground Zero Museum

Architectural remnants, recovered artifacts, and electronic media honor victims and tell stories

Today's expression: Go to great lengths
Explore more: Lesson #399
September 16, 2021:

The September 11 Museum has a wide-ranging collection of artifacts, including architectural remnants, recovered artifacts, and electronic media. The collection on display is powerful yet heavy, but it is a worthwhile spot to visit when in New York. Today’s lesson is the second part of the two-part lesson on the museum. Plus, learn what it means to “go to great lengths.”

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The extensive collection of the September 11 Museum

Lesson summary

Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. JR is the producer, and he has uploaded this full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/399.

On Monday’s lesson, you learned about the September 11 Memorial and Museum. And the one part that I didn’t talk about was the collection. The museum’s collection is wide-ranging, but there are three categories of material: architectural remnants, recovered artifacts, and electronic media. We’ll talk about each of those in today’s lesson.

The English expression we’ll review is “go to great lengths” and we have a song of the week. Let’s get started.

Architecture and artifacts at the 9/11 museum

The September 11 Museum is built into the ground underneath where the Twin Towers previously stood. Although the towers collapsed on the morning of September 11, some parts of the structure remained standing, and those form the first part of the museum’s collection, the architectural remnants.

You heard on Monday’s lesson that the lower portions of two tridents remained standing; the tridents are the tall steel columns that supported the exterior of the building. These two are anchored deep into the ground and extend up a few stories into the airy lobby.

As you go down into the subterranean area, you start to see more of the original structure. A 60-foot-tall concrete retaining wall, which was built deep into the ground to protect the building from the Hudson River, cracked but did not break after the towers fell. In the days after the attacks, engineers feared that the retaining wall would collapse, potentially causing the site to flood. Yet, it didn’t break, and that retaining wall is visible to visitors. There’s also a deteriorated concrete stairway called the “survivor’s stairway,” which people used to escape the building during the chaos.

One of the most vivid images is a steel column from the South Tower. The column should be straight; instead, one end bends back on itself like one half of a staple. As you look at it, and at the rest of the architectural remnants combined, you can imagine the force and power that would have been necessary to bring such a strong structure down.

The architectural remnants connect the visitor to the original majesty of the buildings. When we experience skyscrapers today, we don’t see the steel support beams; we don’t see the retaining walls. All that is hidden from view, and we get to enjoy the lobbies and the interiors. But the architectural remnants show us the powerful structures hidden from view, the parts that we were never supposed to see, which held up those enormous buildings.

There is also an extensive collection of recovered artifacts from the site. There are tens of thousands of items in the collection; just a portion is on display. Parts of the bodies of the aircraft that hit the towers were recovered. A crushed fire truck is on display: the front still looks like a fire truck, with its bright-red exterior and neatly folded hoses, but the back is a mangled mess of destroyed metal. There is also an ambulance with a crumpled hood. A bike rack with abandoned bicycles is covered in dust and debris.

Most of the artifacts are more personal. Wallets, ID badges, transit passes, business cards, children’s paintings, and singed papers remind you that this was a workplace. A twisted high-heeled shoe, a firefighter’s helmet, and a busted flashlight remind you of the frantic search for the exit; you wonder whether the shoe belonged to a victim or a survivor.

The museum has gone to great lengths to identify the owners of recovered artifacts, where possible, and to tell a little about them. A crushed helmet belonged to a firefighter who died in the attacks; he would have turned 30 the next day. A corkscrew had been in the pocket of a flight attendant on United Flight 93. A softball mitt belonged to an office worker who was trapped on the 92nd floor of the South Tower. A badly burned wallet belonged to someone from London who often visited New York for work; he was in a conference room on the 106th floor.

The physical artifacts and the associated stories invite you to imagine the people these items belonged to, how these items fell from 100 stories, and how these small things could have survived such a horrific day. The electronic media, though, doesn’t leave anything to the imagination.

Small screens play television coverage of that morning, so that visitors can see how it appeared to viewers at home. Security footage shows the faces of the hijackers as they went airport security earlier that morning. It highlights their faces as they calmly pass through the metal detectors, box cutters already in their luggage.

There is a recording of the hijackers speaking to the passengers on one of the planes that would hit the World Trade Center. “Nobody move,” the lead hijacker told his victims over the plane’s speakers, “everything will be okay.”

You can hear the drivers of the subway cars deep below lower Manhattan announce to the passengers that the trains are delayed. You can hear audio of police, firefighters, and building security respond to the emergency call.

And then, there are the recordings of the victims, possibly the saddest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. People on that day knew they were going to die, but they still had time. Office workers on the high floors of the Twin Towers had no hope of escaping. They just waited for the end. Some of them called their relatives and left voicemails saying goodbye. In the museum, you pick up a telephone handset and put it to your ear and you can hear the messages they left on answering machines, the last words the victims said to their families.

Images are powerful, too. There are a lot of videos, both professional and amateur, from that day, and a lot of photographs. The photos show the scale of the destruction, the desperation of people trying to flee; people injured, debris, the chaos of the day.

The saddest image, to me, is of a man who jumped off the top of the tower; it is now a famous photo called “Falling Man.” It was taken by a newspaper photographer at 9:46 in the morning and shows a man who had jumped from the tower, preferring to fall to his death than to suffocate or be crushed inside. The photo captures him as he’s falling, the towers’ signature tridents in the background. The man’s head is pointing straight down, and one leg is crossed over another.

If you visit

Twenty years ago, exactly. I’ve only been to the museum once, back when I lived in New York. If you’re in New York, I highly recommend that you go. If you do, don’t feel like you need to see every piece on display. If you try to see everything in a short visit, you’ll just be exhausted and emotionally drained by the end. And as I mentioned on Monday, make sure you schedule some time to decompress after your visit.

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Expression: Go to great lengths