{"id":11018,"date":"2021-09-16T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-09-16T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/plainenglish.com\/?post_type=lessons&p=11018"},"modified":"2024-03-18T14:44:42","modified_gmt":"2024-03-18T19:44:42","slug":"september-11-museum-artifacts","status":"publish","type":"lessons","link":"https:\/\/plainenglish.com\/lessons\/september-11-museum-artifacts\/","title":{"rendered":"Part 2: the extensive collection of 9-11 artifacts on display at the Ground Zero Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"
The extensive collection of the September 11 Museum<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The English expression we’ll review is “go to great lengths” and we have a song of the week. Let’s get started.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
You heard on Monday\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> see, which held up those enormous buildings.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n