The Commemoration Puzzle

August 2001 - Few cars, bright lights, dark sky, its late night lower Manhattan, and I am riding in my aunts ramshackle vehicle, with my parents and grandma. After a final day of sightseeing in New York, my aunts were making sure we had got our NYC fill before heading home to California. I still remember craning my neck out the car window, unable to see the tops of those gigantic buildings, my grandmas body pushed up against mine, as three generations of Katzer females shared the tiny backseat of my aunt's old sedan. The two towering buildings overwhelmed the night sky and my aunt asked if we wanted to go up. Exhausted and hungry, I replied with that certain confidence that can only be found in an innocent 10-year-old only child, "No..We can go up next time."

There was no next time. The two towers were destroyed a month later, their absence casting a tragic shadow over the city of New York---and like all the other shadows of New York's history, less than ten years later, the city is an emblem of resilience.

"We as New York, the city, sweep over the past and repave over it," said John Henderson, a docent at the Tribute WTC Visitor Center.

While construction at the WTC site progresses, albeit slowly, the Tribute center has served as a Sept. 11 memorial since 2006.

Admission is $10, and a guided walking tour is $10 more. The museum also offers a self-guided audio tour which features the stories of 16 people directly affected by the attacks.

Inside, recovered audio files of calls made to emergency dispatchers are activated with a simple push of the button and a video, four hours and 25 minutes long, cycles through the names and ages of the 2,973 people killed in the attacks.

Personally, the center seemed like a small piece in the jigsaw of the unsolvable Sept. 11 commemoration puzzle. It was not able to fulfill that mysterious black void of lives lost and a nation in disrepair, nor should it.

Though, with Henderson's help, I was introduced to places who's mere existence elicited more emotion from me than the majority of the museum's exhibits.

-Hangar 17, at JFK International Airport, Queens: This is where Port Authority has the salvaged remains of the World Trade Center stored. According to Henderson, who has visited the Hangar, this includes the portion of the building struck by the plane and three foot balls of metal, with legible paper and office supplies sticking out, that once were six stories of the acre wide buildings.

-Memorial Park: Within the temporary tents outside the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), "is the temporary resting place for the victims of September 11th," according to nyc,gov. It can only be accessed by family members and in an e-mail, Henderson said some families will celebrate anniversaries and birthdays inside the sites two family rooms (the other is across the street from the site).