Partially overlooked in the glut of media coverage of the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks were two exhibits here in Washington which used artifacts from the three attacks. For just nine days leading upto September 11, the Smithsonian Museum of American History displayed a small collection of visceral reminders of 9/11 that gave viewers an intimate sense of what exactly happened to victims that day.
The exhibit was designed modestly to remove the typical museum separation between visitor and exhibition. Walking around the space was unnerving, not because of the objects but because of how little presentation there was. This was 9/11 told as the tragedy of simple and profound loss, rather than of geopolitical event or an attack on America.
I found it impossible to entirely dissociate the greater meaning of 9/11 and the decade that followed it from the exhibition, but for an hour or so in that small part of the museum I got a sense of the sheer carnage and terror of the day itself as felt by the people who were there.
Part of the exhibit assembled a slice of life and death at the moment of impact at the Pentagon, which goes some way to show what truly happened. An office phone, a dog collar, coins, and a clock all appeared frozen in place, just as they were 10 years ago. Some, like the clock and phone, stopped functioning because of the impact and serve as powerful reminders of lives lost, frozen in time. It was difficult to not stand in front of them and feel a deeply unsettling quiet.
Less powerful were the artifacts from United 93, the interior of which looks just the same as any Boeing 767. Visually, little differentiates the debris from United 93 from other airplane disasters. A movie about the United flight, however, more powerfully portrays what it may have been like onboard that plane. While the debris looks familiar, the circumstances were not—and the exhibition captured that discrepancy well.
Another display featured a single smashed door of a fire engine used on the morning of 9/11. The bravery of firefighters in lower Manhattan that morning is universally recognized as extraordinary. The door, with its smashed-in window frame, echoed the heroism of the 343 firefighters who died at the World Trade Center.
In displaying just the door, the immensity of the tragedy is lost, but the personal physical struggles of those working at Ground Zero that day are magnified. One door from one truck, instead of becoming an emblem, becomes just a poignant shred.
At another exhibit across the mall at the Newseum, a portion of the North Tower’s radio mast has been installed. Vast and broken, bent at the top, this massive section of steel much more resonantly portrayed the scale of the towers, and of the loss. This was the highest part of the once-tallest building in the world. It now sits a mere five stories off the ground.
I was in New York this weekend and saw skyscrapers everywhere, including the fast rising new One World Trade Center. The Twin Towers were each more than double the size of most other buildings in New York. That they could come down at all continues to seem impossible. That they actually did just adds to the shock.
Each of the three sections of the Smithsonian exhibition contain structural pieces from the impacted sites: a structural joint from the World Trade Center, a large section of the fuselage of the Boeing 767 from flight United 93, and a column reinforcement bar from the Pentagon. The sheer force of impact bent all three pieces. All of them have fire scarring which shows the intensity of the heat of the jet fuel flames.
These tributes measure up well to the two most powerful 9/11 exhibitions in the past decade: the 2002 light exhibit, “Tribute in Light,” in New York City which faithfully kept to the towers’ outlines, while defiantly refusing their absence and 2006’s “Here Is New York, a Democracy of Photographs,” a collection of 1,500 inkjet photographs from that day. Their power lied in providing an overwhelming immersion into the enormity experienced then; their success was in being emotional responses rather than emblems, archives, or graves.
Of the remnants that we have, the airline parts at each site unify this triple tragedy. These burnt and twisted pieces of civilian life remind us ten years later of how the abuse of peaceful engineering achievements wrought this ugly and morbid scar on our nation’s history.
