A Trip to the Tribute WTC Visitor Center

Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2007

Ground Zero is an inescapable part of any New Yorker’s life, especially one living down in the Financial District. It’s the center of the neighborhood. Whether you were in New York at the time or not, Sept. 11 was a defining moment of this generation, and of all of our lives. I had never been to the Tribute WTC Visitor Center on Liberty Street, though I had walked by it countless times. Our class trip to the Center last week was an eye-opening experience.

I was 12 on Sept. 11, 2001, living in a suburb of Washington, D.C. I was in my Geometry class when we heard the news. Within hours, school had been cancelled (many of my classmates had family who worked at the Pentagon, site of one of the attacks), I was home, and my family and I were glued to the TV. It was a completely surreal experience, like a really bad movie that I couldn’t stop watching.

I’ve never really thought about Sept. 11, partly because it never seemed real, and partly because I don’t like to linger on bad experiences. I didn’t visit Ground Zero until last year, when I was forced to for a class assignment. I never got a sense of the place on my little self-guided tour, and I thought our trip to the Tribute Center would be similar to my experience last year: something very detached and cursory.

John Henderson, who works for Graduate Enrollment Services at NYU and volunteers as a tour guide at the Center, walked us around the site. Somehow he made the imaginary visions in my head real. I never understood the terror that consumed the people trapped in these buildings, until Henderson described their frantic attempts to escape. I never appreciated the thread-thin line between survival and death, until Henderson said that people below the 91st floor in the North Tower could escape, but those above could not, because debris had blocked the stairs completely.

The Center itself was informative, but I couldn’t walk through it without tearing up. It was inspiring to see how determined people were to help out their fellow New Yorkers that day, and to see how resilient families have been in 9/11’s aftermath. We talked to survivor Manny Papir, a business consultant and self-described “political hack” about his experience that day. Papir, who was Rudy Giuliani’s Deputy Chief of Staff at the time, said that he saw smoke rising from the towers from his home in Brooklyn, and immediately headed over to the World Trade Center to help.

I apologize for being graphic, but one thing he said really struck me: when describing the scene at Ground Zero, Papir said, “We weren’t finding whole bodies, we were finding parts.”

Sept. 11 is still something I will never comprehend, but the Tribute Center visit was a big step in finding some understanding of such a watershed moment in all of our lives.