The 9/11 Museum was rated the No. 1 museum in New York City by TripAdvisor in 2019. Three million people visited that year, but most of them were from places farther away than New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut. Weinstein thinks that locals are reluctant to visit because the event is still too raw for them. But there are likely other reasons, too.
From the beginning, family members of the dead balked at the museum’s commercial aspects, such as the entry fee—now twenty-six dollars—and the gift shop, where N.Y.P.D. and F.D.N.Y. T-shirts are sold alongside mugs and keychains that bear the words “Never Forget.” (The museum has received government grants but is private, and relies on ticket sales and donations to stay afloat.) The memorial aboveground, with its falling waters and dark pools, where flowers are placed in the grooves of the names of the dead on their birthdays, is perhaps better suited to mourning.
When the museum opened, Philip Kennicott, the architecture critic at the Washington Post, described it as “a hellish descent into a dark place, where a tape loop of death and destruction is endlessly playing on every television screen in America.” Like other critics, he found the museum’s religious metaphors oppressive. Holland Cotter, in his review for the Times, wrote, “The prevailing story in the museum, as in a church, is framed in moral terms, as a story of angels and devils.” Prior to the museum’s opening, an advisory panel of interfaith clergy members took issue with a seven-minute documentary called “The Rise of Al Qaeda.” The panel asserted, in an open letter, that the video “may very well leave viewers with the impression that all Muslims bear some collective guilt or responsibility,” and that it could lead to bigotry or even violence. One of the panel members, Sheikh Mostafa Elazabawy, an imam at Masjid Manhattan, resigned from the panel in protest. The video has never been changed.
In the years after the attacks, New Yorkers saw their city’s tragedy used to justify discrimination against Muslims, and also mass surveillance, torture, secret prisons, and two wars, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed. In this context, it is difficult to visit the museum simply as a way of honoring the dead and learning their stories. A new documentary, “The Outsider,” chronicles the debates that took place, when the museum was being planned, about what sort of story it would tell. Some of the discussions documented in the movie seem like reasonable arguments over the presentation of difficult material, such as a recording of a 911 call from someone trapped above the impact zone, or footage of people who jumped out the buildings. But the film presents these arguments as clashes between those who favored nuance and context—typified by the titular outsider, Michael Shulan, who served as the museum’s first creative director—and those who were allegedly wary of controversy and complexity, such as, in the movie’s telling, the museum’s current chief executive, Alice Greenwald.