9/11 Memorial and Museum New York: Everything You Need to Know Before You Visit

The Museum sits mostly seventy feet below ground, in the excavated remains of the original site, and descending into it how any visit begins.

The Pavilion and the Tridents: The glass entrance building holds two of the original eighty-foot steel columns from the North Tower facade, visible from the plaza outside.

The ramp and Memorial Hall: A long descent takes you down towards bedrock, past the point where the towers stood. In Memorial Hall you meet Spencer Finch's installation Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning, 2,983 individual squares of watercolour paper in different shades of blue, one for each person killed in the two attacks. Behind the wall it faces, a repository maintained by the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner holds the unidentified remains of victims. That space is not open to the public and is reserved for family members.

Foundation Hall holds two things that carry more weight than almost anything else on the site. The Last Column is a 36-foot steel beam, the final piece removed from Ground Zero at a ceremony in May 2002, covered in the messages, photographs, and mementoes left on it by recovery workers. Behind it stands a section of the slurry wall, the retaining wall built to hold back the Hudson River, which held when the towers came down.

The Survivors' Stairs: The Vesey Street stairs, down which hundreds of people escaped the plaza on the morning of the attacks, preserved and reinstalled where visitors pass beside them.

Other major artefacts: The crushed cab of Ladder Company 3's fire truck, from a company that lost eleven members that day. Recovered vehicles, aircraft fragments, and personal objects, drawn from a collection of more than ten thousand items.

In Memoriam, the memorial exhibition, is a room of portraits of everyone killed in the 2001 and 1993 attacks, with recorded remembrances from families and personal artefacts in inner chambers.

September 11, 2001, the historical exhibition, is the museum's core and its most demanding space. It runs in three parts: the events of the day itself, told through news footage, first-person accounts, and recordings; the background before 9/11, covering the World Trade Center and the development of the plot; and the aftermath, covering recovery, rebuilding, and the ongoing consequences including 9/11-related illness. It covers the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Flight 93.

A note on the most difficult material: The historical exhibition contains graphic content, including the recordings people left for their families and images of those who fell from the towers. The museum handles this carefully. The most distressing material sits behind partitions with clear warning signage, so you can choose to walk past it. Knowing that in advance makes the exhibition easier to navigate.