SALON

Friday, May 18, 2012 7:15 AM UTC

9/11 families upset over ground zero museum delays

By

Topics: From the Wires,

NEW YORK (AP) — They were promised a place to mourn their loved ones, display their photographs and educate their children and the children of strangers about exactly what was lost on 9/11. But today, family members of those killed have no completion date for the museum that is to be built alongside the Sept. 11 memorial at ground zero — and many are upset.

“The memorial is open, but that’s only half the tribute to those who were killed,” said Patricia Reilly, who lost her sister in the attacks. “The museum is the place where they’re going to tell the story about the people — who they were, where they were, what they were doing and what happened to them that day.”

Construction of the museum — originally scheduled to open on the 11th anniversary of the attacks — has largely ground to a halt amid a financial dispute between the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site, and the foundation that controls the memorial and museum. After months of little obvious progress, some family members are increasingly worried that the powers that share control of the area are backsliding into the kind of politically driven dysfunction that once paralyzed the site.

“They shouldn’t allow disagreement to get in the way,” said Reilly, who especially wants the museum to be completed so she can go there to visit the thousands of fragments of human remains too damaged to identify with DNA testing. No trace of her sister, Lorraine Lee, who worked on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower, has been identified.

“We were supposed to get a contemplative area nearby where we could sit and pray, visit,” she said. “I’m waiting for the remains to find their final resting place.”

Work has been slowed since late last year, when the subcontractors at the site stopped getting paid. The Port Authority claimed the Sept. 11 memorial foundation owed it $300 million for infrastructure and revised project costs, while the foundation argued the port instead owed it money because of project delays. Three powerful political figures have been entangled in the dispute: The governors of New York and New Jersey control the port, while New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is the foundation’s chairman.

Last month, Port Authority Executive Director Patrick Foye said there had been “significant progress” toward a resolution, but any deal has yet to materialize. On Thursday, a spokesman for the port would say only that discussions were continuing. A spokesman for the foundation declined to comment about the families’ concerns.

Officials have said publicly there is no way to complete the museum by this year’s anniversary of the attacks, but no formal communication has gone out to the families to inform them of the delays and keep them apprised, some family members said.

In the meantime, personal items and mementos that families have donated to the museum are in a sort of limbo, with many wrapped and packed away in storage spaces that hold everything from damaged fire engines to children’s drawings.

“There are people out there … who hold these items as very, very precious,” said Debra Burlingame, a foundation board member whose own family’s donation has been put on hold until the dispute is resolved. They will donate a prayer card that her brother was carrying when his plane flew into the Pentagon. Somehow, the small card survived the fire, inscribed with the words “Blessed are those who mourn.”

Burlingame wants to make sure her brother’s story survives.

“You have children who were very young on 9/11 or maybe not even born yet who have no idea what actually happened that day,” she said. “That story needs to be told, and it needs to be preserved for future generations.”

The subcontractors at the site were recently paid $15 million that had been owed to them, but they won’t return to the job until there’s an agreement on future payment and a new schedule is adopted, said Ron Berger, the executive director of the Subcontractors Trade Association. Berger said this week his union is meeting with officials about future plans and he’s expecting a new completion date of June or July 2013 — a decision that would raise project costs further because of the overtime required. But no deal can be made until the port and the foundation come to an agreement.

For some family members, the problems at the 16-acre site feel like an unpleasant flashback. In 2005 and 2006, bitter negotiations between the Port Authority and private developer Larry Silverstein stalled construction on all the office towers planned for the site, with port officials calling Silverstein greedy for demanding givebacks on the rent he paid, and Silverstein saying the agency had never turned over buildable land for his office towers. In 2006, the memorial was redesigned after its projected cost rocketed and some began to question whether the project could move forward.

“It’s all politics, and it’s ridiculous,” said Jim Riches, whose firefighter son died in the trade center. “They should put politics aside and get down to business.”

Riches has given the museum the crushed helmet found next to his son’s body when it was unearthed six months after the attacks. He can ask for it back at any time, he notes, but he won’t — despite his frustration with the delays.

“Maybe 20 years from now, 50 years from now — they won’t know who I am, they won’t know who my son is,” Riches said. “But you know what? Some little kid is going to go in there and say, ‘Look at this, this fireman went in there to help people, and then he was crushed to death by these terrorists.’ … It’s a powerful message.”

___

Associated Press writers Amy Westfeldt in New York and David Porter in Newark, N.J., contributed to this report.

___

Follow Samantha Gross at www.twitter.com/samanthagross

More Samantha Gross.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments are not enabled for this story.

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
FBI reportedly joins Bachmann campaign finance probe
215 points216 points | 13 comments
vote
Jon Karl makes things worse: He regrets “inaccurate” Benghazi email but says his story based on it “still entirely stands.” Really. ABC News?
192 points193 points | 29 comments
vote
Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills. "In an economy where we’re all in the same boat, one person’s spending is another person’s income. So when the government cuts spending, it reduces people’s income, leading to less business, more unemployment, and a vicious spiral of slowing down the economy."
188 points189 points | 127 comments
vote
“Jodorowsky’s Dune”: The sci-fi classic that never was.
79 points80 points | 16 comments
vote
Doug Henwood: Capitalism Thrives on Class Exploitation
41 points42 points | 5 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations