It will cost $24 to get into the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, but the experience will be priceless.
Hundreds of artifacts from the 9/11 attacks will be on display at the World Trade Center gallery — from a burned FDNY ambulance to the watch worn by Flight 93 hero Todd “Let’s Roll” Beamer with the date still at “11,”
officials revealed Friday.
On exhibit are crushed traffic lights, pay phones and street signs, twisted airplane windows, unclaimed bicycles still locked to a rack, part of the North Tower’s antenna, and the last piece of steel removed from Ground Zero — plastered with “missing” posters, badges and inscriptions.
“It really is almost a totem of the recovery,’’ memorial director Alice Greenwald said Friday, as officials unveiled the details of the $700 million project opening this spring.
So much has been collected, donated and loaned that it will take “easily two to three hours’’ for visitors to take it all in, memorial President Joe Daniels said.
He spoke a day after revealing the controversial decision to charge $24 for admission. Lack of federal funding, he said, makes a fee necessary to pay the museum’s nearly $60 million in projected annual operating costs.
Victims’ relatives will get in free, and first responders, seniors and children will get a discount.
Visitors who got a preview Friday — like 9/11 widower Charles G. Wolf, 59, of Greenwich, Conn. — believe the price is worth it.
“Just coming here today was very emotional for me,” said Wolf, whose wife, Katherine, worked on the 97th floor of the North Tower.
“I believe that some people will never be able to get through the museum at first. It’ll just overwhelm them. What do you do with a severed hand? What do you do with that image? This is stuff that any one of you who lived in New York at the time, it would tear your heart out.”
Entering the first gallery, in the south tower’s footprint, visitors will see walls covered with the faces and names of the victims, a “cross-section of humanity,” said Greenwald.
Farther in, 2,983 audio-visual profiles, each a minute long, will be projected on walls, with recorded tributes from relatives and friends.
“They tend not to be overly sentimental, overly maudlin or even sad,” Greenwald said. “They’re the memories you share when you get together as a family.”
The historical section, where the North Tower stood, tells the story of the day, provides context and explores the aftermath.
“In so many ways, this museum is as much about 9/12 as it is about 9/11,” Greenwald said.
Mayor de Blasio Friday called for the federal government to give “substantial” funding for the museum.
And Daniels said museum officials are “going after that federal funding.”
