The 9/11 Tribute Museum reopened in a new home on June 13. The new space is three times as large as the old.
The 9/11 Tribute Museum focuses on the victims of the terrorist attack. Displays feature mementos, photos, and belongings of lost loved ones. The museum also has a collection of “missing” posters, which families posted throughout the city hoping for news of loved ones who disappeared on the day the Towers fell.
Some of the docents are relatives of 9/11 victims. All of them have some personal connection to that tragic day.
Museum co-founder Lee Ielpi explained, “All of our guides are people who are somehow affected by 9/11 whether it’s a family member, whether it’s a rescue-recovery worker, survivors who made it out of the towers, volunteers who came from all over the country to help and people who live and work in the area.”
Ielpi lost his son that day.
Jonathan Ielpi was one of the many firefighters who didn’t survive the day.
Lee Ielpi leads tours through the museum, explaining the artifacts, and bringing the personal connections to life. He reinterprets the national tragedy as a series of personal tragedies, expressing the emotion on a scale people can more readily feel.
Ielpi doesn’t want to just look backward. The whole point of the museum, to him, is making a better future.
“Listen I can’t bring back my son. I’d love to,” he said. “But I think my son—I think all those folks who were murdered here, at the Pentagon, on Flight 93, would want us to think about the future. Our belief is that by understanding what happened yesterday we can make tomorrow better and that is what our last gallery is going to talk about—Seeds of Service, how we’ve done things in a positive thing since 9/11.”
