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Monday, January 27, 2014

September 11 Museum to Charge Steep Admission Fees= Esquire

I am running this story even though I feel the young woman reporter has it all wrong from everything I have learned.

The real reason the Memorial Museum will be charging so much comes basically from the incompetence and poor planning skills of the people running it. There was supposed to be a federal subsidy for it, but that got cut like a lot of other items this year.

I don't think anyone is "making a buck" out of this, I think they are just inexcusably poor managers of what ought to be a free site. There were probably other sources of money available from foundations and the like but of course these people in charge were totally clueless about how to obtain that .

They should have postponed opening the museum until they worked this all out better. But the whole rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, which dragged on for years ( is still not finished) and had all kinds of special little interest groups at each other's throats, second guessing and nit picking at each other..which still goes on around the edges, you know? One giveaway about this is how some ashes turned up lodged in some hidden crevice and then all had to be tested for DNA to see if they were from people killed at the trade center. This is just one example out of many...



Spencer Platt/Getty Images
A man touches the names of his NYPD colleagues at the September 11 Memorial.
So you want to take your family of four to the 9/11 memorial? You want to mourn or talk to your young kids about what happened at the site? That will now be $96, please.

Late yesterday, the foundation behind the 9/11 memorial quietly voted to charge a $24 admission fee to the soon-to-be-open underground museum at the site. The above ground memorial will continue to be free, victims' families will not pay, and there will be discounts and three free hours a week.
Sure, the admission fee is in line with other museums in the city (the MoMA is $25 for adults, for example), but you're certainly not paying to look at art. You're paying to grieve and learn about the largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Ground Zero is already a dark tourism site. Now someone's just making a buck off that fact.
Elizabeth Sile is an editorial assistant at Esquire and editor of the Politics Blog with Charles P. Pierce. She lives in Queens and is proud of it.

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