9/11 Tribute Museum will SHUT DOWN today – weeks ahead of terror attack’s 21st anniversary

The September 11 Tribute Museum in New York City is closing permanently at the end of Wednesday.

The museum, located on Greenwich Street just under half a mile from the World Trade Center, will maintain an online presence but the physical location will close.

Closing the center caused some anger among the New York political class, including former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s ex-secretary, Melissa DeRosa. 

She tweeted Wednesday: ‘This cannot stand. The State handed $1B+ over to the billionaire owners of the Buffalo Bills – they have to stop this’.

Cuomo’s spokesperson, Rich Azzopardi, retweeted the statement. DailyMail.com has reached out to Azzopardi to see if the governor has any comment and has also reached out to current Governor Kathy Hochul’s office. 

Jennifer Adams, the museum’s co-founder and CEO, said that financial problems set off by the Covid-19 pandemic sealed the museum’s fate despite recent fundraisers.  

She said in a statement: ‘Financial hardship including lost revenue caused by the pandemic prevents us from generating sufficient funding to continue to operate the physical museum’.

The museum was part of a larger project that included the still open September 11 Memorial that cost a taxpayer-subsidized $700 million. 

The museum’s memorabilia will largely be taken to a state museum in the capitol city of Albany. 

Guy Sanders, a former EMT who spent over 12 hours at Ground Zero on that fateful day, eventually being diagnosed with cancer from his time at the site, spent the past six years as a docent at the museum.

He reflected on the museum in an interview with DailyMail.com, saying he was saddened by the inability to continue to make history live with young people and the loss of community among those who worked there, most of whom are either first responders, survivors or just affected by the tragedy. 

Sanders said: ‘We shared that experience and it’s something a lot of people don’t have and don’t understand and that’s something we’re going to lose. We are a family’. 

He noted that, for the past several months, those who worked at the museum were ‘on tinderhooks’ because of lower crowds and participation and noted many were very upset.

Sanders was near tears when he spoke about bringing people, young and old, those who were there that day and those who weren’t even alive, to the museum to talk about what he went through. 

The 9/11 Tribute Museum, which opened in 2006, offered tours led by volunteers who had lost a family member or were connected in some other way to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

It was sometimes confused with the much larger Sept. 11 museum, which opened in 2014 near the memorial pools that mark where the twin towers stood.

Sanders felt the docents brought a personal touch to the tribute museum that told the story of EMTs like himself. All of them were either volunteers, EMTs, Red Cross and Salvation Army members.

‘Here’s the thing: I talk to people who have been to the memorial museum and the tribute museum. The thing that stood out with them was we were more personable, we told our personal stories and it became more real to them. We were telling living history and they could see how it affected us.’ 

Adams said the Tribute Museum would maintain an online presence to provide educational resources and support for the 9/11 community.

The nonprofit September 11th Families´ Association, which founded the Tribute Museum, is coordinating with its donors to make sure that the artifacts are handled property, she said.

Sanders said that despite this, it’s not the same: ‘That those of us who are still here are able to tell our stories directly. Remote things don’t have the same impact’. 

He became emotional when telling his story in the wake of Hurricane Maria’s devastation in Puerto Rico to a woman and her son. 

Sanders noted that, if he hadn’t been forced to quit being an EMT, he’d be there assisting in the recovery.

He told us the woman’s son said he himself had become an EMT, inspired by the workers he saw on television in the wake of the tragedy, and told him ‘I’ve got it from here’.

Sanders, who notes he lost his mother earlier this year and will feel a certain emptiness without the museum that he felt after he left EMT work, said: ‘Knowing he watched us and that helped him make a career choice to help other people and he could come to me and tell me, that’s something that… there’s nothing that can replace that’.