9/11 Tribute Museum Permanently Shutters in Lower Manhattan
By Celia Young August 18, 2022 12:26 pm
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New York City’s 9/11 Tribute Museum permanently closed its 30,000-square-foot Lower Manhattan location on Wednesday, a month before the 21st anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The museum — which sits near the larger and more well-known National September 11th Memorial & Museum — blamed the pandemic for its closure, which tanked the city’s tourism economy and “annihilated” the museum’s revenue, the New York Post reported. It was not immediately clear what would happen to the museum’s 10 staffers and the nonprofit did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
After temporarily shuttering six months when the pandemic first hit in 2020, the Tribute Museum reopened at 92 Greenwich Street to a fraction of its usual visitors. It saw just 26,000 guests in all of 2021, compared to the 300,000 it saw on average each year before the pandemic, Jennifer Adams-Webb, the nonprofit’s CEO, told the Post. Fewer ticket sales, coupled with debt it took on during the pandemic, caused it to run out of money this summer.
The museum won’t disappear completely. Its galleries will be disassembled and sent to the New York State Museum in Albany, N.Y, and its website will stay up, the Post reported.
“For over a decade the Tribute Museum has shared educational resources for teachers and students online, reaching classrooms around the world with personal stories,” Adams-Webb said in a statement, according to CNN. “[The museum] is proud to continue its mission with its focus now being on an online, interactive engagement with the 9/11 community.”
The museum first opened in 2006 at 120 Liberty Street and moved to its Greenwich Street location in 2017. It manages one of the largest databases of the immediate family members of the victims of the attacks, according to its website.
Celia Young can be reached at cyoung@commercialobserver.com.
