The interior of The Oculus.

Looking through the glass windows along the top at neighboring skyscrapers.

Doesn’t this exterior night view look like an eye and eyelashes? Appropriately named The Oculus.

The 9/11 Tribute Tour was a highlight of our trip. We learned so much from our guide about the 9/11 WTC Memorial pools and significance in many design details! For example, the victims names are cut out, not engraved, and a white rose is placed in the name of each murdered victim on their birthday. (Homicide is the cause of death on their death certificates.) Individual droplets come together to make the waterfalls, and the trees planted around the memorial mark the actual footprint of the fallen buildings.

A large brass plaque to the 343 New York firefighters who perished on 9/11.

IX XI, 2009. This sculpture depicts the Roman numerals for nine and eleven as a palindrome, reading the same forward and backward. American artist Ultra Violet, known for wearing purple, used the color in this work because it represents mourning in the Roman Catholic Church. The X’s in the sculpture also form four hearts, two of them upside down.

Each One: The Button Project, a 9/11 Memorial, 2002 American Sarah Haskell collected more than 3000 buttons from donors across the country and in England and arranged them into the shape of the Twin Towers. Over the course of 10 days, volunteers sewed the buttons onto hand-dyed and hand-woven linen fabric. Haskell referred to the finish piece as “a shroud for the lives lost.”

The museum descends to the original bedrock foundations 7 stories below street level. It’s awesome how they left the remains of the original steel supports exposed in the floor.

“The Last Column” was the last column to be removed from Ground Zero and became a Memorial Site “bulletin board” where recovery workers left mementos and messages.

Peeking between two skyscrapers to the Hudson River. The Twin Towers originally fronted the river, but the debris from Ground Zero was used as fill in a stretch of riverfront creating a new neighborhood.

The proprietor of Fraunces Tavern was an American patriot and hosted secret meetings of the Sons of Liberty. Frances Tavern is also where George Washington bade an emotional farewell to his officers after the American Revolutionary War.