Report Tells What Belongs in 9/11 Memorial by Etta Sanders The stories of victims, survivors, responders, residents, and witnesses should be the centerpiece of a Memorial Center on the trade center site, according to recommendations issued last week by the World Trade Center Memorial advisory committee. Through the use of oral histories, personal effects, film, photographs, and artifacts, the committee wrote, the exhibits should communicate, "the horror and chaos of the day," "the heroism, sacrifice and human ingenuity" during the attacks and in the aftermath, "the extraordinary scope and scale of the events" and "the awesome scale of the buildings themselves." Visitors should also have access to the slurry wall and see a remnant of the World Trade Center itself by the placement of "a powerful, visible artifact." "You need to have a marker," said committee member Raymond Gastil, director of the Van Alen Institute and a Battery Park City resident since 2002. That artifact could be the 36-foot tall last column to be removed from the site, which is currently housed in a hangar at JFK Airport, or a recovered piece of public art, such as the battered bronze sphere, which stood in the trade center plaza and now serves as a temporary memorial in Battery Park. The Memorial Center's future curators and designers will make those specific decisions. The recommendations of the 27-person committee, comprised of historians, curators, neighborhood residents, and victim's family members, will be open to public comment until July 1. (For the full report and a comment form, go to www.renewnyc.com). A revised version will then be submitted to the board of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation for approval. The development of the memorial and interpretive center will eventually be taken over by the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, which will also undertake a fundraising campaign. A search for someone to head that foundation is currently underway. While the two memorial reflective pools in the footprints of the towers will symbolically represent the void left by the loss of life and the destruction of the buildings, the 65.000-square-foot Memorial Center, which will be located 30 feet underground, will aim to convey the details of the 2001 attacks and the 1993 bombing, as well as the global significance of the events. To fully tell that story, information about the terrorists and their planning should also be incorporated, the committee recommended. "This is an interpretive center or museum, not the memorial," said Gastil, "This is about the facts of history."