Fleeing workers and shuttered businesses. Displaced families and children evacuated from local schools. These, too, are the stories of Sept. 11.

Along with its focus on the tragic losses of that day, the Sept. 11 Museum will give visitors a feeling for what it was like for residents and workers whose lives were changed on that fateful day.

During a computer-animated preview last month of the museum’s complicated matrix of galleries and exhibits, its director Alice Greenwald unveiled new details of a gallery dedicated to Lower Manhattan residents and business owners, whose lives and livelihoods were upended in the wake of the Trade Center’s destruction.

“From our perspective, it’s an integral part of the story of 9/11,” Greenwald told a Community Board 1 committee on Dec. 13.

The gallery will include dozens of photos and artifacts collected from residents and shop owners, including the remarkably preserved “Chelsea Jeans Memorial,” a rack of discount jeans that had been in the window of a shop on Broadway a block from the Trade Center, caked in dust and ash. The gallery also feature audio recordings, among them interviews conducted with residents. In one, played during Greenwald’s presentation, an emotionally wrought teenager tells of her family’s attempt to stay in their Tribeca apartment for as long as possible.

“They told us to evacuate, and we didn’t want to because we knew we wouldn’t be allowed back in for God only knows how long. And here’s my dad going, ‘We should go to the supermarket,’ except there’s no electricity,” says the unnamed girl, her voice shaking. “It’s pitch black dark, everything’s melting on to the floor.”

Seeing renderings of the gallery for the first time, members of Community Board 1’s World Trade Center Redevelopment Committee said they were pleased that museum officials had heard their requests that the stories of local residents and businesses be told.

“The people in the community who live here and had businesses down here had to live with an incredible situation for a long time,” Tannenbaum said. “The amount of destruction and disruption goes way past just that one day.”

Another gallery will be dedicated to the dozens of recovery workers whose illnesses have been attributed to the toxic air. Greenwald said that space has not yet been designed, and that the museum would first need to determine exactly how it will compile the names of those workers.

“We’re trying to get a comprehensive understanding of everyone who would be legitimately considered a victim of 9/11 related illness,” Greenwald said. “It has to be a system that can constantly be updated. That’s the challenge that we have, and we’re looking for ways to accommodate that.”

While the city’s Police and Fire Departments keep records of their own members who have died from illnesses attributed to work at the site, there are no such records for construction workers and other civilians who were part of the recovery. Committee member Elizabeth Williams said she did not want museum officials to delay designing and opening the gallery while waiting for a list that might never materialize.

“My concern is that the ones that we know have died because of 9/11 related illnesses not be recognized because you can’t come up with an empirical list of all the people who have died.” Greenwald responded that the solution might be a user-generated database of recovery workers’ names provided by their own family members.

Catherine McVay Hughes, who chairs the committee and spent several years advocating for the recently passed 9/11 Health and Compensation Act for first responders and recovery workers, said it is especially important to preserve the memory of all workers who died in the cause of the recovery.

“Not only is it simple justice to recognize their ultimate sacrifice,” she said, “it is vital to the future security of our nation that those who put themselves in harm's way, responding to future attacks be confident that their country will stand with them.”