9/11 Museum: Now with Sensurround!

GE, who brings bad things to light, called my attention to this strange story of what hopefully won't wind up being a tasteless case of tragedy-pimping. Worst-case scenario: the 9/11 museum decided they needed a sort of "Martha Stewart of Tragedy" to help them out with the project.

A director at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was named Tuesday to head the museum that will commemorate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Alice M. Greenwood will oversee the creation of the World Trade Center Memorial Museum, an underground gallery of exhibits planned next to the memorial that marks the destroyed twin towers' footprints. Groundbreaking is scheduled for next month; the museum and memorial are slated to open in 2009.

The museum "will honor in perpetuity those whose lives were lost, and demonstrate to all who visit the World Trade center site for years to come, the healing power of memory in retelling their story," Greenwood said in a statement obtained by The Associated Press.

With Greenwald's experience, "the Sept. 11 story will be told in depth and with sensitivity," said Gretchen Dykstra, president and CEO of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation. (. . .)

Preliminary exhibit plans released last year for the memorial museum included a proposal for an "immersive" area with police sirens and pictures of the falling towers to re-create the attacks' experience, as well as the display of such large-scale artifacts from the towers as trade center steel.

The Freedom Museum: home to the most sensitive sirens and special effects in the nation.