Behind-the-scenes look at the 9/11 memorial

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Behind-the-scenes look at the 9/11 memorial
By Yahoo! Studios (video); words by Thomas Kelley, Yahoo! News – 22 hrs ago

To understand more about the 9/11 Memorial, one may look to the person who designed it. Ten years ago, Michael Arad was a young, idealistic architect designing police stations for the New York Housing Authority -- the kind of buildings that most people pass by and never really notice. But the World Trade Center terrorist attacks would soon stir a vision in Arad that will forever be part of America and its history.

Arad, now 42, was born in London, lived much of his childhood in Mexico and the United States, and served in the Israeli army. He had moved to New York City in 1999 from Atlanta and says he still felt like an outsider in his new hometown on Sept. 11, 2001.

On the day of the attacks, Arad was working at home when he heard on the radio that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.  He assumed, as did thousands of others, that it was an accident.

"I remember walking across my apartment and looking through the bedroom window and seeing smoke billowing up from the North Tower," he recalls. "So I grabbed my camera and went up to the roof of the building to take a picture of that and witnessed the second plane swerve around and crash into the South Tower in this enormous fireball and explosion of glass -- a horrendous thing to behold."

He jumped onto his bicycle to go find his wife, Melanie, who worked in Lower Manhattan. "I remember that morning pretty clearly," he says. "It was almost apocalyptic, the quality of the city, biking through throngs of people, who were all transfixed and staring at the towers and wondering what was going on."

 

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