Your feet rest at the footprints of the Twin Towers. The World Trade Center was conceived in the early 1960s by David Rockefeller and built through the 1970s, with the North Tower completed in 1972 and the South in 1973. They were, briefly, the tallest buildings in the world, 110 stories each, dominating the downtown skyline for nearly thirty years.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, hijacked commercial airplanes struck both towers within seventeen minutes of each other, and within two hours both towers had collapsed, killing 2,977 people in the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. The two reflecting pools before you trace the exact footprints of those towers, their water falling into voids that can never be filled. The names of every person killed that day, in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania, are carved into the bronze parapets around the edges.
Find a name and touch it. The silence here is earned.