LOWER MANHATTAN (PIX11) — The 9/11 Tribute Museum in Manhattan will shutter on Wednesday, the museum announced Tuesday.
The museum will keep a presence online, but financial difficulties mean the doors of the Greenwich Street location will close. The COVID pandemic hit the museum hard.
“Financial hardship including lost revenue caused by the pandemic prevents us from generating sufficient funding to continue to operate the physical museum,” said Jennifer Adams, co-founder and CEO of the 9/11 Tribute Museum.
Most of the museum’s collection will be moved to the New York State Museum in Albany. The museum is working to make sure everything is respectfully handled.
The 9/11 Tribute Museum traces its roots to 2004, when a group founded by victims’ relatives decided to turn a former deli, steps away from ground zero, into a focal point for the commemoration of the 2001 terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. The trade center was a massive pit and construction site in 2004, but visitors were already coming in droves.
The tribute museum was dwarfed by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, a $700 million, taxpayer-subsidized project that opened its memorial plaza in 2011 and a vast underground museum in 2014. The museum alone has drawn more than 18 million visitors and the open-air, un-ticketed plaza an estimated 55 million.
