Now, 15 years later, the event has been commemorated by a monument that is a full city block in size. It stands where the Murrah Building used to be. I'm going to post pictures and explain how each of them fits into the memorial has a whole.
The memorial is flanked by two large walls, as though the whole space were still inside a building. On the left wall, shown here, are the number 9:01. That was the time of the initial blast. We were fortunate enough to have a park ranger making a presentation on the memorial while we were there, and he explained that 9:01 was considered the moment when everyone's world was changed forever, even those people who weren't present or related in any way to anyone involved in the bombing.The reflecting pool symbolizes the things around the site that were changed by the bombing. Visitors can walk down to the water, which is very shallow, and look into it, as all of us were changed in some way or another, even if this event is just history to us.
People can also dip their hands into the water and mark their handprints on the walls, to symbolize their connectedness to the people who experienced the blast.The center part of the memorial are rows of bronze chairs with glass sections around the legs. The lower portions of the chairs light up at night. The chairs are arranged in nine rows, to symbolize the nine floors of the Murrah Building. People's names appear on the chairs; the names are grouped by the floors on which the people would have been at the time of the blast. The largest concentration of chairs is in the middle, where the crater was blown in the building; the designer of the monument wanted to "fill in" the hole.
The wall on the right end of the monument has the numbers 9:03 carved into it. The ranger told us that this symbolized the moment when the healing began after the explosion, when rescue workers and concerned citizens rushed to scene to help find people and piece together what had happened.
People from all over the world submitted possible designs for the memorial. A committee narrowed the submissions down to five. The current memorial, sent by a firm in Germany, was unanimously chosen by the survivors and the families o
f those killed.At right is a large elm tree that is not only part of the memorial, it was also part of the events of the bombing. It's called The Survivor Tree, and is around 100 years old. It was in a parking lot across the street from the blast. Pieces of debris are embedded in its trunk. At first, city officials were convinced that it would die from the inflicted damage, and the FBI wanted to cut it down and use the embedded debris as evidence. However, the tree miraculously grew leaves and proved to be very much alive. The people of Oklahoma City insisted that the tree be left standing, and be incorporated into the memorial. Immediately after the blast, it was surrounded by burning cars and other objects. It now has the best care of any tree in the United States.
Personnel, materials, and expressions of sympathy poured in from all over the country, and eventually from all over the world. Some of these expressions are still on display. The wall at right is covered in tiles sent by children and other people; many tiles have handprints or other things painted on them. A section of the chain link fence put up to section off the blast area has been saved and put up along the sidewalk outside the memorial; people still leave tokens of sympathy and commemoration on the fence.The park is run by the National Park Service, although it is not a National Park. Nevertheless, I stepped into the gift shop and added a date stamp to my National Park Passport for this site.
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