Twenty-five years after American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon’s western wall, ground finally breaks this Saturday on the memorial site’s long-missing companion. A visitor education center will rise just across Washington Boulevard from the existing 9/11 Pentagon Memorial.
The National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial Visitor Education Center will be a 52,000-square-foot building holding artifacts from the attack, interactive displays, and firsthand accounts from survivors and victims’ families across a dozen exhibit areas. It’s planned for a site about 200 yards southwest of the existing memorial, across Washington Boulevard, on land freed up by Arlington National Cemetery’s southern expansion.
The Pentagon Memorial Fund, the nonprofit behind both the existing memorial and the new center, was established in 2003 by families of the Flight 77 victims. The project is estimated at $100 million total, funded through a public-private patchwork of sources. This year’s federal defense bill provided $12 million, and Virginia’s state budget earmarked another $1 million for Arlington County to support construction. Private donors have chipped in as well, including $5 million from the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation and contributions from Amazon, Accenture, and Transurban. The center still needs sign-off from the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission, and organizers aren’t expecting it to open before 2029.
“While we were the first of the three attack sites to honor and create a memorial to our victims, we remain the only site without a visitor education center,” said Joseph Kornhoff, the Pentagon Memorial Fund’s executive director, in comments to Stars and Stripes. Ground Zero and the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania have both had dedicated museums or visitor centers for years.
The project is personal for Kornhoff, whose mother was a Pentagon civilian employee who survived the attack. He later served two combat tours in Afghanistan after joining the Army partly because of what happened that day. “If you were alive on 9/11, you know exactly where you were and exactly what you were doing,” he told Stars and Stripes. “And for this new generation that doesn’t have that personalized connection, that’s really what we hope to provide.”
The groundbreaking comes just days after a second milestone for the memorial. The National Park Service designated the existing Pentagon Memorial an “Affiliated Area” of the National Park System on Sept. 9, formalizing a partnership between the Park Service, the Department of War, and the Pentagon Memorial Fund to help preserve and share the victims’ stories. Day-to-day management isn’t changing, the Department of War runs the site, but the designation is a formal recognition of the memorial’s national significance heading into the 25th anniversary.