Details of World Trade Center memorial released

[Khephra]

NEW YORK -- The memorial honoring World Trade Center victims will include a forest of oak trees with a clearing for Sept. 11 gatherings and a Memorial Hall between the twin reflecting pools that will mark the footprints of the lost towers, rebuilding officials announced Thursday.

John Whitehead, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., the agency overseeing rebuilding, called Memorial Hall "a new public space where visitors will pause and, for example, review a directory of the names, locating their loved ones among the souls that are there."

Gov. George Pataki, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, trade center victims' family members and designers Michael Arad, Peter Walker and Max Bond joined Whitehead and other rebuilding officials at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, a few blocks from the trade center site, for a news conference to release details of the memorial's design.

New elements include the Memorial Hall, the 1.5-acre clearing at ground level for public gatherings and the exposed stumps of columns that supported the twin towers.

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