History
On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh parked a Ryder rental truck filled with explosives in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The resulting explosion killed 168 people and destroyed the entire north face of the building.
Months after the attack, Mayor Ron Norick appointed a task force to look into a creation of a permanent memorial where the Murrah building once stood. The Task Force called for 'a symbolic outdoor memorial', a Memorial Museum, and for creation of Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. Six hundred and twenty four designs were submitted for the memorial and on July 1997 a design by Butzer Design Partnership, which consists of the husband and wife, Hans and Torrey Butzer was chosen.
On October 1997, President Bill Clinton signed law creating the Oklahoma City National Memorial as a unit of the National Park Service to be operated by the Oklahoma City National Memorial Trust. The total cost of the memorial was $29.1 Million; $10 Million for the Outdoor Symbolic Memorial, $7 Million for the Memorial Museum, $5 Million for the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism and the rest for other costs. The Federal Government appropriated $5 Million for construction with the State of Oklahoma matching that amount. More than $17 Million of private donations were raised.
On April 19, 2000 the fifth anniversary of the attack, the Outdoor Symbolic Memorial was dedicated. On February 19, 2001 the Memorial Museum was dedicated. The Oklahoma City National Memorial since its opening has seen over 4.4 million visitors to the Outdoor Symbolic Memorial and 1.6 million visitors to the Memorial Museum. The Memorial has an average of 350,000 visitors per year.
Read more about this topic: Oklahoma City National Memorial
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)