Gift shops usually make or break funding of museums, like it or not. There is not a museum out there that doesn't have one for this reason, including the Oklahoma City Memorial, the Johnstown Flood Historic Site, Civil War Battlefields. We don't live in a society that likes to fund these things properly, so this is how they manage to exist at all.

That doesn't bother me at all, and it took me a good month to get the smell of dead bodies and drywall out of my apartment after the event. If it helps, a lot of people's bodies were not recovered from the site so the cross is more or less a grave marker. Thing is, the Fire Dept in particular, is predominately Catholic. So it meant a lot to these guys. Consider this fellow, Father Mychal Judge. He's a Catholic priest, outwardly gay, Fire chaplain ( yes they have these things ) and died helping people get out of the building.

What peeves me to no end is the very thing this guy comments on in the end, the interpretation. THERE SHOULD BE NO INTERPRETATION. PERIOD. The artifacts and the architecture speak for themselves. Get rid of the interactive displays, the gift shop, and all the rest of that tourist nonsense. It's a war memorial, not a ride at disney land.

"Religion is what caused 9/11" what?

Not the good religion, one of the bad ones.

(oops, that was in reply to S. Pain's comment)

Oh yes. That jumped out at me, too. If we're gonna talk about Catholicism, we need to talk about the Romans.