Plans for a visitor education center at the Pentagon’s 9/11 Memorial have been in the works for more than a decade.
First announced in 2015, the goal was to have it open by 2019.
The 2019 goal soon became 2020. And then 2025. Hopes of having it ready by the 25th anniversary of the attack also evaporated.
“Too often, visitors leave the Pentagon Memorial with a sense of longing to understand from start to finish the tragic happenings of that day, in that spot,” the Pentagon Memorial Fund posted on its website explaining the impetus for the project. The center “will serve to fill a vital role in telling the untold story.”
But the center that would explain the events of that fateful day, provide historical context and keep alive the memory of the 184 people who died at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, currently exists only on paper. The four-acre site for the proposed building remains an empty lot.
As the 25th anniversary approaches, the Pentagon is the only one of the three 9/11 memorial locations without a visitor center or museum. The National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York opened in 2014. The visitor center at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, opened in 2015.
Now, after many delays, a renewed effort to finally build the center is moving forward. An official groundbreaking ceremony for the center is scheduled for Sept. 12, said Joseph Kornhoff, executive director of the Pentagon Memorial Fund, the private nonprofit founded by the families and friends of victims of the attack. The organization designed and built the outdoor memorial to the victims at the Pentagon, which opened on Sept. 11, 2008, and welcomes about a million visitors each year.
Robert Gray was a 38-year-old captain with the Arlington County Fire Department when he arrived at the Pentagon with his technical rescue team about 30 minutes after terrorists who had hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 crashed it into the building.
“It was so beyond anything we had ever expected to be involved in,” Gray said in an interview this month. On that day and the days that followed, Gray and his team “searched, dug in, knocked down doors,” to find survivors and, eventually, recover bodies. Twenty-five years later, he still has dreams and nightmares about what he saw and has led efforts to assist other first responders experiencing PTSD from that grim essential work.
Gray has visited the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial numerous times and believes the story of what happened there is incomplete without the planned education center.
“Sometimes we get so far from this stuff,” he said, “that it gets forgotten or is just kind of dismissed.”
Costs and delays
Kornhoff is confident that this time the center will be built. A significant amount of funding has been raised since he took over as executive director 15 months ago, he said, and he wants to keep that momentum going.
“I was brought on to make the visitor education center a reality,” he said. “It is my mission and it is the number one mission in this organization.”
The project has taken time, “but we’re shovel ready at this point,” Kornhoff said.
But the Sept. 12 groundbreaking for the $100 million center, which will take place two days after a private gala fundraiser for the project at a Pentagon City hotel, is a largely ceremonial event.
Representatives of agencies that have to sign off on the plan, including the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts, said final approval has not yet been granted.
The CFA approved the concept for the visitor center in 2023 but “the whole phase of design development and final documentation needs to be undertaken,” Thomas Luebke, the commission’s staff secretary, said in an email.
NCPC spokesman Stephen Staudigl confirmed in an email that the Pentagon Memorial Fund has not yet resubmitted its updated project plan for approval by the commission.
“They are absolutely correct,” Kornhoff said when apprised of the agencies’ statements. “We are continuing to work with them to make sure that those final little steps are at rest as we finalize our construction documents this year.”
Kornhoff said he is hopeful construction on the building, which will be located about 200 yards from the Pentagon Memorial, can start soon and the center will be open to visitors in 2029.
Beyond politics
There is bipartisan support for the proposed center.
“What we have seen from policymakers at all levels of government is a recognition that it is time that America’s Response chapter of the 9/11 Narrative is fully told,” M. David Skiles, a state government affairs lobbyist and advocate for the Pentagon Memorial Fund, said in an email. “Ensuring future generations understand the impact of this day is an issue that transcends politics.”
In a shared letter earlier this year, former Virginia governors Robert F. McDonnell (R) and Terry McAuliffe (D) wrote that the project is “long overdue” and critical for informing new generations of Americans about what occurred on 9/11.
“We always talk about ‘never forget.’ Well, 30 percent of the population today in America was born after 9/11,” McAuliffe said in an interview. “So they really have no context. And when these million visitors come to see the memorial, they don’t get a full recognition of what happened that day.”
In addition to providing that context and honoring the victims of the attack, McAuliffe said “there needs to be recognition of the first responders and the heroic deeds that went on that day at the Pentagon.”
There have been a number of reasons for the delays in building the center. Acquiring the site took time and the expansion of Arlington National Cemetery necessitated a relocation of the proposed center in 2020.
But funding has always been the biggest issue, Kornhoff said.
According to tax returns filed by the memorial fund from 2016 through 2024, the fund reported total revenue of more than $18 million and total expenses of more than $12 million. Of those expenses, approximately $1.3 million was paid to the architecture firm that designed the building, while about $800,000 was spent on exhibit design and educational programming.
The fund also covered maintenance of the memorial site and supported additional educational partnerships. The largest portion went to consulting firms for fundraising and marketing efforts, as well as project management and related guidance.
As it pushes the project forward, the memorial fund is seeking a mix of 70 percent federal and state funding and the remainder in private funding to cover costs.
About 20 percent to 25 percent of that overall goal has been raised so far, Kornhoff said, including $12 million appropriated in 2026 in federal funds, along with $1 million that Virginia has committed to the project. The memorial fund is seeking an additional $35 million from Congress in next year’s budget.
The annual operating costs for the 52,500-square-foot building are estimated to be between $3.5 million to $4 million. Those will be covered by philanthropic support from foundations and partnerships, Kornhoff said.
The center does not plan to charge an admission fee.
It’s personal
Kornhoff’s commitment to the project is personal. On Sept. 11, 2001, he was a 15-year-old Fairfax County high school student. Like many other students in his school, he had a family member who worked at the Pentagon. His mother was a retired Army officer working as a civilian employee in the building when it was struck at 9:37 a.m. by the commandeered American Airlines jet.
Kornhoff learned of the attack that morning in school but with phone service spotty or nonexistent, there was no word from his mother or from his father, who had dropped her off at the Pentagon on his way to work.
After school, Kornhoff went home and waited alone. Neighbors checked in on him but he was still unable to reach his parents. He had no idea of their fate until about 7 p.m., when he heard the garage door opening and saw his parents pulling in in their car.
“I still get teary-eyed thinking about it,” he said.
At the memorial site are 184 benches honoring the people who died that day inside the Pentagon and on the plane that crashed into it. Each bench bears the name of a life cut short.
Dana Falkenberg, 3, of University Park, Maryland, was the youngest victim. Her sister and parents were also killed. Retired Navy pilot John Yamnicky, 71, from Waldorf, was the oldest to die in the attack.
Three District schoolchildren — Bernard Brown, Rodney Dickens and Asia Cottom — were killed. The 11-year-olds were flying to a National Geographic conference in California. Their teachers accompanying them, Hilda Taylor, 58, Sara Clark, 65, and James Debeuneure, 58, were also killed.
Sept. 11, 2001, was Amelia Fields 46th birthday. It was also her second day on the job at the Pentagon where the Dumfries resident worked as a civilian secretary for the Army. Her husband William, a Marine veteran, had baked a chocolate cake for her to celebrate when she got home. She never returned.
Kris Romeo Bishundat, of Waldorf, was a 23-year-old Navy petty officer assigned to the Pentagon just three months before the attack. “I miss his phone calls and his hugs,” his mother told The Washington Post in September 2002. “Part of me is missing.”
Kornhoff is adamant that “now is the time” to get the visitor center project over the line. Not only does he want the exhibits to provide the history and honor the victims, he also wants to tell the story of what happened in the days, months and years after the attack.
“You know, 10,000 people, including my mother, showed up here to work the next day,” he said. “They knew there was something bigger than what had happened and that was to keep our nation safe and formulate our nation’s response.”
The events of 9/11, Kornhoff said, spurred him into a life of service. He later joined the Army and did two tours in Afghanistan before returning to civilian life.
Now, he sees it as his duty to family members of the 9/11 Pentagon victims to deliver on the promise to “never forget” and make the center a reality.
“All of the families, first and foremost, are continuing to stay involved and continuing to support this organization,” he said. “I think the sentiment you hear from a lot of them is that every single day more and more people who knew about 9/11 are gone … A lot of them tell me, ‘I want to see this built before I die.’”
The post At the Pentagon, the wait continues for a 9/11 memorial visitor center appeared first on Washington Post.
