A $100 million visitor center breaks ground today at the Pentagon’s 9/11 memorial, the last of the three attack sites to get one.
The ceremony begins at 11 a.m. at the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial, a day after the 25th anniversary of the attack that killed 184 people at the Pentagon and aboard American Airlines Flight 77. U.S. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who led the effort to secure $12 million in federal construction money for the project, is expected to attend.
The memorial was dedicated on Sept. 11, 2008, the first of the three 9/11 memorials to open to the public. The museum spaces in New York and Shanksville, Pennsylvania followed, in 2014 and 2015, leaving the Pentagon site without one.
The 9/11 Pentagon Memorial Visitor Education Center is planned for a site about 200 yards southwest of the memorial, across Washington Blvd, on land that opened up through Arlington National Cemetery’s southern expansion. Plans call for exhibits, educational programming, a cafe, a bookstore and event space, with free admission.
Two federal announcements landed in the days before the anniversary. On Wednesday, the National Park Service designated the memorial an affiliated area of the park system, formally recognizing its national significance without changing who owns or runs it. The memorial stays under the Department of War, with the Pentagon Memorial Fund supporting it.
The Park Service also awarded the fund $2 million for the memorial’s operation, security and maintenance through the 9/11 Memorial Act grant program, which Trump signed into law in 2019.
“This investment helps ensure that the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial remains a place where the 184 lives taken here are remembered with the dignity they deserve and where future generations can come to understand the sacrifice, courage, and unity that defined our nation in the aftermath of September 11,” said Joe Kornhoff, executive director of the Pentagon Memorial Fund.
Today’s groundbreaking is largely symbolic. The project still needs sign-off from the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission, and organizers have secured roughly 20% to 25% of the cost so far, according to Axios. The fund is seeking another $35 million from the federal government in next year’s budget.
Virginia’s two-year budget included $1 million for the center, on top of the federal money and private donations from the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, Amazon, Accenture and Transurban. Construction is expected to wrap up in 2029.
At the Pentagon ceremony, Trump and Hegseth tie the day to Iran
President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used the Pentagon’s anniversary observance yesterday (Friday) to draw a line from that morning to the war with Iran.
Trump and first lady Melania Trump listened as the names of the 184 people killed at the Pentagon were read aloud, a bell tolling between each. Trump recounted the stories of several of the victims and said the day hardened American resolve.
“We will never, ever forget,” Trump said. “That’s why we fight today. We don’t have a choice.”
Earlier, in a downpour at daybreak, Hegseth and top military officials stood outside and watched as a giant American flag was unfurled on the side of the building struck by Flight 77. Arlington County held its own ceremony at Fire Station 5 later in the morning.
Trump began his remarks by recalling the sense of American unity that followed the attacks.
“In those harrowing days after the attacks, we saw the authentic spirit of our nation,” Trump said. “We were all New Yorkers that day. Every one of us. We were all New Yorkers. We were all family.”
He went on to salute service members “working right now to ensure the world’s No. 1 sponsor of terror — the Islamic Republic of Iran — will never, ever have a nuclear weapon.”
Hegseth said the U.S. military had “laid waste to the world’s most prolific state sponsor of terrorism” in the war against Iran.
“Our warriors have fought an Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for nearly half a century, that cheered on 9/11, a regime that has sponsored terrorist attacks against Americans for decades, killing thousands, including our comrades in Iraq, in Afghanistan,” Hegseth said.
It was the second year in a row Trump observed the anniversary at the Pentagon. The president, who is originally from New York, last attended the ground zero ceremony in 2024.
Rice says she carries ‘deep personal remorse’
Condoleezza Rice, who was White House national security adviser on 9/11, also took part in the Pentagon commemoration. In her remarks she said she still feels deep pain that “those of us in authority on that day did not see the nature of the danger in time to prevent the attack of 9/11.”
“I will always carry deep personal remorse for the pain that you, the families of the fallen, still feel, and for the trauma that our country endured,” Rice said.
In New York, Vice President JD Vance joined former Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden for the reading of the names, at a ceremony that added a moment of silence for people exposed to the toxic dust from the twin towers’ collapse who have since died of cancer and other illnesses.
Arlington responders carried a version of that toll home. Among them was ACPD Cpl. Harvey Snook III, who spent a week at the Pentagon site collecting evidence and victims’ remains, was diagnosed with cancer traced to that work in 2014 and died in 2016.
Pentagon artifacts on display downtown
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is marking the anniversary with dozens of rarely seen objects laid out on tables rather than behind glass, including a candy dispenser recovered from the Pentagon with melted chocolate still inside and the telephone that sat on U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson’s desk when his wife, Barbara, called him from Flight 77 before it struck the building.
Museum director Anthea Hartig said some of the items are “so fragile they’ll probably never go on display.” The goal, she said, is to help visitors “both never forget, but also kind of reconnect” as a generation emerges that didn’t experience the attacks.
“This has truly slipped into history rather than being part of our memory landscape,” she said.
The exhibit runs through today.
