Oklahoma Today July-August 2003 Volume 53 No. 4

We come here to remember those who were killed, those
who survived, and those changed forever. May all who
leave here know the impact of violence. May this memorial
offer comfort, strength, peace, hope, and serenity.
OKLAHOMA CITY NATIONAL MEMORIAL MISSION STATEMENT
WITHIN THESE WALLS
At the Journal Record Building, the Oklahoma City National
Memorial Center Museum ensures we will never forget.
Steffie Corcoran reports.
I APRIL 19,1995
EIGHT YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE THE WORLD FIRST ASSOCIATED OKLAHOMA
City with a day on a calendar. Time has marched relentlessly forward, gradually but
inevitably adding to the divide between the bombing of the Alfred I? Murrah Federal
Building in downtown Oklahoma City and the present. That distance has provided a space for
healing, and for remembering.
"Wewill never forget" is no longer a phrase in shoe polish scribbled on a police car's rear windshield.
These four words now signify a national impulse to erect monuments honoring the senseless deaths
of brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, sons and daughters. Consider the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Consider Oklahoma City.
Here, the processes of grief, healing, and remembrance have been soothed, at least in part, by
the site on which the tragedy occurred, a place considered by many hallowed ground. Today, the
Oklahoma City National Memorial's symbolic gardens and museum occupy that sacred space.
A short walk from the pastoral outdoor grounds - to the west entry of the memorial center museum
gives visitors scant preparation for the contrast they will experience between one and the other.
The center, inside the Journal Record Building-itself heavily damaged by the massive ammonium
nitrate cocktail-rests directly north of the gardens. Proximity and a shared mission
statement are among the few things the facilities, two of the three arms of the tripartite $29.1
million complex, share.
The Oklahoma City National Memorial Center Museum in the former Journal Record Building sits
north of the outdoor symbolic memorial. The grounds, designed by Butzer Design Partnership, incorporate
several elements, including a field of 168 chairs, a reflecting pool, and the Gates of Time.