The Murrah Bombing, Memory and the Memorial
Near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building occupied an entire city block on Northwest Fifth Street in downtown Oklahoma City. At nine-oh-two in the morning on April nineteenth, nineteen ninety-five, a truck bomb containing roughly five thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer detonated in the parking lane directly in front of it.
The blast sheared off the building's entire north face. One hundred sixty-eight people were killed, including nineteen children in the building's day care center on the second floor. It was the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in American history.
The perpetrator was Timothy McVeigh, a twenty-six-year-old Army veteran from western New York with a history of antigovernment grievance. He had chosen the date deliberately, the second anniversary of the federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. McVeigh was convicted and executed in two thousand one.
His co-conspirator Terry Nichols received life sentences on both federal and state charges. What Oklahoma City chose to do with the site afterward became a study in how a community makes meaning from catastrophe. The rubble was cleared.
The footprint of the building was preserved. What stands there now is the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, dedicated in two thousand. At its center are one hundred sixty-eight empty chairs, arranged in rows corresponding to the nine floors of the building, each chair bearing the name of someone who died there.
The chairs for the nineteen children are smaller than the others. A reflecting pool fills the space where the truck stood. At each end of the pool, a bronze gate is inscribed with the times nine-oh-one and nine-oh-three, the minute before and the minute after.
The memorial's designers, Hans and Torrey Butzer, selected through an international design competition in nineteen ninety-seven while they were living and working in Berlin, Germany, described their intention as creating a place where survivors and families could grieve, and where strangers could understand. The phrase We come here to remember is inscribed at the entrance. Across the street, a single American elm survived the blast.
It was already old, planted sometime in the nineteen twenties, by accounts that vary. The shock wave stripped it of leaves and bark and embedded debris in its trunk. It was expected to die.
It did not. The Survivor Tree, as it came to be called, still stands, and each spring its seeds are collected and grown into seedlings that are given to survivors and to communities that have experienced their own mass tragedies. The tree has become its own kind of memorial, unplanned, undesigned, simply alive.
