Constructing a Story, With 2,982 Names

How do you find one name out of 2,982? How can you spot two or three incised words around twin pools that — taken together — extend an acre and a half? How is it possible to discern letters no higher than an inch and a half in the shadow of what is to be the tallest skyscraper in New York City?

Start with a map.

In essence, that is what the National September 11 Memorial and Museum issued on Wednesday: a clear, navigable computerized guide to the location of every name inscribed on the bronze parapets that are being installed along the perimeters of the pools where the World Trade Center towers once stood.

It is the last critical design detail to be announced in a process that began more than seven years ago with the naming of Michael Arad and Peter Walker and Partners as architects of the 9/11 memorial. The memorial is to open to family members on Sept. 11 and to the public, by reservation, the next day.

Meanwhile, victims’ family members, friends, colleagues and acquaintances — and the public, too — can find out for the first time exactly how the names are arranged. On the memorial’s Web site, they can also learn which names have deliberately been placed near others to denote what Mr. Arad calls “meaningful adjacencies.”

That adjacency might mean the victims were close friends or fond acquaintances, were related by blood or marriage or simply common interests, that they bowled together or dined together. It was up to victims’ relatives to make a request.

“Over 1,200 requests were made to bring that opportunity into the design,” Mr. Arad said on Wednesday. “All of them were met.”

“It really enriches the memorial,” he said. “It allows families’ and friends’ stories to be told.” He said the “river” of names, without other identification (like age or title or company affiliation), was meant to convey simultaneously a sense of individual and collective loss.

“It was important to not put the names in an arrangement that looked like the pages of a ledger,” Mr. Arad said. “To the naked eye, it looks random. But to those who know, and for those who bother to learn, it is anything but.”

Pains were taken in laying out the names to ensure that Person A would be next to Person B, while Person B would be near Person C. And so on. “It involved a combination of the most complex computerized algorithms and the most basic analog function of pinning something up on the wall,” Mr. Arad said.

Announcement of the names arrangement was not timed to coincide with President Obama’s visit to the World Trade Center on Thursday, said Joseph C. Daniels, the president and chief executive of the memorial and museum.

Instead, he said, the idea was “to communicate with families significantly ahead of time so they can start familiarizing themselves with the locations.”

The arrangement does not go nearly as far as some family members had hoped in specifying where victims were employed, on what floors they worked and how old they were. But it is a significant change from the purely random system once advocated by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who is chairman of the memorial foundation.

In a compromise reached in 2006, victims were grouped by north and south tower, or by flight, with panels set aside for victims at the Pentagon and those who died in the 1993 attack on the trade center. A separate section was set aside for “first responders,” principally firefighters and police officers.

Edith Lutnick, the executive director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, was the most publicly outspoken and influential critic of random arrangement. Her central arguments were that family members should not be made to search for their relatives and that the memorial should tell the story itself, without the need for guides, maps, Web sites, interpretive text or smartphone apps.

Allowing that she was not entirely satisfied with the result, Ms. Lutnick said, “We did everything possible to make this a comforting and meaningful arrangement of names for our families.” On 9/11, in the north tower, 658 Cantor employees died, far more than at any other company or institution.

Though not delineated as such on the panels, Cantor employees — including Ms. Lutnick’s brother, Gary, who was a partner — are grouped together. Within their larger group, names have been arranged “to capture as many internal relationships as possible,” she said.

The goal, she said, was to be able to assure family members that “your loved ones’ names are surrounded by the names of those they sat with, those they worked with, those they lived with and, very possibly, those they died with.”