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Sixteen years and five million visitors later, what is now the 9/11 Tribute Museum is poised to close within weeks, its leaders say, barring a last-minute rescue from millions of dollars in debt.

“We’ve really been hanging on by a thread,” co-founder and CEO Jennifer Adams-Webb said, and it’s now “a make-or-break situation.”

While financial pressures have been building for some time, leaders say the museum has been pushed to the brink by the coronavirus pandemic, which hammered tourism on the heels of a costly 2017 move.

The 9/11 Tribute Museum traces its roots to 2004, when a group founded by victims’ relatives decided to turn a former deli, steps away from ground zero, into a focal point for commemoration of the 2001 terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. The trade center was a massive pit and construction site in 2004, but visitors were already coming in droves.

“There’s a tremendous need to create a sacred place of remembrance, right here, right now,” then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg said when the Tribute WTC Visitor Center (as it was initially called) opened in 2006.

It exhibited twisted steel from the wreckage, a photo gallery of victims, and other artifacts. But it became best known for walking tours of the trade center site, led by relatives of the dead, survivors, rescue and recovery workers and people who lived nearby on 9/11.

The center drew 100,000 visitors just in its first four months. Over the years, it also has provided over 900 volunteer tour guides with a cherished outlet for their grief, pain and memories.

“I’m able to talk about my son — it’s 20 years later — to people who want to hear about my son,” says co-founder Lee Ielpi, a retired firefighter and 9/11 recovery worker whose firefighter son Jonathan Ielpi was killed at the trade center. His father carried his body from the rubble.

Some guides have traveled from as far as northern Virginia to lead tours. Others have become such close friends that they still take cruises together, Ielpi said.

The center was dwarfed by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, a $700 million, taxpayer-subsidized project that opened its memorial plaza in 2011 and a vast underground museum in 2014. The museum alone has drawn more than 18 million visitors and the open-air, un-ticketed plaza an estimated 55 million.

On Monday, when the Tribute Museum was closed for the day, at least a dozen people showed up at the door, thinking it was the national museum.

Tribute Museum leaders say it still plays a different and valuable role through its focus on guides’ firsthand accounts of living through the attacks and recovering from them.

“To have them tell you that tomorrow can be a better day and it’s up to us, it’s very powerful,” said Ielpi, who was also a founding trustee of the national museum. “We don’t want people to leave with hate or any kind of despair.”

The Tribute Museum has gotten grants and donations but relies heavily on admission and tour fees (currently $17 and $35, respectively, for adults).

Financial strains began in 2017, when the museum moved to a much bigger space a few blocks further from the trade center. The move exhausted the museum’s reserves and increased its rent, but leaders felt it was their best option because the old location was too small to host enough visitors to support a spiking rent bill there, Adams-Webb said.

The new facility allowed for school groups as large as marching bands in town for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. However, visitor numbers initially dropped by about 30% as the museum strove to remarket itself, she said.

Numbers began bouncing back in the next two years, but then the pandemic shuttered the place for months in 2020 and spurred travel restrictions that took a heavy toll on a museum that draws 40% of its audience from other countries. Visitors dropped from 150,000 in 2019 to 26,000 last year.

The picture began to improve after the U.S. fully reopened to many vaccinated international travelers in early November, then was clouded again with the virus’ super-contagious omicron surge, Adams-Webb said.

The Tribute Museum’s parent organization got more than $300,000 in pandemic relief through federal Paycheck Protection Program loans that were later forgiven, Small Business Administration records show. Adams-Webb said the staff has declined from more than 30 people pre-pandemic to around 10 now, and that other cuts were made where possible. Expenses totaled about 3.6 million in 2019, the last year for which the parent organization’s tax records are publicly available.

Adams-Webb, who lost a friend who worked at the World Trade Center, said leaders have approached the national 9/11 museum about potential help or collaboration, but nothing has materialized. The 9/11 Memorial & Museum declined to comment.

Beyond a lifeline to deal with the current debts, Tribute also needs a partner to help figure out how to make it financially sustainable.

She said there’s still “a small window of opportunity” for someone to step in and save a facility “built by the community to fulfill the need this need that’s out there.”

MacKenzie Scott donates $436 million to Habitat for Humanity

MacKenzie Scott has donated $436 million to Habitat for Humanity International and 84 of its U.S. affiliates — the largest publicly disclosed donation from the billionaire philanthropist since she pledged in 2019 to give away the majority of her wealth.

“We could not be more excited to get the gift at a time when, in some ways, the state of housing affordability is the worst that it has been in modern times,” Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International’s CEO, told The Associated Press. His group received $25 million from Scott and her husband, Dan Jewett, with the remaining $411 million to be distributed among Habitat’s local affiliates.

Scott’s donation amounts to nearly 8% of the $325 million in donations that Habitat for Humanity International received in its 2020 fiscal year.

Reckford said Habitat for Humanity will use Scott’s donation of unrestricted funds to increase the supply of affordable housing, especially in communities of color. Though they approach the problem in varying ways, most local affiliates will pursue projects in their communities, while the international group will focus on broader advocacy and efforts to build homes for working-class families.

“Even before COVID, we already had one in seven families paying over half their income on rent or mortgage,” Reckford said. The last two years made that issue even worse, with many people seeking to buy larger homes to ride out the pandemic.

The scarcity of housing drove up the price in many markets across the country, putting homes out of reach for many first-time buyers.

“For low- and moderate-income families, who are service workers and did not have adequate shelter and still have to go out to work, this has been a catastrophe,” Reckford said.

Scott, who is worth about $48 billion according to Forbes, has signed the Giving Pledge, through which many billionaires have promised to donate more than half their wealth. Aside from an occasional blog post, Scott, an author and philanthropist, doesn’t discuss her donations, which exceeded $8 billion in the past two years after her divorce from Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, who was then the richest person in the world. As part of the divorce settlement, Scott received 4% of Amazon’s shares.

In December, in hopes that she would reduce the attention she draws, Scott declined to announce how much or to whom she donated money. She said she would prefer to let the recipients announce her gifts, as Habitat for Humanity is expected to do on Tuesday. Last week, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America announced that they and 62 local Boys & Girls Clubs had received $281 million from Scott. On Monday, The Fortune Society, a New York-based group that helps the formerly incarcerated re-enter society, announced that Scott donated $10 million to them.

Scott has explained in past blogs that she and Jewett had donated $2.7 billion in the first half of 2021 to “equity-oriented non-profit teams working in areas that have been neglected.”

Though Habitat for Humanity is best-known as a home-building nonprofit, the group, founded in 1976, says it has been working for many years on behalf of equity, toward “a world where everyone has a decent place to live.”

Natosha Reid Rice, Habitat for Humanity International’s global diversity, equity & inclusion officer, said that receiving the donation from Scott this year amounted to a dream fulfilled.

“When we started seeing Ms. Scott’s generosity expressed in a very explicit social-justice- and racial-justice-forward way, there were many of us who were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, if we can get the attention of MacKenzie Scott, that’d be amazing,’ not realizing that she was looking into this space already,” she said. “It was a wonderful surprise.”

Rice said that Scott’s gift will accelerate the timetable on Habitat for Humanity’s efforts to increase Black home ownership and diversify its volunteer base. It will also help the group surmount the political and financial roadblocks that make it difficult for racial minorities to buy homes.

According to an analysis released by the National Association of Realtors last month, U.S. home ownership climbed to 65.5% in 2020, with 72.1% of white Americans now owning their homes. Yet only 43.4% of Black Americans own homes, a proportion even lower than it was in 2010. Habitat for Humanity officials say they hope Scott’s gift will help reverse that trend.

“We have a great opportunity to continue to shape a narrative that’s inclusive, that’s diverse, that promotes equity,” Rice said. “And it’s not just the equitable access, because that then allows those families to build equity for generations to come. And that’s a very exciting opportunity for us as an organization.”

EV battery maker LG will add up to 1,200 jobs in Michigan

LANSING, Mich. | Electric vehicle battery maker LG Energy Solution plans a $1.7 billion expansion in western Michigan that will add up to 1,200 jobs by 2025, officials announced Tuesday.

The project at the company’s site in Holland, located about 155 miles northwest of Detroit, was approved for $56.5 million in state grants and a 20-year tax break worth $132.6 million.

Michigan Economic Development Corp. CEO Quentin Messer Jr., who chairs the Michigan Strategic Fund, said the expansion will quintuple the plant’s ability to produce battery components. The average wage will be $1,257 a week, or about $65,000 annually, plus benefits.

“We look forward to the incredible impact this project will have on the region’s economy, small businesses and workforce for generations to come,” Messer said.

A state memo requesting the incentives says LG Energy Solution was considering facilities in the southeastern U.S. and potentially in Poland and China.

The company, which is headquartered in South Korea, could begin hiring later this year. It manufactures large lithium-ion polymer battery cells and packs for electric vehicles and other applications.

It has joint-venture partnerships with General Motors, with which it is building three U.S. battery plants in Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee, and Stellantis, formerly Fiat Chrysler. Stellantis would not confirm reports that it will build a battery factory in Windsor, Ontario, with LG. The site of a planned fourth GM-LG battery plant has not been announced.

“The impact of this win will be felt around the entire state for decades to come,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said in a statement.

LG Energy Solution, formerly known as LG Chem Michigan, has nearly 1,500 Michigan employees, including more than 1,300 in Holland near Lake Michigan. The company plans to construct several new buildings totaling 1.4 million square feet on vacant land it already owns.

Then-President Barack Obama attended the plant’s 2010 groundbreaking, which was aided by a $151 million federal stimulus grant. Production began in 2013.

“Michigan was a natural choice to our commitment of building an impact global business because of its rich pool of talent, being close to the geographic epicenter of the automotive industry and its strong support,” said Bonchul Koo, president of LG Energy Solution Michigan.

Tesla opens ‘Gigafactory’ near Berlin, its 1st in Europe

BERLIN | Electric car manufacturer Tesla opened its first European factory Tuesday on the outskirts of Berlin in an effort to challenge German automakers on their home turf.

The company says its new “Gigafactory” will employ 12,000 people and produce 500,000 vehicles a year once it’s fully up and running. Initial production will focus on Tesla’s Model Y compact sport utility vehicle.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz attended the opening ceremony in Gruenheide, southeast of the German capital, with Tesla boss Elon Musk, who performed an impromptu dance for fans as the first cars rolled out of the factory for delivery.

He later posted a comment on Twitter thanking Germany with the words “Danke Deutschland!” surrounded by German flags.

German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said the opening of the factory was “a nice symbol” that gasoline-powered cars can be replaced with electric vehicles at a time when Germany and other European nations are trying to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and wean themselves off Russian oil.

Tesla began building the vast facility less than three years ago, before it received official permits to do so. Had those permits not been issued, the company would have had to level the site.

“That’s a different company risk culture,” Habeck said, after being asked to compare Tesla’s approach with the slow pace of German construction projects such as Berlin’s nearby new airport, which opened with a nine-year delay.

Environmental activists have warned that the factory could affect drinking water supplies in the region.

Tesla has dismissed those warnings. The company refused most media access to the site and the ceremony Tuesday.

—From AP reports