This year the Remembrance Scholars wanted to bring the Pam Am Flight 103 archives to the Syracuse University community, and they did that through a pop-up museum.

The promenade pop-up museum featured photos, front pages of newspapers, magazine covers and other media artifacts related to the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, which occurred on Dec. 21, 1988. Thirty-five SU students died in the bombing, in addition to 224 others on the plane and 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie.

Since the bombing, SU has held Remembrance Week to honor the Pan Am Flight 103 victims and their families. The promenade pop-up museum is a new addition to the week’s events and was open to the SU community on Monday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Originally supposed to be held on the University Place promenade, the pop-up museum was moved inside the Schine Student Center due to Monday’s weather being too windy.

Charlotte Balogh, a Remembrance Scholar and a senior television, radio and film major, said the pop-up museum was the “brainchild” of Remembrance Scholar Terence “TJ” Wells.

Wells said he and Malik Evans, another Remembrance Scholar, came up with the concept of the pop-up museum because they were talking about trying to make people more aware of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing.

“The tragedy had such an impact on the school,” Wells said. “It affected (the SU community) so profoundly that it is important to make people aware of it.”

The idea of the pop-up museum was to bring some items from the Pan Am Flight 103 archives out to help educate the SU community on the terrorist attack, said Sarah Whittaker, a Remembrance Scholar and a senior communication sciences disorders and marketing management double major. The pop-up museum focuses on the history of the tragedy while the rest of the week will pivot to highlight and honor the victims, she said.

In addition to newspaper clips and photos from the tragedy, a black board with small sketched headshots of all 35 SU students who died in the bombing was on display. The student headshots were arranged into the number 270, representing the total number of people who were killed in the terrorist attack.

The pop-up museum was interactive, allowing passersby to look and engage with the materials if they wanted to.

All of the Remembrance Scholars have been to the Pan Am Flight 103 archives, Balogh added, but she said not many others in the SU community have seen what is in the archives.

Throughout the day, Wells said he saw a nice mix of SU students, faculty and staff stop to look at the display. A few faculty members talked to him and other Remembrance Scholars about how they had some of the SU students who died in their classes 28 years ago. Others knew about the terrorist attack, but wanted more information.

Wells added that he noticed lots of people turning their heads to look at the pop-up museum as they passed by it in the Schine Atrium.

Whittaker said most of the students she talked to about the archive items were shocked by them because they had never seen photos of the tragedy before.

Since the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing took place before most, if not all, current students at SU were born, not many realize the impact it had on the United States, said Lynsey Cooper, a Remembrance Scholar and senior international relations major.

“(Pan Am Flight 103) was our parents’ 9/11,” Whittaker said. “Everyone was shook.”

Each day of Remembrance Week will have a specific hashtag related to that day’s events. Monday’s hashtag was #Remember, which goes along with the pop-up museum’s theme of remembering the history of Pan Am Flight 103, Wells said.

“We are showing what happened, talking about the history and then how we can move forward,” Wells said.

Published on October 24, 2016 at 9:57 pm

Contact Sara: smswann@syr.edu | @saramswann