Chronicle: Memories in Steel

Jan Ramirez remembers the bike rack at Ground Zero.

It was an ordinary metal rack, and seven bicycles had been chained to it the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. But now the bikes were covered in ash, twisted and partially melted, some of the tires distorted. “Whose bikes were they?” Ramirez remembers thinking. “At the height of the morning commute, someone had just parked each of these bikes.”

Ramirez was among a small group of museum professionals escorted to the site of the fallen Twin Towers one day in October 2001, just a few weeks after the devastating attacks of 9/11. It was there that she saw the bike rack—amidst a sea of total wreckage—and knew that someday it would help tell an important story.

“It was shocking. I don’t know what I was prepared for, but I couldn’t believe how everything was pulverized,” says Ramirez, now chief curator and director of collections for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum scheduled to open in New York next year. “I thought we’d see keyboards, mugs, business equipment. It wasn’t there. This bike rack was the first and only intact human-related artifact that put people there at the site. I knew it should be saved.”

Her escort, a Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police officer, spray-painted a circle around the rack and wrote “SAVE.” The fact that it was preserved—along with more than a thousand other artifacts that are now housed in museums and community memorials around the country—is part of an inspiring story of foresight and cooperation made possible largely by an organization mainly tasked with running New York’s bridges, tunnels and airports.

The Port Authority, which originally planned and built the World Trade Center in the 1960s, decided in 1998 to privatize the property. In July 2001, a 99-year lease to Silverstein Properties was finalized, but the buildings and the land still belonged to the Port Authority. After the 9/11 attacks, the Port Authority began work on managing the recovery process, which included clearing the site and preserving artifacts collected from the rubble. The Port Authority’s WTC Artifacts Program—informally called a “steel giveaway” program because many of the recovered objects were metal building materials from the fallen towers—has, in the past two years, filled 1,117 requests for artifacts from museums, municipalities, and first-responder groups

In the chaotic days and weeks following the 9/11 attacks, the main goal was to clear the bulk of the debris from the WTC site and to search it for human remains. Much of the material was sent to Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, where forensic specialists, anthropologists and other experts conducted a massive search-and-sort operation. In what was at first a mostly unorganized effort, Port Authority workers began marking items that seemed significant to save, and construction and forensic experts tagged pieces that might be relevant to their investigations. But the problem of storage loomed, as many items tagged were large: vehicles, steel beams and other building materials. The Port Authority turned to an empty airplane hangar at John F. Kennedy International Airport that had been vacated when the bankrupt Tower Airlines shut down in 2000. This building—Hangar 17—thus became a temporary 80,000-square-foot home for 9/11 artifacts.

“Even then, right after 9/11, people were thinking about memorializing,” says Peter Miller, now a consulting planner for historical preservation projects, who was a Port Authority financial analyst in 2001. He had been on the 65th floor of the north tower when the first plane hit on 9/11 and was able to evacuate down the stairs. Several years later, Miller became a special projects manager for the Port Authority, and his duties included oversight of Hangar 17 and the material housed there.

“There was a lot of informal collection activity,” he says. Museums and history organizations—including the New York State Historical Society, Smithsonian Institution, and state museums of New York and New Jersey—all sent representatives, Ramirez among them, to Ground Zero and Fresh Kills to conduct informal surveys of artifacts that might later be collected. And in the earliest days after 9/11, rescue workers at Ground Zero often took home artifacts that seemed personally relevant to them.

In late 2001, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) began investigating the sources of the WTC’s structural failure, and a court order designated all WTC building material as federal evidence, including much of the contents of Hangar 17.

“When the court order went out, a lot of things showed up back at Hangar 17 that construction workers and firefighters had originally saved,” Miller explains. “In some cases, because of that, we have things that might not have otherwise been saved.”

One of the first artifacts transferred to the hangar was a piece of the antenna that had topped the north tower. Eventually, more than 1,500 pieces of support steel from the WTC—including some with original assembly markings from the 1960s—were housed in Hangar 17. Some of the salvaged steel was determined, in the course of the NIST investigation, to be “impact steel” that had actually been hit by the two aircraft on 9/11. Damaged vehicles were saved, too—several NYFD ladder trucks, as well as ambulances, taxicabs and a train car. And in a separate tent inside the hangar, smaller items were saved and catalogued: things like the handmade “missing” posters that victims’ families posted around New York in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, and crushed and melted filing cabinets from the towers’ business tenants.

The artifacts in Hangar 17 were degrading quickly, both from the initial trauma they had sustained and from time and exposure. Port Authority officials realized that they didn’t have the know-how to properly care for the material, which was already imbued with meaning. “My background wasn’t consistent with this kind of work,” Miller says. “But the significance of even an anonymous piece of steel from the World Trade Center is huge.” So the Port Authority brought portable climate-control equipment into the hangar, segregated the artifacts by type and by distress level, and hired preservation experts to consult on the project.

Ramirez says that without the Port Authority’s intervention, much of what was saved from Ground Zero would have been lost. “The Port Authority employees have been such amazing stewards of this material,” she says. “They lost 84 of their own colleagues on 9/11, and they’re here to run tunnels and airports—they’re not a museum. But they ethically did the right thing, on their own dime, to preserve this material.”

The idea that the artifacts in Hangar 17 should be given away to museums, police departments and nonprofits developed slowly, says Steve Coleman, assistant director of media relations for the Port Authority. The September 11 Memorial & Museum had negotiated an agreement in 2005 to obtain some of the material in Hangar 17 for its planned exhibits. But there was much more material than any one museum could use. In fact, Ramirez estimates that less than 1.5 percent of the physical materials composing the WTC ended up in Hangar 17, and that the September 11 Memorial & Museum could only use perhaps 10 percent of that amount. With so much historically significant material orphaned, the Port Authority began working with museums to find permanent homes for the contents of Hangar 17—especially the scarred and twisted steel beams that had come to represent the power of the tragedy.

The Port Authority created the WTC Artifacts Program to distribute the materials. Starting in 2009, the authority asked cities, towns and municipalities whether they might want a piece of WTC steel to incorporate into a local 9/11 memorial. They also contacted fire departments, police stations and nonprofits, including historical societies and small museums. “The public affairs office predicted I’d get maybe 200 requests up through the 10th anniversary,” says Miller, who facilitated the WTC Artifacts Program for two years. “But in six months, I had more than 1,000 requests.”

Potential steel recipients had to specify how and where they would use the steel they received, certify that they would not make a profit off it and indicate the approximate size artifact they could properly care for. Most requests came from police and firefighter groups, including representatives from police and firefighting memorials.

Organizers of the planned Fire Museum in Fall River, Mass., for instance, read about the WTC Artifact Program online and applied in late 2009. This May, Mike LePage, chairman of the museum committee, learned that they would receive a 36-inch-long, half-inch-thick, 163-pound steel I-beam. The Fire Museum had originally requested two straight beams that might be displayed in a representation of two towers, but the Port Authority awarded only one piece. Still, LePage says he was overwhelmed with emotion when he visited Hangar 17 in May to pick up the steel. “When they brought it out of Hangar 17 on a forklift, I was speechless,” he says. “It was twisted, bent and had heavy fire damage. It was nothing that we asked for, but everything that we needed.”

Because the Fire Museum’s steel beam is relatively small, it can be displayed in a glass case. But finding museums willing and able to take much bigger artifacts has been a challenge, Coleman says. The Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, in Fort Worth, Tex., was unusual in its ability to accept a large piece: a 6,500 pound, 36-foot-long, 6-foot-wide beam designated N-17. Unlike many WTC artifacts, much is known about N-17’s provenance, says Colleen Blair, the museum’s executive vice president for community engagement and innovation. During the NIST study, investigators determined that the beam’s base rested on the 100th floor of the north tower, just two stories above the center of impact from the first plane.

When the museum brought the beam into Fort Worth from Hangar 17 on a flag-draped flatbed truck, citizens’ response was profound, Blair says. “People came to see it and just didn’t talk,” she says. “There was a lot of reverence. The community of Fort Worth sent first responders to New York after 9/11 to help, and we hope this piece reflects the spirit of the community that came together.” The beam will be installed in a public plaza outside the museum and will be unveiled on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 this fall.

While the Port Authority has aimed to spread WTC artifacts across the country, the objects are especially relevant to New York and New Jersey museums. Museum officials from the two states most affected by 9/11 were involved from the start in the process of salvaging WTC material. The New York State Museum’s director of exhibitions and programs, Mark Schaming, for instance, visited Ground Zero in October 2001 and spent more than 40 days in Fresh Kills in 2001 and 2002, working alongside Port Authority employees to sort out relevant artifacts. The museum, located in Albany, opened its first permanent 9/11 exhibit in 2002.

“While the Port Authority concentrated on architecture and vehicles in what they selected to save, we concentrated more, through Fresh Kills, on articles of everyday life,” Schaming explains. “Our collection includes things like souvenirs of the World Trade Center, keys marked ‘WTC,’ and a file cabinet from a business, Aon Corporation, that lost 176 of its people. We also have election posters—Sept. 11, 2011, was an election day in New York—and a big crushed van of election day materials.”

As time has passed, more of the family members of victims have come forward, too, with artifacts they saved or had received from the police. The family of one woman who died on United Flight 175 donated her United mileage card to the museum—the only tangible reminder of that victim that recovery workers were able to find.

In a particularly poignant position is Anthony Gardner, executive director of the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton—and also a 9/11 family member. His brother, Harvey, died in the WTC. Gardner first visited Hangar 17 seven years ago as a member of the 9/11 Families Advisory Council, before he had any museum role. “It was just filled wall to wall. And it’s an airplane hangar!” he remembers. On a March 2011 visit back to Hangar 17, the space was almost empty—the success of the steel giveaway program clear. Gardner’s museum focused on accessioning items that would tell the unique 9/11 story of New Jersey, the state which, after New York, lost the most residents: nearly 700.

One of the most haunting reminders of New Jersey’s loss is a set of two chairs and a table from the Commuter Café in the mall underneath the WTC. Gardner saw the set in Hangar 17 and arranged for his museum to accession it.

“We want to tell the story of how thousands of people commuted in every day from New Jersey, and some of those people ate at those tables,” Gardner says. “It’s really tangible, and it’s significant because our exhibit will tell the story from the New Jersey perspective.”

At the height of its use as a storage facility, Hangar 17 contained upward of 2,000 artifacts. And though that number is now greatly reduced, there are still non-steel items available for request by museums. Coleman says that he expects to find permanent homes for all the remaining artifacts by the end of 2011.

Ramirez says she looks forward to seeing more of the ways in which the museum community can respond to the challenge of 9/11 interpretation. “You could show a bolt found at Ground Zero, and people are stopped in their tracks. They fill in the missing parts. 9/11 brought people of all backgrounds and perspectives together with respect. Now 10 years later, there’s that same kind of spirit.”
The bikes that have haunted Ramirez since October 2001 will be displayed at the September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York. Visitors to the museum may never know who owned the bikes, or what became of the riders who parked their bikes at the World Trade Center on a sunny Tuesday in September. But they will not be forgotten.

Laura Donnelly-Smith is a writer and editor based in the Washington, D.C. area. Museums interested in acquiring a WTC artifact should send an e-mail detailing their request to Nancy Johnson at WTCArtifacts@panynj.gov.