Americans Rush to Build Memorials to 9/11
By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY
22 May 2003

It's not the usual stuff of monuments — not gold or marble or granite. It's twisted, scorched, pitted. You could have bought a ton of it or the price of two Broadway theater tickets. And it would only remind you of disaster and defeat.

Steel wreckage from the World Trade Center is taking its place in new kinds of memorials for a new kind of war. People come to see it and touch it, to say prayers, light candles, leave flowers.

Aside from a few major wars, 9/11 is becoming the most widely memorialized event in U.S. history. Hundreds of public memorials have been erected, and hundreds more are planned. Rarely have so many monuments risen so quickly. Americans, who often have taken decades or centuries to commemorate famous battles, great leaders and awful tragedies, are rushing to memorialize the worst day in the nation's history.

There are memorials at the Ohio air-traffic-control center that had last contact with United Flight 93 before it crashed in Pennsylvania; outside a mine shaft in northeastern Minnesota; on a hilltop in New Jersey overlooking lower Manhattan.

The most common and most powerful element in 9/11 memorials came from the rubble of Ground Zero. A piece of rust-colored structural steel is becoming this generation's Civil War cannon — a tangible symbol of service and sacrifice on display in the public square. The steel connects many Americans to an event of transcendent importance that they experienced only through television.

Carrie Konjoyan helped bring a 4-foot-long, 500-pound section of a Trade Center column to Sherman Oaks, Calif., for inclusion in a monument there. She calls it "sacred steel. When I saw it for the first
time, I started to cry. It was one of the most powerful moments of my life."

Bob Ogorzaly is an architect who worked on the state of Texas' 9/11 memorial, which will have two column pieces standing 9 inches apart. Visitors will be able to squeeze between them. "They are so mangled, and they are washed in the blood of innocents," he says. "It's electrifying to touch them. It brings home the horror of the day."

Everywhere, the steel is treated with reverence, like a sacred relic. In Albuquerque, two columns that will be part of a reconstructed church bell tower were consecrated with holy oil.

A flatbed truck carrying a pair of beams was honored with a police escort through Oak Ridge, Tenn. "The steel itself is almost heroic," says Max Page, professor of architecture and history at University of Massachusetts-Amherst. "It held up for so long before collapsing."

Two four-story-high Trade Center columns support a flagpole that rises 65 feet outside Old Virginia Brick Co. in Salem. Va. "They knocked the towers down," says company owner Fletcher Smoak, who  commissioned the memorial. "But part of them has gone back up."

Fast track to history

Americans have not always been so quick to erect memorials, even to the greatest people or events.

The Lincoln Memorial was not finished until 1922, 57 years after the president's assassination. The battlefield at Gettysburg was not preserved by Congress until 30 years after the Civil War. The USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor was not dedicated until 1962, 21 years after the day that lives in infamy.

Most of the hundreds of state and local Vietnam War memorials were built only after the one in Washington was dedicated in 1982 — seven years after the fall of Saigon — and proved hugely popular.

But Americans are eager to memorialize 9/11. The three major projects — in lower Manhattan, at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pa. — will be finished in a matter of months or years, not decades.

North Miami Beach, dedicated a stone monument just two months after the attacks. "We felt the need to do something and do it quickly," Mayor Jeffrey Mishcon says. "Some people thought we went too quickly."

"Why wait?" asks Joe Dittmar, who escaped from the Trade Center on 9/11 and has helped raise funds for a memorial in Naperville, Ill. "I don't think you can do it too soon."

Or too often. Local memorials "are for the many people who will never see the memorials in New York, Washington or Pennsylvania," says Ken Senter, a high school teacher in Oak Ridge, Tenn. His students plan to use Trade Center steel to make memorial plaques for all 50 state capitols.

Relatively few Memorial Day events this weekend are geared specifically to 9/11 and its monuments. Many new memorials commemorating the terror attacks will be dedicated Sept. 11.

'Rush to memorialize'

Americans' feelings about memorials and monuments have changed, according to Ed Linenthal, professor of religion and American culture at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh.

In the past, there was a sense that traumatic events had to take their place in historical memory before they could be memorialized," he says. "There was no rush to memorialize the Holocaust at first — it had to settle for awhile. But now memorials are part of how we comment on momentous events. It's how we engage with them."

And it's how we put our stamp on history. "Monument making is history writing in stone," says Nick Capasso, curator of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Mass., and an expert 
on public sculpture.

After the Civil War, towns could order their war monuments out of a catalog. But there is no template for 9/11 memorials.

"People are making it up as they go," says Gary Laderman, an Emory University religion professor. "It reflects a cultural sensibility — increasing customization and individual forms of expression when it comes to dealing with death."

So you have two flagpoles in Riverside, Calif., 100 oak trees in Amherst, N.Y., three lilac bushes outside an International House of Pancakes in Wichita. A memorial planned in Schenectady, N.Y., includes a copper statue of Sirius, the police dog killed at the Trade Center.

A new high school in Prince William County, Va., will have a giant sundial with a small white triangle of concrete near the Roman numeral nine, pointing to the time when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.

But the single most popular element in 9/11 monuments is Trade Center steel:

• A 13-foot column was cut in two to create replicas of the Twin Towers in Lafayette, La. The monument has a base shaped like the Pentagon and a Cajun translation of words from President Bush's 9/11 speech.

• At Bartram Trail High School in Jacksonville, Fla., teachers and students used a twisted, 6-foot beam to form one leg of a V-shaped sculpture they installed in the school courtyard. The other leg is stainless steel, to symbolize rebuilding.

• St. Bernard of Clairvaux Church in Scottsdale, Ariz., has a memorial with a 4-foot-high cross cut from an I-beam by a fireman at Ground Zero.

The wreckage of the World Trade Center was still settling when New York received the first requests for debris from the scene. City officials had more pressing concerns, but as the months passed, memorial makers used varied channels.

A member of the Sherman Oaks Chamber of Commerce had a brother who worked in the mayor's office in New York. The brother-in-law of the operations manager at Old Virginia Brick ran a New York-area steel scrap company. A city council member in Martinez, Calif., reminded a New York City bureaucrat that his town was the birthplace of Joe DiMaggio.

Most of the almost 200,000 tons of steel was sold for scrap for about $140 a ton. But the city held back some pieces and eventually handed them out for memorials to about 215 governments, agencies and non-profit groups. 

Recipients ranged from the Nixon, Ford and FDR presidential libraries to Ben Narodick of Fountain Valley, Calif., whose Eagle Scout project was to design and build a 9/11 memorial for his community.

The city wasn't delivering the steel; recipients had to get it. Narodick couldn't afford to fly to New York, but he persuaded Federal Express to ship the steel piece for free. It took him and seven other members of the football team to lift it into place.

By the time the planners of a Sept. 11 memorial in Upstate New York got to Ground Zero last year, the site was almost clear of debris. Then they noticed four steel column sections off in a corner. The foreman didn't know how the steel got there, but he said that if they could take it away within 24 hours, they could have it.

Keeping the memory alive

More than anything, the memorial builders want to ensure that 9/11 is never forgotten. "I fear that in this PlayStation 2 world, what happened that day will be put aside by future generations," says Dittmar, who escaped from the south tower. "But it was no video game."

Future generations, however, are a tough audience.

The nation is filled with monuments no one notices to events no one remembers. "We have a short memory for memorials," says Michael Miscione, a New York writer and history buff. "After a generation or two, most of them are forgotten."

New York City offers three prime examples:

• Nearly a million people attended the dedication of Grant's Tomb in 1897.  For two decades, Civil War veterans helped make it the city's most popular tourist attraction. Today, the Civil War general's resting place is best known as a stale joke: Who's buried in Grant's Tomb? (The answer: Grant and his wife
Julia.)

• After the excursion boat General Slocum caught fire and sank in the East River in 1904, memorials were erected in Manhattan and Queens to the more than 1,000 passengers who died. Both are largely ignored today, and few people even know of the disaster.

• A century ago, a 12-story column with an eternal flame on top was erected in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn to remember American troops who died aboard British prison ships in the East River during the Revolutionary War. More than 11,000 died — several times the number of American battle deaths.

But today the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument is vandalized and, like those it honors, forgotten.

Which makes some wonder about the durability of memorials created in haste.

"If there's not a compelling design, a monument disappears into the urban fabric," Capasso says. "People walk right by it. They don't look at it; they don't even see it."

Page, the University of Massachusetts professor, asks if monuments really do their job. Once we decide what something means and set it in stone, he says, we tend to lose interest: "Someone once said there is nothing as forgettable as a monument."

Senter, the Oak Ridge High School teacher, cannot accept that. He believes that without a tangible reminder, 9/11 for students will soon "be out there in unreal land." 

The school has a 9/11 memorial with two steel columns near the flagpole. The other day, Senter saw some students sitting on the memorial's concrete pad, eating lunch. "I wondered, 'What does that mean? That they're comfortable? That they've forgotten?' "

He's made himself a promise: On the first day of school each year, he will take his classes out to the memorial.

He'll talk about the passengers who charged the cockpit, the trapped office workers who said goodbye on cell phones, the firefighters who rushed up to their doom. He'll talk about why some people hate America so much.

"I'm going to tell them what that steel means," he says. "When you're looking at it and touching it, 9/11 is real."

Photo Note:  Eagle Scout Ben Narodick stands next to a memorial, dedicated to all victims of terrorism, outside a Fountain Valley, Calif., public library. Phot by Damian Dovarganes, AP