Broken

The Port Authority of St. Paul invited the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to bring their World Trade Center Traveling Memorial to the annual Taste of Minnesota festival held on the grounds of the state capitol for six days including the 4th of July. And so Lieutenants Chet Weekes and Gene Smith of the Port Authority Police Department, and co-founders of the Memorial, drove their WTC Traveling Memorial motor coach across several states to make it in time to set up in a tent across from Cody the Buffalo from “Dances With Wolves” and the stage where goofy radio DJs held suomo wrestling contests, and every noon there was a class in aerobics. And I took a day off work to see the exhibit.





At the entrance, easels displayed histories of the Port Authority and the Twin Towers, pasted to foam core poster board, and the most basic of tables held models of the towers and random related items like a lamp whose shade was made from pictures of the towers at night, and a toy sized United Airlines plane. The path then curved around another series of tables with posters leaning on each other like the bottom row of a house of cards.



Each poster showed the photo of an officer who died when the towers collapsed, and their names and short biographies, with typos, some of which were corrected. And further down there posters with poems and one showing President Bush holding a police officer’s badge. The large screen TV in the corner wasn’t working but it apparently usually showed videos of the destruction.

Beyond the TV, along one wall of the tent were the remains of the objects pulled from the rubble: PATH train signs and World Trade Center signs and Port Authority No Trespassing signs, all mangled, a pay phone nearly unrecognizable, a flattened broken flashlight, the door from an NYPD squad car, burnt, with a photo of the same door still attached to the car which rested at Fresh Kills landfill, unidentifable chunks of twisted metal that used to be something. Hanging from the wall of the tent was a tattered ATF Agent t-shirt, and thick heavy PAPD WTC coats with sleeves that appeared to have been shredded by lions.









A table held a melted cell phone cover, crooked forks and knives, a portion of a computer keyboard, a doorknob, a rusted stapler, a bent cover for an electrical outlet, a piece of glass, a piece of marble, a piece of the threshold to an Otis elevator, bolts, computer circuit boards, and the top half the word “World” from a sign.



Xeroxed onto goldenrod paper inserted into sheet protectors and taped around the exhibit were several signs stating “All of these items were recovered from Ground Zero they are very fragile PLEASE DO NOT HANDLE thanks!”, and people were kept back by the same sort of ropes that airports use to form lines at tickets counters; later I realized that the repeated EWR on the fabric is the 3 letter code for Newark.



And this on white Xerox paper, fastened to a surprisingly mottled green hunk of rivetted metal outlining a hole the shape of an airplane window: Part of the fuselage from American Airlines Flight 11.

It was the fuselage that kept me from sleeping until predawn hours and gave me nightmares when I could close my eyes. This was what remained of the plane which flew over my hotel during its final intact seconds and caused the hole I’d see 15 minutes later, and the collapse I’d also see a little over an hour after that. That started the process by which a date became a day, not unlike the Fourth of July.



Someone sat on the other side of this metal once, and looked at the New York skyline which is the last thing they’d ever see of the world outside that metal, and the people who determined that this was from Flight 11 probably also knew who sat there. This would be going to the Smithsonian, Gene told me, along with the car door and the other things, not even ten months after it flew into history. But for these few days it would remain propped up on the pavement in front of the state capitol, inches from the toes of my shoes, in a tent next to Cody the Buffalo, and the petting zoo, and a booth selling red white and blue God Bless America trinkets.

-- written November 15, 2002





To read what happened to these pictures, click here: Here Is New York 2007 and Unity And Remembrance