Honoring Heroes
NY memorial remembers firefighters’ sacrifice on 9/11
By Gary Gately
Special Contributor
Dallas Morning News – September 10, 2006
New York — Joseph reaches up to touch the fireman’s helmet, and I tell him about heroes who have gone to heaven.
We’re standing together in front of the new 56-foot-long bronze memorial to firefighters who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Here, across from the 16-acre pit at Ground Zero, I wonder what to tell my 4-year-old son, and what not to tell this boy who loves firefighters and would like to become one someday.
We use pencil and paper to make a rubbing of the name and one of the 343 fallen New York firefighters inscribed in the wall beneath the three panels. (Later, we’ll say a prayer for John K. McAvoy, Ladder Company 3 fireman, Staten Island hockey coach extraordinaire, and those he left: his wife, Paula, and children, Kate and Kevin.)
On the side of the wall of the “Ten House,” home to Engine Company 10 and Ladder Company 10, the bronze memorial, the first large-scale monument at Ground Zero, captures an instant of horror, heartbreak and heroism.
Like ancient memorials, this wall tells a simple story, one that is at once visceral and horrific and timeless. In the center panel, flames shoot skyward from each of the towers, and firefighters tug at hoses, shout commands, point to the blazing skyscrapers and rush forward clutching bars used to pry open doors. Two firefighters kneel before a hydrant to splash water on their faces.
Under a brilliant blue sky that recalls that morning five years ago, a cluster of firefighters from other station houses amble about and talk firefighter talk. Joseph beams when one of them reaches out to shake his hand. He’s awed by the bas-relief scenes of firemen in boots and helmets and the ladder truck like the one he got for Christmas and never tires of.
But then he asks the inevitable question: Why did they all go to heaven?
Something terrible happened here, before you were born, I tell him. But good triumphed over evil, hope over despair, light over darkness, love over hatred. And it is in part through what is not depicted on the bronze panels that the genius and eloquence of the memorial shine. It pictures no people-loaded planes turned into missiles, no terrorists in the cockpit, no bin Laden, no jihad, no geopolitics. Both towers, though ablaze, still stand, and the firefighters are still alive. So it is more a monument to life, and to those who saved lives. The terrorists who died killed as many as they could, and considered it martyrdom. The firefighters who died saved as many people as they could, and considered it the duty of another day’s work.
John Morabito, a Ladder 10 firefighter at the station across Liberty Street from Ground Zero, says the firefighters welcome questions about the attack and its aftermath and the five firefighters from the station who died. “No matter what they build across the street, the firehouse is always going to be the memorial,” he says. “We are the living memorial.”
For firefighter, it was ‘the end of the world’
Mr. Morabito was in the south tower when the north tower collapsed, and he had never seen anything like the devastation and the terror. “I saw basically for me what was the end of the world,” he says. “I’ve been to many fires, and you look at another firefighter’s face to feel comfortable. But that day, I saw terror on other firefighters’ faces, guys shaking their heads and thinking they’re going anyway, knowing they’re signing their own death warrants. They were brave, brave guys who knew they were not coming home.”
But he saw something else, too.
“That day, I saw the good in people. Hundreds of people coming down stairs, not concerned about themselves but others, people who cared more for others than themselves. If you want to know good, good was everywhere. God was everywhere.”
Holland & Knight, a law firm whose office is a block from Ground Zero, supplied ice to soothe rescue workers in the weeks after the attack. Beyond being frequent visitors to the World Trade Center complex, the firm had another connection to Sept. 11. One of its partners Glenn J. Winuk, a volunteer firefighter from Jericho, N.Y., did what came naturally when he heard about the World Trade Center fires. His adrenaline kicked in, and off he went to try to save people. He never made it back.
When the workers no longer needed ice, the firm broached the idea of donating a firetruck to the Ten House, which had been heavily damaged and reopened only after $3.5 million worth of repairs and renovations. But the fire department instead wanted a lasting memorial to its fallen comrades, and the firm, starting with money left over from the ice fund, raised more than $1 million.
A design team sketched what would become the memorial panels after listening to firefighters talk about responding to the attack. At first, designers considered a glass memorial and even created a model of one, but sculptor Viggo Beck Rambusch insisted it be bronze, says Brian Starer, a partner at Holland & Knight who headed the effort to create the memorial.
“You want this to be a 100-year memorial, which means in 100 years it’ll tell a story, and you want it to be made of noble metal,” Mr. Rambusch told the lawyer.
Noble Metal?
“Trajan’s Column,” Mr. Rambusch replied, referring to the Roman monument. Mr. Starer went to Rome and imagined the monument unfurled horizontally instead of in a spiral, and he knew the sculptor was right.
On the wall, above the firefighters, words on the monument read: “Dedicated to those who fell and to whose who carry on. May we never forget.”
And may we give thanks for genuine heroes. God knows 4-year-olds and all the rest of us will always need them.
Gary Gately is a freelance writer in Baltimore.
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