Trade Center Relics for Posterity

NEW YORK —  Preservationists are cleaning and photographing hundreds of burned, battered and twisted World Trade Center relics at an isolated airport hangar to create a catalog for museum curators and memorial planners worldwide.

About 700 objects were plucked from the 1.6 million tons of debris by a team of architects working for the trade center owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Among them: five floor slabs compressed into a 3-foot-thick pancake, a bus-sized chunk of the north tower antenna, a crushed firetruck with its ladder twisted into a candy cane shape.

In a parking lot outside the former Tower Air hangar at Kennedy International Airport, several crushed cars covered in tarps sit next to more piles of twisted steel, an elevator motor the size of a refrigerator and the commuter train cars that were found buried in the seven-story-deep pit that was the trade center basement.

Shortly after the terrorist assault that killed about 2,800 people, museums around the world began requesting items from the disaster.

“There are a lot of things that are very evocative of the life of the World Trade Center as it existed, and of course, a lot of material that documents the day of Sept. 11,” said Sarah Henry, vice president for programs at the Museum of the City of New York. “The tremendous physical forces unleashed that day are frozen in time.”

The Port Authority has not yet designated specific pieces to any museum or memorial organization, said Mark Wagner, one of the architects on the project.

The team expects all 700 artifacts to be decontaminated and cataloged within six months, and then be available to lend out.

“Eventually, if a museum is interested in a particular piece they can flip through the catalog and identify it by number,” Wagner said. “The catalog, once that’s available, kind of gives them a shopping list.”

Some items are surprisingly rare -- such as pieces of the towers with glass still intact. Since the Port Authority provided $6 million last year for the World Trade Center Archive project, the team has come across glass “maybe twice,” Wagner said. Nearly all of the glass was pulverized in the collapse.

One symbol of the destruction, the widely photographed 100-foot-tall, 80-foot-wide jagged fragment of the north tower’s north wall, has been dismantled and lies in pieces.

It would have to be reassembled to be used in a memorial, as city officials suggested when it was pulled down on Dec. 15, 2001.

The facade pieces are laid out in the 85,000-square-foot hangar next to the 62-ton south tower column that was the last piece of steel left standing after the collapse. A temperature-controlled room houses the column, surrounded by five U.S. flags.

Throughout the hangar are about 10 sections of the north tower’s 350-foot-tall antenna -- one of the last images visible in the dust as the building collapsed.

Another climate-controlled room is being planned to store smaller items, like a copy of the New York Times from June 23, 1969, when the towers were being constructed. It was found inside a steel column. Wagner theorizes it was stuffed there by a construction worker.