http://www.tribecatrib.com/news/news.../hangar17.html
Remnants Await Return to WTC Site
By Carl Glassman
POSTED JUNE 27, 2008
It will be another three years before the National September 11 Memorial and Museum opens at the World Trade Center site. But for the museum’s curators, the monumental task of composing the 9/11 story is now.
Chief curator Jan Ramirez and associate curator Amy Weinstein are gathering the photos, films, oral histories and personal mementos for the permanent collection. But
it is the massive artifacts —the rusted and twisted tonnage of World Trade Center steel and the wreckage of emergency vehicles, for example—that will influence design and engineering decisions before the museum is built.
Those objects, including a pair of structural steel “tridents” from the towers and the 65-ton “Last Column,” are among a thousand World Trade Center remnants cleaned and stored neatly in Hangar 17 at JFK Airport. Within two weeks after the disaster, the former Tower Air hangar had become a repository of massive Trade Center rubble, some of which will be selected for posterity.
Last month, a Trib reporter accompanied Ramirez on a tour of the 80,000- square-foot hangar, where she talked about objects being considered for the museum—decisions that will influence how generations of visitors try to comprehend the enormity of physical loss on Sept. 11.
Only a few of the mangled vehicles in the collection can return to the site. Among those might be Engine 21, which had been parked at Church and Vesey Streets when the towers came down. Ramirez said that the truck’s cab, a burned-out wreckage, and its rear section nearly intact, is a potent symbol of the “quirk of fate” that day.
“If you turned left you might have lived, if you turned right you might have died,” she said.
Ramirez and Weinstein are on a quest to find the people and stories behind the objects. For Engine 21, it is the last hours of William Burke, the revered fire captain who drove the truck to the scene that day. He perished on the 24th floor of the north tower after choosing to stay with two workers—one a paraplegic—though he knew the south tower had collapsed and the north tower was next.
A Ladder 3 truck that had been parked on West Street, its cab missing, also is likely to be displayed in the museum, Ramirez said. One of Ladder 3’s men was the highly decorated fire captain, Patrick J. “Paddy” Brown.
“We actually have recordings of his voice. We know he got up as high as probably the 43rd floor of the north tower,” said Ramirez. “He heard the evacuation order but stayed to make sure all the civilians were out. He was killed when the building came down.”
“You have to be careful how you use the word hero,” Ramirez noted, “and we probably will not use that word. But there were incredible choices that were made that day.”
Some surviving crew members of other vehicles in the hangar are still too traumatized to tell their stories, Ramirez said. Such is the case with two men who arrived in an EMS ambulance.
Gutted by fire, the vehicle’s ash-filled interior could be misperceived as harboring WTC dust, Ramirez said, so the ambulance will probably be one of the few objects encased in glass.
Just how the museum avoids displaying artifacts of destruction as perverse objects of sculptural art is still an open question, Ramirez said.
“We want to make sure that we do not aestheticize moments in which everything became so twisted or scratched that it becomes almost luridly beautiful,” she said. “We’re going to avoid using traditional museum mounts and, to the best of our abilities, we’re going to keep the mounts very humble. We’re not presenting them as fetishized objects.”
The few fragmented remains of Broken Propeller, the Alexander Calder sculpture that stood at the World Trade Center, lie pitifully on a line-up of tables within a “microclimate” tent of their own. Ramirez said the museum may bring the pieces back into a “silhouette ensemble placement” that does not pretend to create a new work of art.
The display of the “Last Column” offers other challenges, Ramirez said. The 36-foot girder, with its hundreds of photos and messages of grief and remembrance, is preserved in its own climate-controlled tent. There, preservationists Steven Weinstein and Peter Gat continue their years-long effort to halt the corrosion it suffered at Ground Zero.
But the famous totem probably can not be housed in the same controlled environment at the museum, where it will be displayed in a large area next to the exposed slurry wall.
“Do we have visitors actually go into a chamber where they can encounter it, do we enclose the column?” Ramirez asks. “We’re still thinking about a variety of options.”
The curators are tracking down many of the people who inscribed messages on the column in an effort to collect their stories.
Working with the museum’s design consultants, they are considering creating a touch screen on which visitors can scroll up and down a computer-generated facsimile of the column, touching on images or numbers or agency markings that will bring up an oral history or slide show.
“There is so much rich history to all of this,” she said.
It is undecided what will become of the boulder-like composite of concrete and rebar that now resides like a quarantined patient in a room of its own. It is several unknown floors of a tower compressed into a layered mass less than four feet high. It is so emotionally charged—family members differ on whether it should be exhibited—that Ramirez asked that it not be photographed.
“We’ve had the medical examiner come out and they said if there happened to be a person trapped there nothing would have survived at this heat, which they’ve estimated at about 2,800 degrees,” Ramirez said.
That object, like so many others in Hangar 17, will be the subject of much careful thought over the coming months.
“We’re just trying to think through every decision we make,” Ramirez said.
