In less than two months, the world will mark the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attack on the World Trade Center, which killed nearly 3,000 people that sunny and dark Tuesday morning, including about 750 from New Jersey.
But while memorials have long been completed at the Twin Towers site in lower Manhattan, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the Garden State’s Empty Sky memorial at Liberty State Park in Jersey City remains incomplete, say victims’ family members, supporters, and a designer of the New Jersey memorial.
And with the cost of completing the memorial estimated at $15 million in a state with a budget of $60.7 billion — and a wealth of potential corporate and individual donors — advocates for its completion say they’re increasingly frustrated by Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s apparent reluctance to finish the job her predecessors didn’t.
“As a fellow veteran, I’m shocked that it seems like Gov. Sherrill just doesn’t care,” said Mike Danatos, who was one of 12 original members of the Family and Survivors Memorial Committee formed in 2004 that selected the design. “Maybe she’s just too busy.”
Danatos, a retired teacher who served in the U.S. Air Force after the Vietnam War, was referring to Sherrill’s service as a Navy helicopter pilot.
Spokespeople for the governor did not respond to requests for comment this week.
Danatos’ bother-in-law, Brian Martineau, 39, of Edison, died in the World Trade Center’s collapse after giving up his place on an elevator to a co-worker who ended up surviving. “Typical Brian,” Danatos said.
Fifteen years after the mostly completed memorial was dedicated on Sept. 11, 2011, it remains without the stainless steel panels, or cladding, on the exterior of its twin concrete walls, where the intended messages, “Never Forget” and “Always In Our Hearts,” have never been inscribed.
Some 60 cherry trees initially planted around the memorial as a contemplative grove have mostly died off and not been replaced.
The lighting scheme that’s supposed to illuminate victims’ names repeatedly malfunctioned and was eventually removed leaving the memorial and evening visitors in the dark.
A pair of kiosks intended to let loved ones locate the names of victims randomly positioned on the interior sides of the walls do not work.
The polished stainless steel cladding on the ends and the interior of the memorial’s two concrete walls contrasts with the rough concrete finish of the walls’ exterior sides. The memorial’s co-designer said the lack of exterior cladding originally intended for the memorial made it into “a concrete eyesore.” Ted Sherman | NJ Advance Media
And the names of 19 additional victims of the attack identified since six names were added in 2021 still await their inscription, advocates for the memorial’s completion say.
After the survivors committee was appointed and planning began under Democratic Gov. Jim McGreevey, the memorial was dedicated seven years later under Republican Gov. Chris Christie.
The memorial’s latest update, advocates say, was in 2021, when six new names were added under Sherrill’s predecessor, fellow Democrat Phil Murphy.
The advocates say they received assurances that the Sherrill administration would address the problems.
These include a May 14 unsigned email from the state Department of Environmental Protection noting the addition of the six names in 2021, and adding that the department was “also advancing longer-term projects to address issues involving the memorial’s trees and lighting, as well as modernize the kiosks used to help visitors locate names on the memorial.”
The second was a June 5 meeting with Sherrill staffers, including her cabinet secretary, Jonah Scharf. But they said that meeting ended up focusing mainly on preparations for the 25th anniversary commemoration.
And without any sign of progress on the memorial’s missing elements, the advocates consider the state’s assurances as empty as the sky above Ground Zero after the attack.
“We are now less than eight weeks from commemorating the most devastating mass murder in American history,” Dennis Hallion, a retired New Jersey State Police active in the cause, emphasized in a press release on Wednesday. But, he added, “We have received NO ANSWERS, NO TIMELINE, NO COMMITMENT.”
Hallion and others say they have been trying unsuccessfully for months to win a commitment to complete the memorial from Sherrill, who was sworn-in in January.
Others allied with Hallion and Donatos include Chris Meek, a philanthropist, author and former Goldman Sachs executive who was working near Ground Zero on 9/11, and has written about and advocated for its victims since then.
Meek, founder and CEO of the nonprofit 9/11 Legacy Foundation, said he has tried unsuccessfully for months to schedule a meeting with Sherrill.
A Republican whose Legacy board includes high level former federal officials from both parties, Meek said he was baffled that Sherrill would pass up an opportunity to be out front on a cause that was not only right and just, but relatively inexpensive to finance, as well as politically unifying and popular.
“This is a grand-slam, layup for her,” said Meek.
The names of 749 New Jersey victims of the 9/11 terror attack are etched in 4-inch letters. Advocates for the memorial’s completion say 19 names are missing.
Aristide Economopoulos | NJ Advance Media
If Sherrill wanted to avoid or minimize public spending on the project, he said, she could launch a private fund drive.
“I’m sure you can find some New Jersey-based corporations to throw $15 million together,” said Meek, whose latest book Keeping Our Nation’s Promise, due out Sept. 8, has a photograph of Empty Sky on the cover.
Meek and others are also allied with architect Jessica Jamroz, who co-designed the memorial and one for Westchester County, New York, with the late architect and planner Frederic Schwartz.
Jamroz said a public-private partnership to finance and maintain the memorial had been envisioned since the project’s inception.
She called the unfinished status of the the memorial “unconscionable and heartbreaking,” and reiterated her past lament that the unclad exterior walls of the memorial made it “a concrete eyesore.”
Jamroz said the first priority should be to inscribe the additional 19 victims’ names.
Referring to family members, she said, “Some of these people don’t know that their names are missing.”
“A number of families that I have spoken to were not aware that this memorial existed,” Jamroz added.
Still, Jamroz said she was hopeful that the governor would come around. “I trust with all of my heart that the Sherrill Administration is going to do the right thing,” Jamroz said. “But she needs to be prompted.”
For those who’ve never visited, the memorial is essentially a pair of parallel concrete walls set 12 feet apart and measuring 210 feet long by 30 feet high by 30 inches thick, a configuration that for some evokes the image of the World Trade Center towers laying on their side.
The walls form a corridor with a flat, bluestone floor open from above and at each end, which cuts through a grassy mound 10 feet high at its center, near a waterfront walkway along Liberty State Park’s shoreline at the mouth of the Hudson River into Upper New York Bay.
The interior side of both walls is clad with stainless steel panels, onto which the names of 749 New Jerseyans are inscribed deep enough for etching, with letters four inches tall, in seven rows stretching the length of the memorial.
The open eastern end looks across the water to Ground Zero, near Manhattan’s southern tip, where for weeks after the attack people along New Jersey’s Gold Coast and farther inland could see and smell the acrid smoke from the smoldering mountain of rubble and remains.
Looking out and up from between the walls reveals the empty sky that gives the memorial its name.
Jamroz couldn’t recall whether Schwartz, who died in 2014, ever explicitly stated that he’d named the memorial after the 9/11 song “Empty Sky,” by New Jersey’s rocker laureate, Bruce Springsteen. But she was certain that’s where it came from, especially in light of the Westchester memorial, which has the same name as The Rising, the album that includes the song.
“It was just obvious,” she said.
Two New Jersey House Democrats, U.S. Reps. Josh Gottheimer and Robert Menendez, used the 24th anniversary to call for including those who died after the attack from debris-related illnesses at Ground Zero.
While the memorial’s empty sky effect has been widely applauded since the memorial’s dedication 15 years ago, Jamroz and others say the missing elements undercut not only the its appearance, but its functionality and its message.
For example, she said, the missing lighting was meant “to dignify the victims’ names in the evening,” while the purpose of the autumn-flowering cherry trees was to provide “a comforting spirit of rebirth and renewal.”
“Without all of these aspects holistically integrated,” Jamroz said, “the promised vision of the Empty Sky Memorial will never be fully realized.”
This rendering represents how the Emty Sky Memorial was designed, with stainless cladding on the exterior of its two parallel concete walls, with this large message on its south side, and one reading, “Always In Our Hearts” facing north. The memorial is at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, next to the historic Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal.Courtesy of Jessica Jamroz