Twenty-five years ago, residents of the Rockaways gathered at an empty lot to watch the devastation in Lower Manhattan unfold.<\/p>\n
That lot, now called Tribute Park, is where an estimated 300 people gathered Friday to remember those lost.<\/p>\n
The names of the victims from the Rockaways were read aloud \u2014 73 people, according to event organizers, including 28 firefighters.<\/p>\n
Longtime resident Jim Lang lost two family members on Sept. 11. His sister, Rosanne Lang, was in the North Tower, and his nephew, Brendan Lang, in the South Tower.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s 25 years, and it\u2019s pain. It\u2019s still real. It never goes away,\u201d he said. \u201cI got a call from my brother, Gerard, and he said Rosanne is in the North Tower, and I said, \u2018What floor?\u2019 And he told me what floor she was on, and I said she\u2019s gone because the plane went right through Cantor Fitzgerald.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMy nephew had run into the South Tower to get his workers out. They were doing a project in the South Tower, and he was killed. The plane hit below him. He went upstairs, and we never found either of them,\u201d Lang added.<\/p>\n
Brian Davan is now a Battalion Chief with the FDNY. He says that when he got to Lower Manhattan on that day, the Twin Towers had already collapsed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was like walking on the face of the moon,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was devastating and overwhelming. It\u2019s tough even now, 25 years later, to come to grips with that,\u201d Davan said. \u201cSometimes it feels like it\u2019s 100 years ago, sometimes it feels like it was yesterday.\u201d<\/p>\n
Davan\u2019s father-in-law, FDNY First Deputy Commissioner William Feehan, died on that day as he was directing operations.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven though he probably knew the South Tower was going to come down, there was work to be done, and he stayed there, and he showed great courage, and I\u2019m so proud of him. I\u2019m so proud of the New York City Fire Department, and we miss him each day,\u201d Davan said.<\/p>\n
As they do every year, family members came to lay roses in honor of their loved ones.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe lost our nephew, Charlie Heeran. It was devastating, and it\u2019s been a long 25 years, and in that 25 years, his siblings have gotten married, had children. And their cousins have gotten married, had children, and we keep up the tradition of letting them know all about 9\/11,\u201d Anne Hurley said.<\/p>\n
A sense of community, some residents say, was born from the devastation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis country was never so close as it was on 9\/12, ever. And that\u2019s a sad thing to see because this neighborhood stayed together, but you hear so much divisiveness now \u2014 9\/11 should be bringing us together,\u201d Lang said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twenty-five years ago, residents of the Rockaways gathered at an empty lot to watch the devastation in Lower…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":345264,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[113412,111557,25,98,100,99,9,24,12,6019,63,27,200],"class_list":["post-345263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-9-11-25th-anniversary","tag-9-11-anniversary","tag-app-top-stories","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-news","tag-noorulain-khawaja","tag-nyc","tag-top-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/345264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}