{"id":345641,"date":"2026-09-13T15:58:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T15:58:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/345641\/"},"modified":"2026-09-13T15:58:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T15:58:20","slug":"25-years-after-9-11-wtc-steel-connects-a-divided-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/345641\/","title":{"rendered":"25 years after 9\/11, WTC steel connects a divided U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"

On Friday, victims\u2019 families, first responders, and current and former government officials gathered at Lower Manhattan\u2019s 9\/11 Memorial to mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks<\/a>. With its immense pools and subterranean museum, the site was expensive (at around $1 billion), complex, and controversial. It\u2019s become an important place of pilgrimage, but it is just one of thousands of 9\/11 memorials scattered throughout the country.<\/p>\n

Between 2009 and 2012, the Port Authority donated more than 1,800 beams and girders from the World Trade Center<\/a> to communities in every state. This was a small fraction of the towers\u2019 total structure, but enough to fill JFK Airport\u2019s Hangar 17. Buckled columns and pieces of the distinctive arches had been stored after the attacks as evidence for a criminal prosecution that never materialized, and as an archive: the last physical record of two of the world\u2019s most iconic buildings.<\/p>\n

Many local memorials were built while the national ones \u2014 at Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and Shanksville \u2014 were still snagged in protracted disputes over design and funding. Far-flung communities commemorated the attacks because they had experienced them through television.<\/p>\n

Even for those who had never set foot in New York, 9\/11 was a collective national trauma. These horrifying and unreal events could be materialized through \u201crelic\u201d steel, and the steel\u2019s passage through the country served as a kind of burial \u2014 for the buildings themselves, and, by proxy, for the more than 1,000 victims whose remains were never recovered.<\/p>\n

Local memorials were built on budgets in the thousands (and sometimes hundreds) of dollars, not millions. The Port Authority\u2019s program had loose rules and few dictates: any nonprofit or community group could apply for steel and, providing they made minimal alterations, incorporate it into a memorial alongside other elements. Larger cities had no claim to larger pieces, and commercialization was prohibited, with the Berlin Wall slabs that ended up in hotels and malls serving as a cautionary tale.<\/p>\n

When we began our research<\/a>, only a handful of memorials had made the news, mostly those featured in annual Sept. 11 stories: bent I-beams draped in flags, adorned with yellow \u201cSupport our Troops\u201d ribbons, and topped with eagles. Some, like the famous \u201c9\/11 Cross\u201d now in the 9\/11 Museum\u2019s collection, carried heavy undertones of Christian nationalism. Our early thesis was that the World Trade Center\u2019s steel helped link remembrance of the attacks to overt support for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. That reading was too simplistic.<\/p>\n

Memorials are anchored in grief and loss, but they can drift into the territory of monuments: asserting power in bronze and stone.<\/p>\n

Many late-19th century \u201cLost Cause\u201d memorials from the American Civil War have been reassessed, their proclaimed \u201cgrief\u201d for the vanquished Confederacy now widely seen as barely concealed bigotry. Others go too far in indicting the wrongdoers or, as with many USS Maine memorials, use tragedy to justify subsequent wars. Yet memorials are not just objects that encourage \u00fcber-patriotic chest-thumping; they can bring healing, and their creation can be a valuable course in civics.<\/p>\n

As we catalogued hundreds of 9\/11 memorials and interviewed dozens of the artists and craftspeople who shaped steel from the WTC a different story emerged. Many were \u201cpatriotic,\u201d but in their own distinctive ways: one couple, who created a sculpture that is 17.76-foot-tall (a nod to the U.S.\u2019s founding year), also ran the only LGBTQ-friendly bar within 300 miles. Another artist fashioned a stainless-steel flock of birds to cradle a beam, their forms, he revealed, were an amalgam of hawk and dove: his way of expressing ambivalence about the wars that followed 9\/11.<\/p>\n

We were struck by how wide-ranging the creative practices turned out to be. Some sculptures were less in the mode of commissioned public art, and more akin to the welded pieces in the front yards of local eccentrics, beloved by their communities, who buck homeowner association rules.<\/p>\n

In one memorial, rebar \u2014 still attached to steel and concrete \u2014 juts out like antennae. In another, an artist spent months burnishing a rusted beam until its now-shiny surface mirrors the sky above. All of the memorials \u2014 even those with stars, stripes, and eagles \u2014 engage with 9\/11 in ways that are more nuanced, and less partisan, than we had expected.<\/p>\n

Memorial makers had to arrange their own transportation to collect massive beams from Hangar 17 at JFK and then navigate local approvals and installation. This often meant reaching out to others for support and volunteering their time. In some cases, they have also committed to providing ongoing care and maintenance for the sites.<\/p>\n

One creator was frank when asked whether they would take on another memorial project: \u201cprobably not\u201d because it was \u201ca ton of work.\u201d But it also brought unexpected connections. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.<\/p>\n

Surveying thousands of France\u2019s small-town WWI memorials, the historian Antoine Prost noted that scholars rarely approach this subject without bias. \u201cOne of the most tenacious prejudices on the left, even among historians,\u201d he wrote, \u201cis that monuments to the dead are an expression of jingoistic nationalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Importantly, 9\/11 memorials honor civilian victims, not soldiers. When they do commemorate courage and sacrifice, it is that of firefighters \u2014 civic heroes who serve community, not state, power. Memorial-making, we learned, is far more than mere flag waving.<\/p>\n

Memorials helped communities to process grief through the hands-on work of welding steel, moving field stones, and planting gardens. Even some of the larger organizations that requested steel, like firehouses, often depended on a single motivated volunteer who stored the artifact in their backyard, protecting a \u201cpiece of history\u201d under a tarp or corrugated tin roof, whether that was on Long Island or in rural Wyoming.<\/p>\n

The steel provided a connection to the towers, and a way to reclaim their memory from the spectacle of their destruction. While laying hands on these broken, twisted fragments may seem medieval in its reverence for relics, it gives new generations a tactile connection to 9\/11.<\/p>\n

Brothers Samuel and Max Holleran are authors of \u201cScattered Steel: The Afterlife of the World Trade Center<\/a>,\u201d published last month by Cornell University Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Friday, victims\u2019 families, first responders, and current and former government officials gathered at Lower Manhattan\u2019s 9\/11 Memorial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":345642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,11,10,299,11803],"class_list":["post-345641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-opinion","tag-september-11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345641","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=345641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/345642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}