{"id":346764,"date":"2026-09-14T22:24:22","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T22:24:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/346764\/"},"modified":"2026-09-14T22:24:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T22:24:22","slug":"9-11-ceremony-marking-a-quarter-century-at-ground-zero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/346764\/","title":{"rendered":"9\/11 Ceremony: Marking a Quarter-Century at Ground Zero"},"content":{"rendered":"

The attendees who begin filing in around 7:30 a.m. are dressed as if they could be arriving for any large, outdoor, warm-weather event on a cloudy, humid day\u2014a casual wedding, a graduation. Middle-aged women wear floral-print sleeveless dresses and canvas sandals; older women wear dark dresses and solid shoes. Hair is freshly cut and colored, makeup carefully applied. Sunglasses abound. Children, in crisp button-down shirts and linen shorts, concentrate hard on behaving well. The dress code is unclear; some attendees wear T-shirts and jeans. Many carry supermarket bags with flowers peeking out: fair-trade Whole Foods roses still in their stickered wrappers, dyed bodega carnations in red, white, and blue. People smile as they greet and hug relatives, friends, and acquaintances. Some walk beneath the full-leafed oak trees to find a place to unfold their portable chairs.<\/p>\n

Some of the T-shirts feature various messages and photos. Siempre vivira (he\/she will live forever). Nunca olvidare (I will never forget). Above or below the photos are birth and death dates\u2014the first in the 1960s or the 1970s, the last always the same: 9\/11\/01. Even without the dates, though, the photos mark themselves as from the past. People did not regularly take daily pictures of themselves or one another back then and the enlarged snapshots mark special occasions of full-haired young people: graduations, birthday dinners, trips. The people in the images pose carefully, self-consciously, so as not to waste finite camera film on bad shots.<\/p>\n

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Jenn Nilsen and her family wear pastel-blue tees that match the sign she holds. Troy Nilsen\u2014born March 2, 1968\u2014was a \u201cdedicated family man,\u201d \u201cvaluable employee,\u201d and \u201cavid sportsman,\u201d the sign informs us. He took the express bus from their Staten Island home to his job at Cantor Fitzgerald that day, Jenn, his widow, says, and she never heard from him again. He was 33; she is now 57. In one of his photos, Troy wears a bright-yellow raincoat, smiling next to a large fish he has just caught. She smiles. \u201cHe loved to fish.\u201d The disparity in ages grows with each year: surviving husbands and wives in late middle age and early old age display photos of spouses permanently left behind in their twenties and thirties.<\/p>\n

At 8:42, a drum begins tapping out a signal for people to stand or sit at attention. A minute later, a chorus begins singing the National Anthem, and three minutes later, a bell chimes . As a violin plays, a man recites a single name: Gordon McCannel Aamoth, Jr. A child follows with a second: Edelmiro Abad. Attendees hoist their photo signs in the air, an enduring four-hour protest against the mass severing of these individual lives so early.<\/p>\n

The names become a backdrop as the crowd resumes its muted activity. Family members, waiting for their loved one\u2019s name to be called, talk quietly among themselves as they review snapshots they\u2019ve brought with them. The families of Antonio Melendez<\/a>, 30, and Leobardo Lopez Pascual,<\/a> 41, pass around photos, including one of the two men standing, smiling, in front of Fritz Koenig\u2019s \u201cSphere\u201d sculpture at the old World Trade Center plaza.<\/p>\n

\"FirePhoto by Jeenah Moon – Pool\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Both men worked the breakfast shift at Windows on the World that morning. \u201cI was eight,\u201d says Melendez\u2019s daughter, Yaritza. \u201cTheir lives mattered. We like to keep the memories alive\u201d for the children. These young men\u2019s grandchildren, small kids sipping from juice boxes, wear pink and blue tee shirts with cursive printed messages to \u201cGrandpa watching me from Heaven\u201d and messages about their karate and \u201cpre-K princess\u201d milestones. As the readers of the names get to the \u201cMa\u2019s, the \u201cMc\u2019s, and begin the \u201cMe\u2019s, the two families stand and arrange themselves in a neat row, falling silent to listen.<\/p>\n

The clouds clear, and the sun begins to burn off the humidity. Some children sit atop adults\u2019 shoulders; others stamp on spotted lanternflies. Service dogs, police dogs, and pets watch squirrels run across the paths and through the branches of the memorial-glade oaks above, scattering acorns along the stonework. Small groups move to and from the memorial pools, placing flowers, notes, stuffed animals, pins, and American flags, Italian flags, and Mexican flags.<\/p>\n

A few speakers interrupt the earnest roll call of names with carefully rehearsed speeches. At least two survivors demand that the U.S. government hold Saudi Arabia accountable for its government\u2019s alleged role in the attacks. One victim\u2019s brother says to me of the president\u2019s relationship with the Saudis, \u201cTrump kisses their ass.\u201d The final speaker at the podium, Michael Massaroli, Jr., says <\/a>the name of \u201cmy father, Michael Massaroli.\u201d (The name reading hews only loosely to the alphabet.) He shakily observes that \u201cthis is an unusual position to be the last one to go here, I gotta admit,\u201d and says that he will \u201cuse the little platform I have\u201d to ask everyone to cease using this \u201ctragedy\u201d as an excuse for hatred of Muslims. \u201cPlease stop.\u201d As with the other scattered political speeches, some people applaud and others remain silent. And the crowd generally pays little heed to the tent in the background that shelters the politicians: a sitting vice president, four former presidents, and three former and one current New York City mayor.<\/p>\n

\"DeanPhoto by Jeenah Moon – Pool\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

A child carefully memorializes \u201cthe best uncle that I never met, Uncle Douglas Benjamin Gardner<\/a>.\u201d Twenty-five-year-old Trisha Pakkala addresses her mother, Deepa Pakkala,<\/a> 31: \u201cYou dreamed my whole life for me, and you only got eight months,\u201d she says. \u201cThe mom who raised me got the rest. . . . I think you\u2019d be glad she was the woman who raised me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sky is now fully blue behind the new One World Trade Center as trumpeters sound Taps and grandchildren, children, nieces, nephews, wives, husbands, sisters, brothers, and parents continue to unsheathe their flowers and place them beside one of the 2,983 names carved along the borders of the flowing dark waters where the once-glinting Twin Towers stood. A teddy bear atop the name of Sebastian Gorki pronounces itself a \u201cComfort Cub therapeutic teddy bear.\u201d The squirrels continue noisily loosening acorns from the late-summer trees, and another September 11 morning is gone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The attendees who begin filing in around 7:30 a.m. are dressed as if they could be arriving for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":346765,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,11,10],"class_list":["post-346764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346764","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=346764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/346765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}