A Decade of Hope (19 page)

A young lady by the name Jennifer Adams, a very competent woman who came out of an investment banking company, came in to organize things. A firefighter from the NYC firefighters' union knew that Marian needed some help and introduced her to Jennifer. Her company had left for Houston just shortly before 9/11 and wanted her to come along, because she is commendably brilliant, but she was in love with New York City, and so she stayed. She had been working in the North Tower on the eighty-sixth floor when it was hit. Jennifer had spent about three and a half months as a volunteer at the World Trade Center site, working on the corner of Liberty and West in a little white tent with many other volunteers, handing out coffee, hot chocolate, inserts for shoes, a warm word, a comforting shoulder, maybe some guidance. It was a very difficult place for anybody to be, but it gave her a pretty good understanding of what had happened at the site. Jennifer agreed to join us, but only for a few months, because she needed to work. We were able to pay her a minuscule amount of money at the end of each month, and that enabled her to stay on for almost eight years. We got our funds from banging on doors and calling on friends like the International Association of Fire Fighters. Family members helped us, because they knew this was an effort that was going to be vital for them and for everyone.

I think that Jennifer's joining us was simply meant to be—so many things have happened since then that cannot be coincidences. When she came onboard we saw right away what a godsend she was. She began by organizing our little WVFA completely. Early on she noted that there were many family organizations that were redundant and were conveying mixed messages, so she put eight of them together and created the Coalition of 9/11 Families. She was just relentless in her endeavors. She started a quarterly newsletter, which we still publish to this day. She built a database of some forty-five hundred family members. And then, after four years of work, she suggested that we step back and perhaps rebuild our own organization. “The Widows' and Victims' Families' Association” was proving to be a mouthful, so we decided to call it the simpler “September 11th Families' Association.”

One day she looked out the window, pointed to Liberty Street, and said, “Why don't we lease that little building down there, and we'll make it a visitors' memorial center?” So I looked at Jennifer like, I don't know, as if she were an oracle, and so we discussed it. I said, “Jen, that's wonderful.” We were given a very inexpensive space to share with a Lutheran organization—everyone was so generous.

That was January of 2004. Our little odyssey began in March.

During this whole period people were coming down here in droves, moving around aimlessly and wondering,
Is this the World Trade Center site?
There was nothing here saying that it was, except maybe for dubious street vendors selling 9/11 T-shirts and coffee mugs, so it was foolish to think that everyone who came to the site would automatically recognize Ground Zero. Hundreds of thousands of people have never been to New York, and what they saw was a hole in the ground. Nobody was out there to guide them, to help them, tell them the stories of that day.

Jennifer, meanwhile, had been paying attention to what I had been doing at the site. I had just stopped my part of the recovery work after many uninterrupted months, and I was no longer working as a retired FDNY member. At around that time I had begun to get calls from people who wanted to go through the site. It began when the Port Authority asked me to bring a group of reporters through the site. And I felt something there, when I did that. I was able to talk to people about 9/11. I cried every time I did so, but I was able to talk about it, and I saw the value of talking, and of being a firsthand storyteller. I started to walk them around, explaining that terrible day to them, trying to give them a sense of what really had happened. It was a natural thing for me. And, I had become a tour guide without knowing it.

Then the Fire Department asked me to take another group of reporters around. I can still remember vividly, walking through the site, with recovery work still going on, how a reporter stopped me, with a little bit of a smile on his face. He was watching one of the firefighters on the pile. “Did you see what that guy just did?” he asked. I said, “No, what?” The reporter said, “He just picked that shoe up and smelled it.”

And I looked at this reporter and said, “Most guys are going to pick a shoe up and smell it, because it could have human remains in it. And that may be the only thing a family gets back.” I had caught him off guard, and he now had a tear in his eye. But these are things that we did at the site. We were looking for parts of people, and we were looking for them in places that were hidden, because there were no bodies here. And they were hidden, in any place you could think of: a shoe, a sock, inside a shirt, in a two-inch void between two massive beams. Only 174 complete bodies of the 2,752 beautiful people who were murdered at Ground Zero on September 11 were recovered. There are still 1,222 missing.

A professor from Duquesne University, Mike Dillon, who has since become a very good friend, came to do a story. Someone in the city press office had asked if I would meet with this reporter, a professor, who was doing a story for a local newspaper in Pittsburgh. I don't remember the full content, but it was about me, the site, Jonathan, and the recovery workers. In it he gave me a title, “ambassador to the dead.” When I first read it, I said to myself,
Is this good?
And then the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was a good title, as our 9/11 dead need to be talked about and represented.

At the World Trade Center site thousands of people came to volunteer their services. In America the volunteer spirit is still very much alive, whether it is working as a candy striper at a hospital, helping kids read at a library, or being a volunteer firefighter in your hometown—75 percent of the country is protected by volunteer firemen. And this volunteer spirit was prevalent at Ground Zero then, and is present at the Tribute [WTC Visitor Center] today.

I have met many beautiful, wonderful people—my BWs, I call them—from every state in the union. They have come here, some during that nine-month recovery period, to do something, and they could not stay at home and do nothing. Those who could not come in person went out and collected money, equipment, and supplies, things that could be used at the site. It was so beautiful.

One couple from a little place called Phillipsburg, Kansas, which is about as big as a pinhead, came here four separate times at their own expense. On each visit they spent two weeks feeding us and cleaning up after us. The wife asked me, “After this is all done, will you come to speak to us?” I said okay, and they were ecstatic. I went to their little town not knowing what to expect. It was the first time I had really traveled to speak to a large group about 9/11. I went into the large and spiffy auditorium of their brandnew school, and it was overwhelming: The crowd was standing-room-only, hundreds and hundreds of young people and families. It was very rewarding to be there.

I spoke positively, and talked about tomorrow. I told them how my best friend had been taken from me on 9/11, along with eighty or ninety other good friends whom I had worked fires with. But my best friend was my son Jonathan, and although I couldn't bring him back, much as I wished I could, I had to do something for tomorrow that would make the world better. There was no alternative, as it was our sacred obligation to give all children the best that we could, and the most effective way to start was with an education about understanding the good things in our world. But to understand good, you had to talk about the bad—the horrors, the world wars, slavery, starvations, and 9/11—in a positive way.

 

I speak regularly now and say a lot of things that are very difficult for people to understand and hear. I talk about the men and women who worked at the site on their hands and knees every day to find 19,979 body parts. But then I turn it into a positive, something we can learn from. We can't hate. The people who did this, these are people who hate. They are fanatics. They come from what we now call radical Islam, as opposed to Islamic people in general. But if we're going to be afraid to talk about radical Islam, we must pay heed to the adage about history repeating itself. In fact, it has already repeated itself. It repeated itself with the underwear bomber, the shoe bomber, the guy who had a bomb up on Times Square at Forty-fifth Street, the attacks on the trains in Spain, the buses in London, and the hotel in Mumbai—every time you read or hear about somebody strapping a bomb on and walking into a crowd of people. How many more people have died since 9/11 because of this thing called “radical Islamic extremism” ? Catholic churches were just bombed in Arab countries. A person walks into the crowd and detonates a bomb he is carrying, pulverizes twenty or forty or sixty beautiful people. How can you turn these terrible things into something positive? That is the challenge.

It's easy for us in this country to forget these things because we live in the lap of luxury. So I speak positively about what we can do. These young people are tomorrow's people, and if they don't understand history, then shame on us. Almost ten years later and there is still not a state in our country that has a curriculum to teach the history of 9/11—not
what
happened, but
why
it happened. Who did it? And why did they do it? If our educators aren't teaching, one day we're going to be very sorry.

Today there are countries that are very close to developing nuclear weapons, autocratic countries in which there is much unrest and turmoil, where change can occur overnight. Will these nuclear weapons fall into the hands of fanatics? Just think about the planning involved in 9/11. Would those planners stop short of dropping a nuclear bomb on Tel Aviv, Paris, London?

I've asked that question many times and have occasionally been asked, “Don't you think what you're saying is kind of radical?” And I respond, “Well, let me ask you one question, and then you tell me: On September 11, if these same nineteen terrorists had had the capability of bringing a dirty bomb into the center of Manhattan, would they have done it? Would they have detonated it?”

And what is the answer I get from these people? Silence. Because they know damn well the answer is yes.

 

When I got back from that trip to Phillipsburg I was called by people there who told me they were planning to come to New York with a group of high school students who had just graduated and asked if I would take them on a tour around the site. Although the site was already closed off to visitors, I said sure, of course. Jennifer came with me as I gave the tour, and, as she recalls, they were typical high school kids, all fidgety, looking around, [but] as soon as I started talking, everybody stopped and listened with a real intensity. At the end Jennifer realized this was something that was so important to those kids. They were going to go home with a totally different attitude—a good attitude, because we ended by discussing what we could all do for a positive future for our country.

Back at the 9/11 Families' Association office we talked about that experience, and Jennifer said, “Let's build on it. Let's do tours and change people's lives.” So we went out and knocked on many doors. Governor [George] Pataki thought it was a fabulous idea and asked the LMDC [Lower Manhattan Development Corporation] to help us financially. We met with Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg, and he said, Great. We needed to raise at least $6 million to build out the Tribute WTC Visitor Center to what it is today, and we were able to do so with funding from the Port Authority, the Red Cross, and American Express. That effort started started in March of 2004, and by September of 2006 we opened our doors to the public. We're a nonprofit, so fund-raising remains a major challenge, especially with the current economic situation.

When we were first looking to build the Tribute Center, we assumed that the official 9/11 memorial that would be built on the footprints of the original towers was going to be many years away from completion and operation, so we conceived the Tribute Center as an interim memorial for visitors. But after many meetings with the people that we brought in to help us from the museum world, we realized that we were building something that was going to be out of the ordinary and not in the same vein as a typical museum or memorial. Just as I had been called the ambassador for the dead, the Tribute Center would become the ambassador for those people who could not speak.

We have trained over 390 guides—all volunteers. They come from the 9/11 community, which we define as anyone who lost a loved one, rescue workers, survivors who made it out of the towers, volunteers like Jennifer, and then the people who live and work in the area who watched that day and witnessed things that no one should ever have witnessed. Can you imagine being there to see those people who jumped from the two buildings ? Who better to give a tour than this 9/11 community? They are the voices of the people who were murdered that day.

The Tribute Center is a person-to-person, I-was-there history. It is a sharing. Everything you hear, see, or read is testimony by people who were affected by 9/11. It is like a museum in that it has many artifacts and a historical collection of objects, but it also has living stories and living storytellers. The Tribute Center is open seven days a week, and our guided tours are held seven days a week. We limit the tours to twenty people, and do four and five a day.

When you enter the Tribute Center you see in Gallery 1 what the World Trade Center and the area were like before September 11, after which you follow a timeline that starts on February 26, 1993, the date that's forgotten by just about everyone: The first time the towers were attacked by radical Islamic extremists.

In the next gallery we start the timeline of September 11 and take you through the events of that day. You hear voices and see people who died that day. There are transmissions of the firefighters on their walkie-talkies as they are ascending the stairs in the South Tower—all those great men, all those powerful voices, doing what we as firefighters did every day before 9/11 and have done every day since. You'll see photographs of police officers like Moira Smith [see Jim Smith, page 128] and civilians coated with ash. You'll hear families talking about their loved ones. You'll see posters of missing people. You'll see a powerful five-minute video of what it was like to spend nine months at the site. You'll see my son's helmet and his turnout coat, which we were blessed to recover.