All That Remains

 Text by Etta Sanders
Photos by Carl Glassman

Here lies the World Trade Center. Just a miniscule fraction of the Twin Towers still exists, and almost all of it-some 600 pieces-resides in JFK Airport's Hangar 17. What will be preserved for future generations is yet to be decided. But every charred fragment and rusting beam is a touching and tangible reminder of that terrible day.

The twin towers' facades were clad in a skin of 3/32-inch aluminum. In Hangar 17, approximately 30 pieces, averaging about 10 feet in length, are all that's left of that mammoth, shiny surface. The tracks for robotic window washers that traversed the buildings are visible on some of the pieces.
This "boulder" of concrete and rebar is probably composed of three stories of one of the towers-35 feet compressed into a mass only 3 or 4 feet high. It looks like a geological formation that would take millions of years to form, but was created in a few terrible seconds. Visible in the mass are poignant hints of office life, such as a metal slide from a file cabinet drawer and the edges of carbonized stacks of paper that look like thin sheets of black mica. A shred of paper with Japanese writing on it is embedded in a craggy nook.
The frequent rumble of low-flying airplanes-eerily like the sounds that preceeded the towers' destruction-provides a jarring soundtrack for viewing the piles of twisted and broken metal torn apart by crashing planes. Here, some of that metal is temporarily stored outside the hangar for tagging and cataloguing.

Rescue and recovery workers cut stars, crosses and medallion shapes from the tower beams as mementos for victims' family members and visiting dignitaries. "I hear Jack Nicholson has a piece," said Jacqueline Hanley, a Port Authority architect who has been working on the preservation effort.
In a corner of the hangar are two turnstiles to nowhere that were once used by throngs of PATH train passengers. The subway sign stood at the Vesey Street entrance to the 1 and 9 trains. Fare cards were also recovered, with varying expiration dates but all hovering around the 11th.

For months after Sept. 11, two jagged 200-foot-tall pieces of the north tower facade continued to stand precariously in the mound of rubble. The last recognizable tower fragment, which reached up to nine stories at its highest point, has frequently been mentioned for inclusion in the memorial center. But, in fact, it no longer exists. It was impossible to save intact, so the lower 80 feet was cut into 31 pieces. Those pieces, like the two trident-shaped beams seen here in cross-section, were numbered and labeled "north curtain wall." It is unlikely that this tower fragment could ever be fully reconstructed.
This car probably belonged to Port Authority police officer David Lim. At 8:46 on the morning of Sept. 11 he was in his office in level B-1 of 2 World Trade when he felt the building shake. He left his partner, Sirius, a dog trained in bomb detection, in the basement kennel and rushed to assist people evacuating the north tower. As he and several firefighters helped a woman down the stairs, the building collapsed around them. Remarkably, after five hours, they emerged. Sirius did not survive.

More than 600 pieces of the World Trade Center are stored at the hangar. Mark Wagner, an architect with Voorsanger & Associates, was part of a team that worked at the site identifying parts of the structure that could be preserved. When they first came to the site in late September 2001, there were three flags still flying on the flagpoles along Church Street. "We thought, 'That's important, we need to save these,' " he recalled. The next morning the flags were gone. "That was the first realization that things were moving really fast."