Nearly everything in Hangar 17 is the color of rust. Massive beams, sheared and twisted, are stacked under huge sheets of white plastic. Steel ripped like paper lies piled beside girders bent by unimaginable forces into the shape of candy canes.

This is what is left of the World Trade Center.

The contents of the 80,000-square-foot former Tower Air hangar at JFK Airport might look more at home in a salvage yard than in a museum, but some of it will one day be encased and displayed to tell its story for generations. The fate of the rest is yet to be determined.

		While those decisions are being made, the trade center's remnants are vulnerable to further destruction. The hangar's roof is leaky and salty air blows in off the nearby ocean. "Humidity is a real concern," said Amory Houghton, a senior strategic planner for the Port Authority, who oversees the hangar operation. "Steel doesn't maybe rust, it always rusts." A team of architects, conservators and curators are working in a race against time and the elements. Steven Weintraub, founder of Art Preservation Services, leads a team of five conservators. For more than two decades he has worked to preserve the precious objects of history, from ancient Egypt to the Holocaust. Now he has turned his attention to artifacts from the more recent past-crushed and charred fire trucks and ambulances, an elevator motor the size of a refrigerator, 17 tangled pieces of the antenna that rose above the towers. There are more than 600 pieces in all.
"It is not so much an issue of technical complexity," Weintraub said. "It is more an issue of scale and human significance." Deciding how to convey that scale and the emotional depth of the tragedy is the task of the recently appointed World Trade Center Memorial Advisory Committee. Last month, committee members visited the hangar to consider what items to recommend for inclusion in a memorial museum. That process may take longer than expected as the search continues for someone to head the memorial foundation, which will ultimately control all the artifacts. In the meantime, Weintraub and his colleagues are working to arrest any further deterioration. "The goal is to stabilize it, not to change it beyond what it is," Weintraub said. "The power is in the damaged condition, because that represents the historical context of why we're trying to preserve the pieces. If it looks too clean or too restored, it diminishes that aspect of the story." The most attention, more than $300,000 worth, has been paid to one item, the 36-foot-long girder that was the last piece of the World Trade Center to be removed. As if lying in state, it rests on wooden supports in a sealed room within the hangar that was initially used for asbestos abatement. The column is covered with signs of grief and pride-photos of victims affixed by their relatives, painted messages to lost colleagues, and Police Department decals. "It became a totem of remembrance," said Jacqueline Hanley, a Port Authority architect who is a member of the preservation team. The column is also rusted and flaking. High-powered dehumidifiers keep the humidity level inside the room at a steady 40 percent. Outside, in the damp and drafty hangar, it is twice that. Five people will be dedicated full-time for four months to working just on the column-an estimated 3,000 person hours in all. To preserve the painted messages, the conservators used a syringe to inject a resin just under the paint. They then cover the area with a thin sheet of plastic and weight it with lead shot. On the underside of the 60-ton column, they've rigged tripods and magnets to apply the necessary pressure. It's an example of the challenges presented by the sheer size of these artifacts. "You can't just flip this over to get access," said Weintraub. Because many of the photographs taped to the column were made with inkjet printers, they are already fading. One solution, Weintraub said, is to make more color-stable high-resolution digital copies. Then, in the future, curators can choose either to exhibit the original faded images or to replace them with more stable reproductions. On a recent morning, two members of the conservation team stood on ladders noting every feature. Some items will need to be removed and reattached later, and they want to be able to replace them exactly where they were. When restoring a fine art painting, said Weintraub, the aim is to preserve the artist's aesthetic statement, but in this case, "It was really the spontaneity of the workers. That's what we're trying to preserve." Because not everything can be given such intensive care, Weintraub is conducting experiments on small pieces of the columns. By speeding up the corrosion, he hopes to determine what will happen to the metal if left as is over the summer, and to gauge what its condition is likely to be in five years. The beams will continue to rust, he said, but possibly not to such a degree that they are at short-term risk. "We're trying to make rational decisions based on science. So it's not just an issue of compromise, it's an issue of what makes sense," he said. Several other items, including the pieces of the antenna, will soon be moved into moisture-controlled enclosures. Weintraub works alongside architect Mark Wagner, an associate at the firm of Voorsanger and Associates, who was part of a team that first came to the trade center site at the end of September 2001 to try and identify what could and should be saved. They tagged artifacts from the site, from the Fresh Kills landfill and from salvage yards in New Jersey. Most of the metal was shipped overseas and melted down. Now, more than two and a half years later, Wagner is again tagging and cataloguing steel, this time in Hangar 17. Anywhere else, the rusted metal would look like ordinary demolition debris. What gives it meaning is that it was part of that place on that day. Out of more than two million tons of rubble, a fraction of one percent was saved. "This is it," said Wagner. "We're very conscious of that." More photos on the artifacts being preserved at JFK Airport