Some artifacts, like these in 2008, were stored in specially built climate-controlled rooms within Hangar 17. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib
They’re gone. Every one of the more than 2,600 pieces of steel, crushed vehicles and other 9/11 artifacts stored in a hangar at JFK Airport have found homes of remembrance.
The Port Authority announced on Thursday the end of its “giveaway program” that since 2010 has distributed recovered objects from the World Trade Center attack to communities in all 50 states and 10 foreign countries.
Curators of the Sept. 11 Memorial Museum got first pick of the artifacts, which now make up a sizable part of the institution’s displayed collection. The remaining were given to museums, town governments, schools, non-profit organizations, and community groups that included police and fire departments—on condition that they be publicly displayed. State museums in New York and New Jersey received many of the objects.
“The 9/11 steel, whether small or large, represents the 343 firefighters who were lost, as well as all victims of terrorism throughout the world,” Joseph W. Pfeifer, the New York Fire Department’s Chief of Counterterrorism and Emergency Preparedness, said in a statement. “Not only do these artifacts help us to never forget, but it also represents our hope for an end to terrorism."
.jpg "Top: A 36-foot section of antenna from the World Trade Center, formerly stored in Hangar 17, arrives in Gibson, Ohio, last year. It will become part of permanent Public Safety Service Memorial, to be dedicated this Sept. 11. Above: A section of World Trade Center steel displayed near the Palm Beach Garden (Fla.) Fire Rescue station.")
Within two weeks after the disaster, the 80,000-square-foot former Tower Air hangar had become a repository for rusted and twisted tonnage of World Trade Center steel and crushed vehicles as well as artifacts as small as a rare surviving piece of glass from a tower window.
Out of more than two million tons of rubble, a fraction of one percent was saved, marked for posterity by consultants from Art Preservation Services.
Jan Ramirez and Amy Weinstein, then curators at the New-York Historical Society (later to become, respectively, chief curator and associate director of collections at the September 11 Memorial Museum), oversaw the salvaging effort.
In 2008, Ramirez took the Trib on a tour of Hangar 17 (see video above), still filled with all the preserved artifacts, the tangible connections to that terrible day.