Messages of Love and Hope on a Freedom Tower Beam - New York Times

Messages of Love and Hope on a Freedom Tower Beam - New York  Times

The Heart in Darkness

Ten years ago, in December 2006, I went up to Battery Park to join with many other people in adding prayers and messages of hope onto one of the new steel beams that were one of the thirty supporting columns to be installed at the base of the Freedom Tower, now called 1 World Trade Center. This special beam was distinctively painted white. When I arrived I picked up a black magic marker and walked alongside the beam looking for some free space to add my message to the inscriptions of so many other people who had come earlier. There was very little space left on this 30 foot beam for my thoughts so I decided to squeeze in just the four names of my family "Allan, Liz, Elena, Rachel.'.

Over the following years the connection with that day in Battery Park and the unrelenting construction of the new WTC and Memorial Park and the entire renewal of the site faded from my mind. I didn't avoid lower Manhattan but the daily routine of a long commute bypassed that area and my thoughts. To me it became just another construction site among so many others that were sprouting up all over the city.  My visits to the Memorial Park ended after the three separate time I went with my daughters and my mother and sister. When I did find myself downtown I found that it was just an annoying, chaotic jumble of noise, crowds and detours. 

Now ten years later, FEMA, my current employer, was relocating its regional offices to 1WTC following many other companies that moved downtown. Those old 9/11 memories began to return as we planned our move. 

A month ago I entered the soaring lobby of 1 World Trade Center to start my first workday on the 53rd floor. When I found my work area I walked over to one of the large panoramic windows that was only a few feet from my desk.  I faced north … uptown.  Manhattan laid before me in all its shapes, colors and textures. The narrow ribbon of the West Side Highway meandered up and away and I was surprised by how wide the Hudson River appeared.  The Empire State Building seemed small and ordinary. Construction life was everywhere at the most dizzying of heights. But as I gazed out at this magnificent view I could not escape remembering that dark day almost 15 years ago…that bright fall day in 2001 when I was driving along the Long Island Expressway towards my job in Long Island City and suddenly confronted with the burning tops of both twin towers in the distance. The blackest smoke against the bluest skies drifting towards Brooklyn.

Now I stood and stared out of the window with the same view of the people who worked and died in at their workplace in the North Tower on September 11, 2001. I imagined their terror when they must have seen American Airlines Flight 11 just before it crashed into the north face. Just as I was doing today they had just begun a routine workday greeting each other and finding a place to hang their coats.  It was an uneasy, chilling feeling.

But then an extraordinary understanding released me from those awful thoughts from that day.

I suddenly realized that hundreds of feet below where I stood on the 53rd floor, deep in the ground, the same special white 30 foot steel beam that was covered with messages from ten years ago now stood permanently encased in tens of thousands of tons of dark gray steel and concrete that make up the base of this enormous edifice that I am now working in.  And at one end of that beam the four names of my family would still be there just as I had written them many years earlier. “Allan, Liz, Elena and Rachel” are now forever connected together and protected in a dark, but safe space, within a building that will last for many centuries.

Many years from now the grandchildren of my grandchildren will visit this site. But they will not know it as "ground zero;" but a magnificent plaza and museum, where you can hear the soft splash of the waterfalls and a quiet, somber place that tells a terrible story that happened a long time ago. They will stretch their necks to find the top of this building. They will probably say "Awesome." And they will be told by their parents about the four names of a loving family in an earlier generation and how those names ended up within these powerful walls. Maybe they will tell that story to their children and remember our names.

So each morning when it is still quiet, before construction has begun; and crowds of visitors and the lines for the museum have not yet formed, I walk from the subway between WTC 3 and 4 and into the wide expanse of the memorial site, past the two pools into the south entrance of 1WTC.  And I think during that short walk about the intersection of tragedy, hope, coincidence, renewal and most important, how four members of my family are now connected together every day within this place… forever.

As I looked north this morning I saw a bright blue sky with some wispy clouds on the horizon.  I looked for a plane but there was none. And as I turned away from the window, I looked down at the floor, past my feet, past the 53 floors, through the lobby and into that dark space where the white steel beam was beating strong. It is the heart and the spirit of this 104 story building that is now filled with the vibrant life force of thousands of people who work and visit every day. It is the heart in the darkness that will beat for generations.

I felt sure.  It felt right
Allan