On Friday, victims’ families, first responders, and current and former government officials gathered at Lower Manhattan’s 9/11 Memorial to mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks. With its immense pools and subterranean museum, the site was expensive (at around $1 billion), complex, and controversial. It’s become an important place of pilgrimage, but it is just one of thousands of 9/11 memorials scattered throughout the country.
Between 2009 and 2012, the Port Authority donated more than 1,800 beams and girders from the World Trade Center to communities in every state. This was a small fraction of the towers’ total structure, but enough to fill JFK Airport’s Hangar 17. Buckled columns and pieces of the distinctive arches had been stored after the attacks as evidence for a criminal prosecution that never materialized, and as an archive: the last physical record of two of the world’s most iconic buildings.
Many local memorials were built while the national ones — at Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and Shanksville — were still snagged in protracted disputes over design and funding. Far-flung communities commemorated the attacks because they had experienced them through television.
Even for those who had never set foot in New York, 9/11 was a collective national trauma. These horrifying and unreal events could be materialized through “relic” steel, and the steel’s passage through the country served as a kind of burial — for the buildings themselves, and, by proxy, for the more than 1,000 victims whose remains were never recovered.
Local memorials were built on budgets in the thousands (and sometimes hundreds) of dollars, not millions. The Port Authority’s program had loose rules and few dictates: any nonprofit or community group could apply for steel and, providing they made minimal alterations, incorporate it into a memorial alongside other elements. Larger cities had no claim to larger pieces, and commercialization was prohibited, with the Berlin Wall slabs that ended up in hotels and malls serving as a cautionary tale.
When we began our research, only a handful of memorials had made the news, mostly those featured in annual Sept. 11 stories: bent I-beams draped in flags, adorned with yellow “Support our Troops” ribbons, and topped with eagles. Some, like the famous “9/11 Cross” now in the 9/11 Museum’s collection, carried heavy undertones of Christian nationalism. Our early thesis was that the World Trade Center’s steel helped link remembrance of the attacks to overt support for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. That reading was too simplistic.
Memorials are anchored in grief and loss, but they can drift into the territory of monuments: asserting power in bronze and stone.
Many late-19th century “Lost Cause” memorials from the American Civil War have been reassessed, their proclaimed “grief” for the vanquished Confederacy now widely seen as barely concealed bigotry. Others go too far in indicting the wrongdoers or, as with many USS Maine memorials, use tragedy to justify subsequent wars. Yet memorials are not just objects that encourage über-patriotic chest-thumping; they can bring healing, and their creation can be a valuable course in civics.
As we catalogued hundreds of 9/11 memorials and interviewed dozens of the artists and craftspeople who shaped steel from the WTC a different story emerged. Many were “patriotic,” but in their own distinctive ways: one couple, who created a sculpture that is 17.76-foot-tall (a nod to the U.S.’s founding year), also ran the only LGBTQ-friendly bar within 300 miles. Another artist fashioned a stainless-steel flock of birds to cradle a beam, their forms, he revealed, were an amalgam of hawk and dove: his way of expressing ambivalence about the wars that followed 9/11.
We were struck by how wide-ranging the creative practices turned out to be. Some sculptures were less in the mode of commissioned public art, and more akin to the welded pieces in the front yards of local eccentrics, beloved by their communities, who buck homeowner association rules.
In one memorial, rebar — still attached to steel and concrete — juts out like antennae. In another, an artist spent months burnishing a rusted beam until its now-shiny surface mirrors the sky above. All of the memorials — even those with stars, stripes, and eagles — engage with 9/11 in ways that are more nuanced, and less partisan, than we had expected.
Memorial makers had to arrange their own transportation to collect massive beams from Hangar 17 at JFK and then navigate local approvals and installation. This often meant reaching out to others for support and volunteering their time. In some cases, they have also committed to providing ongoing care and maintenance for the sites.
One creator was frank when asked whether they would take on another memorial project: “probably not” because it was “a ton of work.” But it also brought unexpected connections. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Surveying thousands of France’s small-town WWI memorials, the historian Antoine Prost noted that scholars rarely approach this subject without bias. “One of the most tenacious prejudices on the left, even among historians,” he wrote, “is that monuments to the dead are an expression of jingoistic nationalism.”
Importantly, 9/11 memorials honor civilian victims, not soldiers. When they do commemorate courage and sacrifice, it is that of firefighters — civic heroes who serve community, not state, power. Memorial-making, we learned, is far more than mere flag waving.
Memorials helped communities to process grief through the hands-on work of welding steel, moving field stones, and planting gardens. Even some of the larger organizations that requested steel, like firehouses, often depended on a single motivated volunteer who stored the artifact in their backyard, protecting a “piece of history” under a tarp or corrugated tin roof, whether that was on Long Island or in rural Wyoming.
The steel provided a connection to the towers, and a way to reclaim their memory from the spectacle of their destruction. While laying hands on these broken, twisted fragments may seem medieval in its reverence for relics, it gives new generations a tactile connection to 9/11.
Brothers Samuel and Max Holleran are authors of “Scattered Steel: The Afterlife of the World Trade Center,” published last month by Cornell University Press.