NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) -- In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey took up the gargantuan task of removing the debris from the World Trade Center site. The pulverized concrete ended up in Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, where workers sifted through the remains to identify the dead. The structural steel of the complex was sent to scrapyards in New Jersey, and some ended up getting recycled on the international market — with its buyers often unaware of its origin.
About 2,000 pieces of steel were kept locked away in Hangar 17 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, to be investigated by the FBI. In the ramp-up to the 10-year anniversary of the attacks, the Port Authority set up a program to distribute this remaining steel for memorials: People could choose an artifact among a 350-page inventory circulated by the Authority, fax in a request, and go get a piece of structural steel. As a result of this program, thousands of communities around the world have adopted a piece as their own, creating a vast catalog of memorials from California to Texas, from Canada to New Zealand.
Sociologist Max Holleran and artist and writer Samuel Holleran spent a decade inventorying the memorials that use the program’s steel, and tracking down those who made them — often through grassroots efforts with very little money.
“The attack was so televisual, and the image of the towers became so painful and charged, we were curious as to how communities could honor the buildings without showing them,” Samuel Holleran told Bloomberg CityLab five years ago, when we first covered the project. Now, the brothers have a new book out on the trajectory of the raw materials and their meaning, Scattered Steel (Cornell University Press). Bloomberg CityLab spoke with the authors about memory-making across geographies. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Talk about the genesis of the book.
SAMUEL HOLLERAN: About 10 years ago, I was working as a public artist. And I noticed this one listing for $2,000 to work with what was labeled as an artifact of the World Trade Center. And that really struck me, because making artwork from received pieces of material, let alone pieces that are from this really public and tragic and televisual event, it’s really uncommon.
MAX HOLLERAN: We went into the project with a couple of assumptions. One is that a national tragedy of this magnitude would have a more set kind of style-guide of memorialization, and it also would have a bigger budget. One of the things about this $2,000 call is no one makes art for that much money. It’s a really, really small amount of money for a public memorial. And so we were struck by the grassroots nature of how this happened. People who are not professional artists, they’re making these things in their garages and on really low budgets.
SH: There’s a pretty wide spectrum. There are about 1,800 different memorials. At the very top of the budget and expertise, there’s a memorial in Padua in Italy, that was constructed by Dan Libeskind at a huge budget paid for by the NATO region and actually a little bit controversial there because people thought, well, maybe that’s a bit too much money for us to spend on someone else’s tragedy. And at the very bottom there are people working for free, and just welding pieces of steel onto a base. In the middle, it’s probably someone who is a craftsperson, who considers themselves an artist, but they’re not a public artist who’s done a lot of commissions before.
And a lot of times they've done it at great personal expense in terms of volunteering their time and not really receiving much compensation — if receiving compensation at all. And working with this material, that’s difficult. It’s not an easy thing to think about the presence of this inauspicious thing in your art studio.
You refer to these grassroots efforts as “DIY memorialization.” Is this unique to 9/11?
SH: The US is a space where there is actually a lot of grassroots memorialization work. People are familiar with highway memorials where there’s a big crash that kills someone and there will be a cross there or something else that commemorates it. The memorialization of 9/11 is sort of unique with the steel, in that it allowed people to work with one unifying element, but to do their own thing in ways that you don’t see much of.
It’s also a reflection of the typical American can-do spirit. In the post-9/11 era, people were keen to show that communities could come together and do something to lift the burden of grief off of New York City and spread it around the country. And there was a sense that the big memorials in Pennsylvania, in Northern Virginia, at the Pentagon and at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan were going to be too slow and too hamstrung by all these different actors and bureaucracy. This was a way for people to take control.
You talk in the book about how this act of memorialization brought communities together to mourn and process the trauma. Tell me more about this, and give me a couple of examples.
SH: The communities were different in terms of their relationship to New York. In the communities of the tri-state area, you see people who are immediately affected. And those memorials, in some cases, were standing in for actual headstones. They’re places of extreme grief and pain. When you get further from NYC and its surroundings, you get to people who felt very much attached to the tragedy as Americans, but they maybe didn’t have an actual connection to NYC or to the victims. They had seen this event on television and seeing the steel come into their community was a way to make this surreal event real. And there’s a big emphasis on having it be a gathering point and a teaching point for future generations, but I think all memorials are trying to do that in some way.
We would start some of our interviews with people who were in the West and say, ‘Well, New York is really far from you. How do you feel about connecting this tragedy to something that’s all the way on the other side of the country?’ And some people took a little bit of offense to that and said, ‘Hey, we felt it just as much as anyone else. We honestly felt like we were next in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Phoenix.’
New York City firefighters on a fire rescue boat salute the future USS New York as she passes lower Manhattan next on November 2, 2009 in New York City.Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Most of the effort to distribute steel started happening around the ten-year anniversary of the WTC attacks. What happened before that?
MH: There were memorials made from steel on an ad hoc basis. There was a piece of steel sent to the Venice Biennale and there was a permanent steel memorial made in Christchurch, New Zealand. But this is when it gets formalized, and they get this PDF of images that they start sending out to community groups and fire stations and police officers. The steel that makes up the memorials spent 10 years in Hangar 17 at JFK Airport. I think that added to the symbolic power, which is that people had kind of forgotten about the steel. And WTC, when it was built, used the most structural steel of any building of that time.
Those who get the steel get this highly meaningful piece. Did many people use it as a raw material and create something new out of it? Or did most people use the steel as such, without changing it at all?
SH: The artist Graham Bennett in Christchurch, New Zealand, was one of the first to suspend the steel and make it into a construction. It’s three pieces suspended by wires and cables, and the small amount of steel required to suspend it and cut through is buried below it. The steel was really treated like a sacred relic. In general, there’s an extreme amount of reverence shown with the steel. It was not used as a raw material. There were a couple of instances where steel was taken from the hangar at JFK and was melted down, including for the USS New York, the ship that was produced with some symbolic amount of steel.
MH: One of the hard and fast rules of the steel program by the Port Authority was no charging money for viewing the memorials. I think what they really didn’t want is something like the Berlin Wall, where people are still trying to sell you a rock with some graffiti on it that may or may not have been attached to the Berlin Wall. I think that was really wise, because that would’ve made it into a whole different kind of item and one that could be experienced individually, one that could be perhaps cheapened by being a consumptive object rather than experienced publicly and with other people in public spaces.
MP: With all of the steel now gone from the Hangar 17, what do you foresee for the lifespan of these already created memorials? How do you think this is going to help make sure that this attack remains in the American psyche? And how do you think these are going to be interacted with in the future?
SH: I think everyone wants it to serve a pedagogical function for people who were not alive during the attacks or who were very young. But a lot of people are already saying that some don’t really know what it’s for. Of course on 9/11 anniversaries, there’ll still be some sort of memorial service, but the other 364 days of the year, it might just be public art.
MH: Our human nature is to forget these things. And the power of a memorial is not so much in keeping us from forgetting, but allowing us to jog our memory or for those who’ve never had that memory to bring it about the first time around.
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