Fort Lee to Construct 9/11 Monument Out of World Trade Center Girder

On Sept. 11, the tenth anniversary of the tragic events of 9/11, Fort Lee will dedicate a monument in built with a girder and other pieces of the World Trade Center donated to the borough for that specific purpose by the Port Authority.

The girder, which arrived in Fort Lee a couple of weeks ago and will be the centerpiece of the monument, comes from the 79th floor of Tower 1, just above where the airliner hit the tower. Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich said they know this because they’ve done a lot of research, visited the hangar at JFK Airport where the steel from the World Trade Center is stored and have artists’ renderings, drawings and diagrams provided by the Port Authority to show which specific girder the borough has in its possession.

“There’s fire damage on this girder. It’s twisted. So it was impacted by the crash,” Sokolich said. “Not only does it signify the violence of the building crumbling, but it’s got fire damage and ash on it.”

The monument itself, which is still being designed by a special committee the mayor formed, will feature the roughly 12-foot steel girder, which weighs several tons, standing straight up with a thick steel plate—one of hundreds that lined the perimeter of the base of the building—tilted in front of the girder featuring a placard identifying what the various pieces represent. There will also be four plaques placed around the monument, each devoted to Fort Lee’s own first responders: Police, Fire, Ambulance and Emergency Services. A wrought iron gate, a paved path and a planting area will surround the entire monument.

The monument will also feature what Sokolich called “Fort Lee’s first eternal light.”

“There will be a piece of conduit on the bottom with a high-powered, outdoor halogen light, so it will be lit inside the girder,” Sokolich explained. “So you’ll see it at various holes in the girder and then at the end it’ll just spew into the night sky.”

Sokolich said Fort Lee is deserving of a 9/11 memorial, “because we played an integral role with our emergency services going to the site.”

Fort Lee also served as a staging area for emergency vehicles from New Jersey that needed to get to the site, noted Fort Lee councilman Jan Goldberg, who is part of Sokolich’s committee and made the trip to JFK with Sokolich and others to meet the Port Authority’s curator, who ultimately donated the piece.

“They would park here, and one of our volunteer fire departments covered for the fire department in the Bronx,” Goldberg said. “We also set up triage at the high school.”

“Not to mention we lost residents,” Sokolich added. “It could have been a lot worse considering all the people that work in the city here.”

After some exhaustive research, it was determined that six Fort Lee residents in fact lost their lives at the World Trade Center nearly 10 years ago. But Sokolich noted that those were people technically living in Fort Lee at the time and that it’s impossible to account for the many more who may have lived most of their lives in Fort Lee but were living elsewhere when they died in the attacks. Thus it was decided that the idea of putting names on a plaque as part of the monument was not a viable option.

“We were just so fearful that we were going to miss a name that we scrapped the idea of putting the people’s names on the plaque,” Sokolich said. “You have some people who died who now live [elsewhere] who lived in Fort Lee for the first 44 years of their lives. Shouldn’t they be on that monument? They’re Fort Lee’s children. They’re born and raised here. But we’re not going to know that based on this information because we know the town they lived in when they died.”

In conjunction with the larger monument the borough will be building smaller memorials out of another girder the Port Authority donated and cut into nine two-foot by two-foot pieces.

“We’ve decided to build a base and place these pieces of the girder at each of the fire departments, the ambulance corps., police department, borough hall,” Sokolich said. “Each piece will have a plaque below it indicating 1 of 9, 2 of 9, etcetera. It will indicate that they are part of a larger girder, and it signifies the unity of all of our emergency services on that day,.”

Perhaps best of all, Sokolich says, “it’s not going to cost us a dime.”

The mayor’s committee—what he calls his “special projects team”—is comprised of himself, Goldberg and several members of the borough’s emergency services departments and the Department of Public Works, including Michael Maresca, who will be integral in building the structure.

“We’re building this all in house,” Sokolich said. “And at the end of the day, 99 percent of this will have been donated.”

The committee had considered several locations for the memorial, including the Fort Lee Community Center and Borough Hall, but in the end settled on Constitution Park for a number of reasons.

“This signifies sadness; you don’t want to use the word macabre,” Sokolich said. “We wanted to make sure it was in a place that could be recognized and respected but also not bring down the environment that it’s in. We don’t really want to compete with what the community center represents. So we found a great place that was public enough and could be viewed by a lot a people yet it wasn’t imposing on the area.”

The dedication ceremony is being planned for Sept. 11 at Constitution Park. Sokolich said government representatives and curators from the Port Authority will be invited to attend.