From a hangar to a Midwest memorial

Eight years ago my dad called to say he was in New York. I was attending graduate school at Columbia University and his visit was surprising. If I had time, he said, I should come to the old Pan American hangar at the Kennedy International Airport. There was something there I might find interesting. 

The hangar was a repository for hundreds of giant chunks of twisted steel that had once comprised the World Trade Towers. There were other artifacts too — a PATH train, dust-covered Bugs Bunny and Foghorn Leghorn statutes, a crumpled firetruck. Some were slated for the September 11 Memorial Museum.

As a storage space, Hangar 17 was causing the city grief because of its poor atmospheric control and the money required to maintain it. But getting rid of the steel scraps was proving another headache, in part because they were so big and difficult to move. 

The New York Port Authority wanted the pieces that wouldn’t be used in the Manhattan memorial to go to states across the country building their own tributes and museums. My dad, the mayor of Hilliard, a mid-sized town in central Ohio, saw an opportunity. He had worked with design firm Bird Houk Collaborative to draw up plans for a first responders’ park, and a friend, David Meeks, put him in touch with the authority after he discovered the steel through a Google search.

“I had a knack for getting on the Internet and finding things when other people couldn’t,” said Meeks, the then-economic development director for Hilliard. The authority was trying to move slowly, so they weren’t really promoting the steel, he added.

Dad’s trip to New York was to pick out which steel fragments would best fit the design of the proposed park, and then figure out how to move them more than 550 miles to Ohio. (The only cost of the steel was in the transport).

Constraints like power lines limited which pieces they could chose. 

“We knew we wanted a flagpole,” said Meeks. The city also wanted to incorporate a piece of rail from the subway because of Hilliard’s history as an old rail community.

It was a sunny spring afternoon when dad and I visited, but inside the hangar the atmosphere was somber. It was so quiet our footsteps seemed to echo. I was awed by some of the artifacts but also overwhelmed. I was a college kid in Ohio when the towers fell, and though I had visited them before September 11, 2001, seeing them in pieces made the reality of that day raw.

The word “Save” was spray painted on some steel beams. All the objects were meticulously labeled and catalogued. There were also crushed vehicles, a clock with hands stuck on 9:12, a fragment of rock that was actually four floors that had been compacted into what looked like a meteor. In a separate room lay B101, a column from the South Tower covered in pictures and messages — “Remember WTC ops forever.” It was the last chunk of steel recovered from the site and it’s removal, in May 2002, marked the official end of the clean up.

Hilliard was one of the first cities to tour the hangar and pick from the range of steel available, said Doug Francis, the city’s police chief at the time and now its spokesman.

My dad chose several pieces, including one of five flagpoles that were salvaged from the wreckage and a V-shaped support from the parking garage beneath one of the towers. It now lays on its side in the park, a symbol of the towers tumbling.

It would be another year from the time dad and I toured the hangar until the city mobilized resources to retrieve it. The load weighed seven tons altogether and Francis agreed to escort it back with the help of 20 officers and firefighters and a convoy of eight vehicles. A local trucking company donated a flatbed semi to haul it all.

With the help of a crane and workers from the Port Authority, they placed the chunks of steel on the truck and pulled out of JFK at 8am on a spring day in May, just 24 hours after leaving Hilliard. New York police on motorcycles guided the Ohio escort out of the city, lights flashing. They kept the lights on the rest of the way home, said Francis.

Along the way people honked and gave the thumbs up as they passed, he recalled. The truck bore signs indicating where the steel came from. At every rest stop, people would come up to touch it.

“It was a very moving 36 hours,” Francis said.

Three months later the park was dedicated and a year after that the flagpole went up in front of the police station.

The Port Authority would eventually apportion pieces to every state and seven countries, including Afghanistan and China, Erica Dumas, a spokeswoman for the Port Authority told the New York Times. In total, 1,500 eligible organizations received artifacts.

The hangar is now closed, the steel in new homes. And today marks seven years since the first responders’ park in Hilliard was unveiled. Events are scheduled in the evening, when lights illuminate fountains that spray from old firehose nozzles in arches meant to symbolize unity. 

This afternoon, however, two visitors dropped by to offer a tribute. At a time when the country seems to be unraveling, when it seems less united and more hateful than I can remember, they left a lanyard over the V-shaped piece of steel that read simply: Stronger than ever.