From Ground Zero

Did I ever show you this? I don't think I did, or if I did, I can't find it on the blog. Anyhow, this is a sculpture that sat between the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. When the towers came down on 9/11, they fell on this sculpture. It was recovered from the rubble and laid in storage for some time, but is on display (or at least it was last year when I shot it on 9/11/08) in Battery Park in lower Manhattan. It's simply called The Sphere and was created by Fritz Koenig.

You might be able to tell from these pictures that The Sphere was heavily damaged in the attacks. They reportedly pulled a seat from one of the two aircraft out of the sculpture after it's recovery. And I think I read somewhere that it weighs somewhat less now than when it was initially created due to lost pieces.

Anyhow, I was just sitting here sharing some other pictures regarding 9/11 with you, so I wanted to throw these up as well.

World Trade

While I'm all worked up about the events of 9/11, here's a picture of two beams recovered from the wreckage of the World Trade Centers in New York City. These beams came from, I think, the 77th floor of the 110-story towers. They are on display at the Smithsonian's Museum of American History. This may have been the only thing I saw in DC that made me cry.

United Airlines Flight 93

I took a tour of the US Capitol Building on September 10th, and the day before I was there, they dedicated this large plaque. It's a memorial to the people who died aboard Flight 93 when they chose to overpower the terrorists and crash the plane into a field into Pennsylvania rather than allowing the plane to be flown into the Capitol Building as many now believe the terrorists intended. I don't know if I'll ever make it to that field, so I'll have to show you this instead. I've visited the other two locations where terrorists struck that day, and paid my respects to the fallen.

9-11-01 The Pentagon

I found myself with a little extra time when I was in Washington DC recently, so I took the Metro out to the Pentagon. There's a memorial area on the opposite side of the building from the Metro station, but it's worth the walk. I'll show you more of the memorial some other time, but tonight I want to show you the spot on the building where the plane impacted on September 11, 2001. You can see the black marble rectangle above, inscribed with the date. That's all there is to mark the spot. Plain, simple, and straight to the point.

Normal tourists like me can't get past the fence, but at least it's close enough that you can see it over there. I can only imagine the lengths they had to go to in order to build a publicly accessible memorial right next to the Pentagon.

I don't know if anyone ever uses these three entrance doors. All the activity seemed to be on the side to the right of this one. It opened up onto a giant parking lot, and a tunnel under a road that led to the neighboring mall.

I was a little nervous about taking these pictures, since there was more than one sign posted that said no pictures. But none of them were in the immediate area of the memorial, so I just kept shooting and hoped for the best.

Ground Zero

I was in New York last year for the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. My first night there was September 10th, and my buddy and I walked from Greenwich Village down to Ground Zero. There were lots of people around getting ready for the ceremonies the following day. Both presidential candidates were supposed to be in attendance, so there was plenty of security on hand. But we were still able to walk around the site and pay our respects to those people who lost their lives that day in the World Trade towers. Having only been to New York City once before, and then only for a short time, I felt eerily like I recognized the place. Perhaps it was the constant TV coverage, but I knew where I was when I saw the buildings in the picture below. Even in the dark, I knew I was where the towers had once stood.

Looking South

Here are three pictures I took from the observation deck of the Empire State Building on September 11th. Each one is a little bit closer to Ground Zero, which is where they are shining the spotlights from. It's tough to get shots like this in the dark without them being blurry, but I think these are fairly good. Just to orient you a little, in the shot above, you can see the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges at the left of the picture, reaching over the East River. To the right is the Hudson River. The bridge in the shot below is the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, linking Brooklyn to Staten Island. And that means that most of the lights in the background are actually on Staten Island. Somewhere out there is the Statue of Liberty, but I don't think it's visible too clearly in any of these pictures. Wait, it's a tall green object in the right of center in the picture up top. I think I've gotten much better as a photographer since the last time I tried to take pictures from this spot.


In this last shot, you can see where the lights shine right up out of the hole that used to be the World Trade Center towers. More about that hole later.