Firefighter's 9-11 Memorial

Firefighter's 9/11 memorial: Visible valor, invisible tribute

DAVID W. DUNLAP

New York Times News Service

NEW YORK - There is that instant of horror to be relived, forever frozen in bronze. There are scenes of valor and camaraderie to be celebrated. There are names to be touched and traced: the Fire Department's 343 dead.

But the most poignant messages of the first large-scale 9/11 monument at ground zero - a bold, literal and almost neo-Classical 56-foot-long bronze relief - will never be visible. Those are the private thoughts written by firefighters on the back of the south panel, just before the monument was installed last month on the side of "10 House," the engine and ladder company across Liberty Street from the World Trade Center.

The firefighters' monument was unveiled Saturday by the members of "10 House," Engine Company 10 and Ladder Company 10.

"This is a 100-year monument," said Harold Meyers, assistant chief of the Fire Department and the Manhattan borough commander. "We wanted it to tell a story. One hundred years from now, we want you to look at this and say, 'This is what happened."'

In the central panel are the flaming towers, caught at the instant when the second jetliner hit on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Flanking it are scenes of firefighters laying down hose lines, a weary firefighter reaching up from a curb, a fireboat on the horizon. They are composed in exacting detail. Meyers made sure of that.

Below the main relief are two long panels inscribed with what Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta called a "silent roll call," the names of the dead, arranged by rank, from First Deputy Commissioner William M. Feehan to Paramedic Ricardo J. Quinn.

"We've done it in a fashion that, as you kneel down, you can take a pi
ece of tracing paper and trace that name," said Brian D. Starer of the Holland & Knight Charitable Foundation, which raised the money for the monument.

Because so much labor and material was donated, he said it was impossible to put an exact dollar figure on the project.

"This is a million-dollar memorial that didn't cost a million dollars," he said.
Holland & Knight is an international law firm whose New York office is at 195 Broadway, a block from ground zero. Its central role in the firefighters' monument can be traced to the earliest days of the rescue and recovery effort, when Starer helped furnish ice for the workers on the smoldering pile.

His wife, Cheryl Roy Starer, had immersed herself in volunteer work at a triage center four blocks north of ground zero. After two or three days treating workers with deeply bloodshot eyes, for whom conventional eye drops offered no relief, she set out to create soothing ice compresses.

She telephoned her husband and said: "I want you to stop what you're doing. I need ice. I'm not asking you, I'm telling you." He asked how much. "All you can get," she answered.

After nine weeks, ice was no longer needed, but there was still money in the fund that had been establisged to provide it, and fire officials proposed that it be used for a memorial. Starer agreed, with the understanding that the monument would also honor Glenn J. Winuk, a Holland & Knight partner and volunteer firefighter who raced to the trade center after helping evacuate his own building. He was never seen again.

Starer approached the Rambusch Co., a 108-year-old firm that specializes in decorative metalwork, stained glass and lighting.

A 10-foot-long plaster model followed. Dozens of details were fussed over: how high the fireboat sat in the water, how the radio cords curled. Full-scale panels were made in plastilene clay. At this late stage, Charles R. Cushing, a naval architect, noticed that the smoke from the north tower was drifting in the wrong direction. That was corrected.

The 6-foot-high, 7,000-pound mural arrived in Manhattan on May 19 in two 24-foot-long side sections and an 8-foot-long central section. It was put up overnight.

Before the south panel was hoisted into place, the installation crew and the firefighters from "10 House" were invited to write messages on the back with paint pens. Some offered sentiments like "I'm here with you" or "Til we meet again." Others enumerated their friends who died that day - six names, seven names, eight names.

"I'm not a misty guy," Meyers said, "but I have to tell you, I had a misty moment." Those sentiments are meant to stay private and personal. "I hope," the chief said, "no one ever gets to see the back of it."

, New York's assistant fire chief, speaking of the messages written on the back of the 9/11 memorial at "10 House"