Honoring Victims of 9/11

World Trade Center replica in Bethel turns heads
By Donna Christopher NEWS-TIMES CORRESPONDENT

Peter Paulnak of Bethel built a Sept. 11 memorial in his yard.

BETHEL -- People are curious. They slow down. Some get out of their cars and take pictures. Others walk up to Peter Paulnak to ask questions.

They want to know why the Chestnut Ridge Road resident built a Sept. 11 memorial on his front lawn. Made out of wood and painted green, it is a 16-foot model of the World Trade Center. There is a huge heart in between the two towers. The buildings are lit at night and a broadcast antenna on the North Tower has a flashing beacon.

Paulnak spent several months building the tribute he set in place July 4.

When illuminated with red, white and blue rope lighting outlining the model, the towers appear to be floating in the darkness at night, said Paulnak.

"It stops traffic," he said at his ranch house on Daniska Drive.

Passersby ask him, "Why did I do it? Did you lose anybody?" He tells them, "No. I have no relatives or friends, know no one who died in the towers." Paulnak's objective is to keep the memory of a tragedy that affected thousands from fading. "It changed families. It changed the world," he said.

The 57-year-old plumbing and heating contractor "could not forget" seeing people people die when terrorists hijacked jet planes that hit the Twin Towers almost five years ago. It is a tribute to the victims, the heroes and the families, he said.

"They went to work on a normal autumn morning. Parents did not go home to their kids. Kids did not go home to their families. People parked in a commuter lot in Jersey and took the PATH trains to work. They had nothing to do with terror. They were people making a living and the families changed, the world changed. It was very sad. I could not forget. We should not forget."
An amateur photographer and craftsman, Paulnak is a prolific builder of models from kits and from scratch, a hobby he has spent 15 years honing, as evidenced from a massive 12-by-40 feet model railroad in his basement. Replete with six working engines, six loops totaling 500 feet of track, six sets of trains and city buildings, and a Grand Central Terminal on one end and Union Station on the other, the model is of the New Haven Line from Danbury to Norwalk, circa 1950.
The 9/11 memorial was a design from Paulnak's imagination. He decided to build one last winter and searched the Internet but came up with no plans. Paulnak then created his own."I was obsessed once I started thinking about it," he said. "I started working on it in the spring."
He learned the dimensions of the Twin Towers and decided to build his installation to scale. "The South Tower was 1,362 feet and the North Tower was 6 feet taller, 1,368 feet in total. So I built my towers about 16 feet. That's 29?3„4 inch to every 208 feet. Both towers are about 16 feet, though one is an inch taller. The mast is six feet," he said.

Paulnak wanted people to see the structure at night, so he installed lighting and makes sure they're on at 8:45 p.m., when it is pitch dark."You can hear (cars) slow down going up and down the hill," he said.

The reaction from everyone, including neighbors, is "very positive."

Paulnak was working at a client's home in Wilton Sept. 11, 2001 and watched the tragedy, like many people, on TV.

"I could hear the commotion downstairs and went down to see what was happening. I saw the tower smoking. You think it's serious but I thought it was a small commercial plane, not a commercial airline. The saddest thing was seeing the papers, stuff on people's desks that was important one minute and scattered through Manhattan the next minute. For the towers to come down that way was a hideously efficient way of killing a lot of people. They used jetliners to kill people on planes and jet fuel to kill the people inside."

He remembers watching with the homeowners as the North Tower crumbled.
"We were shocked. They were worried about a friend who was working in one of the towers." The client learned later the friend had perished.

He's been to the site in lower Manhattan. "It's a hole in the ground. We went to pay our respects." He expects no accolades from building the memorial, just knowing, from reactions so far, that his visual reminder of the tragic loss of human life prevents the memory from fading."I will never forget," he said.