Twenty-five years after September 11, the 9/11 Memorial and Museum is preparing to mark the anniversary with a new exhibition and a nationwide educational push aimed at Americans who have no memory of the attacks. One name on the South Pool I have followed for eighteen of them.
On Monday afternoon, the Museum described the exhibition it is about to open on the 25th anniversary of the attacks. It is called In Their Honor: 25 Years of 9/11-Inspired Service.
Beth Hillman, the Museum’s president and chief executive, stood before a bank of cameras at a press briefing convened with the New York Foreign Press Center – the State Department’s Manhattan outpost for foreign media – and offered a figure that has come to define the anniversary. It felt, she joked at the top of her remarks, as though there were more cameras than people in the room. About 100 million Americans, she said, were either unborn on September 11, 2001, or too young to have registered what was happening. Each year, she said, the annual promise to never forget becomes both harder to keep and more necessary to renew. ‘As time moves forward,’ she said, ‘that battle becomes even more important.’
The Museum’s mission, Hillman said, is to commemorate the nearly 3,000 people killed that day, to educate a next generation of Americans about what happened and what has happened since, and to inspire all who visit with stories of courage and sacrifice. In a few weeks, she noted, that mission would return to the Memorial Plaza for the 25th time.
That mission takes physical form on September 12, when the Museum opens In Their Honor. Reporters were the first to walk its rooms on Monday. The exhibition, Hillman said, occupies a gallery inside the Museum and turns from the events of the day itself toward what followed: the volunteer surge, the enlistments, the nonprofits built around loss, the arts and educational institutions revived in the wake of the attacks.
Logan Miller, a 9/11 family member and a member of the Museum’s Visionary Leadership Council, spoke next. In 2001, he said, he was a second grader in Bayside, Queens, more concerned with snack time than with the news drifting down the hallway outside his classroom. His teacher stepped into the hallway to talk with the other teachers, he recalled, and, one by one, his classmates were picked up by their parents. By late morning, a class of 25 had shrunk to two or three. Around one o’clock, his father arrived and told him there had been a terrible attack in the city, and that the World Trade Center had fallen. At eight years old, he fixated on one question: how does a building fall?
His uncle, an EMT and a senior court officer at the New York State Supreme Court, worked just blocks from the World Trade Center and got off the subway at Canal Street that morning, reaching the courthouse before the first plane struck. He and more than two dozen fellow court officers made the decision to leave the courthouse and walk toward the towers. A photographer for the New York Post captured him at a makeshift triage on Church Street, bandaging the arm of a woman with severe burns before she was loaded into an ambulance. Then he and several other officers went back into the tower to look for survivors. They found another woman. One of the officers took her to safety; walking out, he saw Miller’s uncle and two other court officers for the last time. Moments later, the South Tower fell.
The man Miller called his grandfather – his father’s uncle – worked near Ground Zero in the weeks after the towers came down, after residents were told it was safe to return to Lower Manhattan. He breathed the dust and the toxic air that continued to linger there. Years later, Miller said, he developed leukemia and died in 2016, exactly fifteen years after the attacks.
‘The consequences of 9/11 did not end on September 11, 2001,’ Miller told the room. They kept unfolding, he said – through the first responders, the ordinary New Yorkers who ran toward danger when everyone else was running away, and the people who, years later, became sick because of what they had breathed. He also thought, he said, about the countless people who looked at what happened that day and decided to do something because of it: to serve, to rebuild, to help people they had never met. Many of them, he said, had spent the last 25 years doing exactly that.
Twenty-five years later, Miller said, there is an entire generation with no memory of what happened. The responsibility now, he said, is no longer only about remembering what happened, but about remembering that there is a generation that does not know what happened. Remembering them, he said, in their honor.
For the first time this year, the annual ceremony on the Memorial Plaza will include a seventh moment of silence, Hillman said, in tribute to those who have since died from illness and injury caused by exposure to the toxic aftermath of the attacks. A live prime-time special with ABC News, featuring musical performances, will air on the evening of September 11. Throughout the season, she added, the Museum will run a nationwide educational effort centered on a digital learning experience that classrooms across the country can access. The Museum has also invited journalists from around the world – many of whom, she noted, are themselves part of the 9/11 story – to share their own accounts with the institution.
Three of the Filipino victims I have come to know in the years since are on the parapets of the same Memorial. Cesar Amoranto Alviar, 60, an accountant at Marsh and McLennan, worked on the 94th floor of the North Tower; his name is inscribed on panel N-16. Grace Alegre Cua, 40, a native of Infanta, Quezon, had been at Chuo Mitsui Trust for fourteen years; her name is on panel S-39. Benilda Pascua Domingo, 37, from Barangay Sta. Maria in Laoag City, had come to the United States the year before the attacks – her visa finally through after a fourteen-year wait to bring her family – and had just begun planning her wedding. Her name is on panel S-37.
Noah Rauch, the Museum’s senior vice president for education and public programs, has spent more than a decade watching a line move across American classrooms – the line, he said, between memory and history. He described it as a widening gap between those who remember the attacks and those who do not. For roughly 100 million Americans, he said, September 11 is no longer a lived event; it is a subject. That, he said, gives the 25th anniversary particular weight – a chance to make sure the stories, the lessons, and the legacy captured in In Their Honor are preserved not just for this generation but for those that follow.
The Museum’s programs, Rauch said, have reached nearly 20 million students since the institution opened. Its Anniversary Digital Learning Experience – a 35-minute film paired with a live chat that lets students ask staff questions in real time throughout September 11 – has drawn more than five million student participants over the years, underwritten, he noted, by the New York Life Foundation. On-site and virtual field trips for grades 3 through 12 remain free to all tri-state schools, funded, he said, by the Will Family Foundation, Barbara and H. Rajan Cohen, and the New York City Council. Professional-development seminars help teachers – many of them now part of that 100 million with no memory of their own – teach a subject that, Rauch acknowledged, is not easy to teach. The job, he said, is to give educators the content and the strategies to help students connect to what happened, whom it happened to, and how people responded in extraordinary ways.
Hillman closed by returning to what she called the spirit of September 12, when people of different backgrounds and ideologies, she said, came together in patriotism and unity. That spirit, she said, is what the Museum hopes to carry into its next quarter-century – alongside a solemn commemoration that honors the dead, pays tribute to the heroes of the day, and provides comfort to families and survivors.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was on my way to work in Manhattan, riding a cab down Lexington after getting off the 6 train at 51st Street. By the time I reached the hospital, the first plane had already struck the North Tower. By the time I got to my office on the 16th floor, the second plane had hit the South Tower. The secretaries were already crying. One of our administrators had a fiancé at Cantor Fitzgerald.
That afternoon, I walked home to Queens across the 59th Street Bridge. Cell service was down across the city; only text messages went through, and only sometimes. I was carrying a Nikon Coolpix 995. From the bridge, I took a photograph of Lower Manhattan.
7 years after the attacks, I saw Rudy Abad in a YouTube video, describing what he had done in his wife’s memory in the Philippines. I have been following the story since. One of the names on the Memorial is inscribed on panel S-34 of the South Pool.
The Memorial arranges its names not alphabetically but by what it calls ‘meaningful adjacency’ – the people who were standing next to whom that morning. Close to 3,000 names have been cut into bronze around the two pools; each can be located by a panel number, N or S, followed by a number from 1 to 76. S-34 belongs to Marie Rose Abad.
She was 49, a senior executive at the investment bank Keefe, Bruyette and Woods. She was born in New York, the daughter of an Italian immigrant family. She had survived the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center – walked down 110 stories then. She did not survive the second attempt. She was in her 89th-floor office when the second plane struck below her. In her final phone call to her home on Long Island, she told her husband, Rudy Abad, that it was too hot, that this might be the last time she spoke to him. Her last words to him, he later recalled, were: ‘Ru, pray, pray.’
Rudy Abad was born in Manila. He left the Philippines in 1963 to study in the United States and eventually became an American citizen. His wife had told him she wanted, one day, to help the poor in his country of origin. In 2004, three years after her death, he funded the construction of about fifty one-story houses on the site of a slum in Manila’s Tondo district. It is named Marie Rose Abad GK Village. I have followed the village since – the children on its alleys, the brightly colored homes, the street sign at the entrance bearing the name of a woman who never lived to see it.
In Their Honor opens on September 12.