"Ground Zero", the 9/11 Memorial and the new World Trade Centre

As I said in my previous post, the World Trade Centre is located within Manhattan's Financial District, literally just a a couple of blocks away from Wall Street and the NYSE.

It has been a few years since I went down to "Ground Zero" so this was definitely somewhere I wanted to go to again while I was here in New York.

In addition to the actual World Trade Centre there are a couple of other buildings in the area that are historically significant, and both, thankfully and/or miraculously, survived the attacks on Sept. 11th.

Trinity Church and St. Paul's Chapel, make up Trinity Wall Street.  Trinity Church has stood on this site in Manhattan, at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway, since 1697.  The current building, the third on the site, was consecrated in 1846 and is a registered National Historic Landmark.

A beautiful French sandstone and Italian marble statuary wall, called a reredos, is within Trinity Church.  The crucifixion appears at the centre of the reredos with the twelve apostles on the right and left.  Above is a depiction of Christ in glory.  Surmounting the reredos are angels playing musical instruments.  The stained glass chancel window features Jesus in the centre with, from left to right, Peter, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul.

Beautiful but relatively new compared to the rest of the church, the pipe organ at Trinity Church was installed in 2003 after the dust, ash and smoke of September 11, 2001, rendered the previous pipe organ unusable.

On Sept. 11, 2001, debris from the collapsing World Trade Centre towers struck a large sycamore tree that had stood for nearly half a century in the churchyard of St. Paul's Chapel.  When the dust settled, the uprooted tree was found lying on a narrow path in the yard.  It had fallen in such a way that none of the historic tombstones around it were disturbed and none of the wreckage reached the Chapel.  Philadelphia-born artist Steve Tobin heard the story of the sycamore and envisioned using its roots as the basis for a bronze sculpture.  In Sept. 2005 the two-tonne sculpture was installed here. The Trinity Root serves as a metaphor for connectedness and strength.

In 1789 George Washington took the oath of office to become the first President of the United States.  Afterwards he made his way from the Federal Hall on Wall Street to St. Paul's Chapel where he attended services.  At that point, St. Paul's had already been a part of New York City for 23 years.
St. Paul's was first opened as an outreach chapel of Trinity Church and when Trinity was destroyed in New York's Great Fire (1776), St. Paul's miraculously survived thanks to a bucket brigade dousing the building with water.
St. Paul's Chapel is now known as "the little chapel that stood" because it survived a second brush with destruction on Sept. 11, 2001, when the World Trade Centre building collapsed just across the street.  Other than a lot of dust and debris there was no damage to the church.

Directly behind the rear entrance to St. Paul's Chapel is the Bell of Hope.  It was presented in Sept. 2002 to the City of New York by the Lord Mayor of the City of London as a symbol of solidarity on the first anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001.  It is rung annually on Sept. 11th, and on other special dates.  The bell was cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London, the same foundry that cast the Liberty Bell and Big Ben.

The original World Trade Centre (WTC) was a 16-acre commercial complex built between 1966 and 1987.  It contained seven buildings, a large plaza, and an underground shopping mall.  The centrepieces of the complex were the Twin Towers.  Over 1,360 feet tall. they were the tallest building in New York City.  Both had 110 floors, approximately 35,000 people worked in them, and tens of thousands of commuters and tourists were at the buildings daily.  The complex even had its own zip code!

The fully redeveloped WTC will include a memorial and museum, commercial office space, retail, and connections to public transit.  The master plan for the site calls for a spiral of new towers around the eight-acre Memorial.

The 9/11 Memorial opened on the 10th anniversary of the attacks.  It consists of two pools set in the footprints of the original Twin Towers.  These are where the towers used to stand.  Thirty-foot waterfalls cascade into the pools, each then descending into a centre void.

 The south pool

The north pool

The nearly 3000 names of the victims of the 9/11 and 1993 attacks are inscribed in bronze around the perimetres of the two pools.

1 World Trade Centre, just beyond the north pool, at 1,776 feet will be the tallest building in the United States.

Just east of the south pool, 4 World Trade Centre will rise 72 floors and stand 977 feet tall.

All but one of the trees on the Memorial site are swamp white oaks.  The exception is a Callery pear tree known as the "Survivor Tree".  This tree was planted on the original WTC plaza in the 1970's and after 9/11 workers found the damaged tree, reduced to an eight-foot-tall stump in the wreckage at Ground Zero.  The tree was nursed back to health in a New York City park and grew to be 30 feet tall, and in December 2010 the tree returned to the WT site.  Standing just west of the south pool it embodies the story of survival and resilience that is so important to the history of 9/11 today.

Although still under construction, the 'new' World Trade Centre site is quite impressive - and I found the 9/11 Memorial pools to be very moving!