Two 9/11 Artifacts, a PATH Car and an Antenna Mast, Get New Homes

Jul 05, 2023

Advertisement

Supported by

By David W. Dunlap

Hangar 17 at Kennedy International Airport, which for years was as close as New York City had to a Sept. 11 memorial museum, now stands almost empty of the monumental artifacts of the attack on the World Trade Center 14 years ago.

On Tuesday, a 32-foot section of the 360-foot antenna mast that once soared skyward from the top of 1 World Trade Center arrived at the Fulton-Montgomery Community College in Johnstown, N.Y. Next spring, it is to be erected in an upright position, not far from the student union and near a memorial to the Vietnam War dead.

Also on Tuesday, PATH train car No. 143 was taken out of the hangar and loaded onto a flatbed trailer for the journey to its new home, the Kingston Trolley Museum, in Kingston, N.Y. It arrived on Wednesday. A companion car, No. 745, was removed in August for a trip to the Shore Line Trolley Museum in East Haven, Conn.

Travelers may remember Hangar 17 unhappily as the terminal for Tower Air, a low-fare and charter airline that went bankrupt in 2000. It is to be demolished sometime after the last artifacts are removed early next year.

There are 228 items left, mostly smaller objects, said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which has used Hangar 17 to store as many as 1,284 trade center objects.

Among the remaining items — not yet claimed by institutions that would display them publicly — are checkered coats on wooden hangers from the Casual Corner store in the trade center concourse, tools from LensCrafters, a “2 for $20 Sale” sign, a cubicle wall, a phone message book, a mannequin head with a neck scarf, an Afro wig, a skateboard helmet and a Tonka toy fire engine manual.

Bill Wall, the president emeritus of the Shore Line Trolley Museum, who engineered the donation of car No. 745 to that institution, was also responsible for matchmaking between the Port Authority and the Kingston Trolley Museum.

“We call him Professor, because he’s so plugged in,” said Erik Garces, the president of the Kingston museum. “He’s forgotten more than I know.”

The collection currently includes two Brooklyn trolleys. “Genuine Brooklyn trolley-dodger trolleys,” Mr. Garces said, adding that he had still not forgiven the Brooklyn Dodgers for moving to Los Angeles after the 1957 season.

PATH car No. 143 will be the first at Kingston connected to a historic event.

“I first came upon the PATH rail cars in late September of 2001 when several of us went underground to inspect the condition of the remains of the W.T.C. PATH station beneath the rubble and burning debris,” Peter L. Rinaldi, a retired Port Authority engineer, said. “There were six empty PATH cars still in the station at that time, three of which were badly damaged and three that were not.”

“It was then that the thought first entered my mind that maybe we could save one of these cars as an artifact for future use,” he added.

As for the antenna mast, it owes its new home to Lou Pabon, 63, who graduated from Fulton-Montgomery Community College in May.

“He was a laborer, among other occupations, in New York,” Dustin Swanger, the president of the college, said. “The last job he had was at ground zero.”

Mr. Pabon shared stories and photographs from the cleanup with students and faculty members. Then, about a year ago, he stopped Dr. Swanger in the hall. “Do you know there are some large pieces left of the World Trade Center?” he asked the college president. “Would we be interested in having a piece here?”

Dr. Swanger recalled his reply: “Absolutely.”

Together with Joel Chapin, a professor of fine art, Mr. Pabon visited Hangar 17. “They saw the antenna and said how moving it was,” Dr. Swanger said, “the way it has this almost spinelike illusion to it.”

Mr. Pabon and Professor Chapin hope to create a memorial setting in which the upright antenna mast is ringed with stanchions to which photos are affixed of the original twin towers, the attack, the aftermath and the new 1 World Trade Center.

Concrete models of the towers, about three feet high and scored to reproduce the distinctive pinstripe facades, will be installed nearby. The hope, Dr. Swanger said, is that each Sept. 11, at 8:46 a.m. and 10:28 a.m., to mark the hours of the attack, the shadow of the mast — like that of a sundial — will fall on the little towers.

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of a picture caption with this article misspelled the name of the city that was the destination for PATH train car No. 143. It is Kingston, N.Y., not Kingstown.

How we handle corrections

Advertisement