Church destroyed in 9/11 attacks rises again

NEW YORK—A Greek Orthodox church taking shape next to the World Trade Center memorial plaza will glow at night like a marble beacon when it opens sometime next year. It also will mark another step in the long rebuilding of New York’s ground zero.

The St. Nicholas National Shrine, designed by renowned architect Santiago Calatrava, will replace a tiny church that was crushed by the trade center’s south tower on Sept. 11, 2001. The new church will give Greek Orthodox believers a place to worship while also welcoming visitors of any faith who want to reflect on the lives lost in the terrorist attacks.

“It is such a significant church because of what happened here,” said Jerry Dimitriou, executive director of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, which oversees 540 parishes and approximately 1.5 million Greek Orthodox faithful across the United States. He said people may want to stop and pray after they’ve been to the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum, a few paces away. “We will give them a place to come and sit, and sit inside of a church,” Dimitriou said.

The large crowd that will assemble Monday for a ceremony on the 16th anniversary of the terror attacks will be able to see the unfinished church, now a raw-looking structure covered in concrete and plywood.

It is one of a handful of unfinished pieces of the reconstruction of the huge trade center site, which is now a combination of green trees, polished stone and glassy towers after being known for years as a dusty, gray construction zone.

Two of four planned office towers are now open. A third is set to open in spring 2018 with Spotify as an anchor tenant. A fourth office tower and a performing arts center are yet to be built.

The church, tucked in a park on the southern edge of the site, is Calatrava’s second World Trade Center commission.

His bird-shaped train hall, called the Oculus, opened in March 2016 and is now a draw for selfie-taking tourists, though some critics grouse that the $4 billion price tag was high for a structure that seems more mall than train station.

The estimated cost for St. Nicholas is $50 million. Unlike the transit hub, built largely with federal transportation dollars, the church is being funded through donations from disparate sources including the Greek government, Greek Orthodox church members around the world and, Dimitriou said, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston and the Italian city of Bari, whose patron saint is St. Nicholas.

The church they are building hardly resembles other Calatrava projects such as the Oculus or the Milwaukee Art Museum with their distinctive ribbed wings.

Rather, the new St. Nicholas was inspired by two Byzantine shrines in Istanbul, the Hagia Sophia and the Church of the Holy Savior in Chora. Like those structures built in the fifth and sixth centuries, St. Nicholas will feature a central dome flanked by towers.

The building will be sheathed in marble from quarries north of Athens —the same vein of marble that was used to build the Parthenon. Calatrava said he was thrilled to receive permission from the Greek government to use the marble because, “for me Hagia Sophia is the Parthenon of Orthodoxy.”

While the towers at the church’s corners will look like solid stone from the outside, the dome and sides will be covered with thin layers of sandwiched marble and glass that will be lighted from the inside at night. “You’ll see that the dome is glowing and the front is glowing,” Dimitriou said. The dome area will all be illuminated like a candle.”

Calatrava said his building will complement the memorial pools directly to the north. “On one side you have water and memory, and on the other side, in the church, you have the idea of the light of the candle and the flame and the sense of hope,” he said. “What I’m trying to do as an architect is give a sense of hope.”

The original St. Nicholas was far more modest. The 35-foot-tall (11-meter-tall) building housed a tavern when Greek immigrants bought it in 1919 to use as a church.

The church stayed put when the trade center’s monumental twin towers were built in the 1970s.

“All of the buildings around it were sold,” said Olga Pavlakos, a parish board member whose grandparents were among St. Nicholas’ founders. “We stood our ground. Greeks are tough people.”

But the church that survived the twin towers’ construction could not survive their destruction. St. Nicholas was the only building not part of the trade center complex that was completely demolished after hijackers struck the towers.

The new church is a few dozen yards (meters) west of the old St. Nicholas on top of the screening facility for trucks entering the trade center site. The land swap between church officials and government agencies involved in rebuilding lower Manhattan took years to settle, delaying the start of construction.

A temporary icon of Christ gazes down at the sanctuary under construction now. It will be replaced by a permanent icon before the sanctuary starts hosting Orthodox services. Meanwhile, work has started on second-floor meditation and reflection spaces that will be open to all.

A spherical bronze sculpture that stood between the twin towers before Sept. 11, 2001 returned to a spot next to the church just last week. Artist Fritz Koenig’s sphere, seen by many as a symbol of resilience, was placed in a small park just west of St. Nicholas.

Pavlakos said the new church’s welcoming stance honors the legacy of the old St. Nicholas, where area office workers often stopped to light a candle during their lunch hours.

“It’s not only for Greek people, it’s a place for everybody,” she said. “And that’s what we stood for before, so this is a continuation.” JPV

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Last pieces of 9/11 rubble reach memorials

For six years, Amy Passiak oversaw the distribution of hundreds of objects from the World Trade Center in New York, a task she finished days before the 15th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

There was only a knot of people on July 27, in a corner of the cargo area at New York’s Kennedy airport, to help with the end of the adventure.

The last pieces from the Twin Towers still stored in Hangar 17, which had been exposed to the view of thousands, left under Passiak’s watchful eye.

For six years, she coordinated the distribution of almost 2,800 pieces under the control of the site’s owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Among them, there was no individual, personal object: a damaged police car, sunglasses sold at one of the stores in the building, but mostly massive objects, fragments of the destroyed skyscrapers in lower Manhattan.

There was a lot of steel, including several of the tridents, the distinctive forked steel structures on the facade at the base of the buildings, each weighing several dozen tons.

In 2009, the Port Authority decided to distribute the objects to non-profit organizations and government entities for use in public memorial projects.

Already working at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, Passiak was chosen to supervise the program.

Passiak, who is in her 30s and holds a master’s degree in museum studies, discovered a universe about which she knew almost nothing.

“I was a senior in high school in Michigan when 9/11 happened. I had never been to New York City,” she said.

Passiak had no close family connection to the victims of the attacks, or the police officers, firefighters and emergency personnel, nothing that could create a link, even an indirect one, with the attack.

“I didn’t have a real concept of what the World Trade Center was, where it was,” she added.

‘A lot of hugs’

Retrospectively, this distance perhaps allowed her to completely plunge into the task without feeling emotionally overwhelmed.

Since a little more than a year ago, the pace of the work has sharply slowed and Passiak is also handling other projects, but “for about four years, my life was September 11, which is crazy,” she said.


Generally, “I think that I’m a very emotionally steady person,” she said, “so I think that that actually helped with the job. I was able to remain calm.”

Passiak and the Port Authority approved the requests of 1,567 different groups across the United States, many of them fire and police departments, schools and cities.

Requests for objects also were approved for 10 foreign countries, including Canada, China, Germany and Italy. Despite its long ties with the US, France is missing from the list.

Each distribution was emotionally charged.

“I received a lot of hugs,” said Passiak, smiling.

“As the front person, you became part of that grieving process, almost like a pillar that they were able to identify and lean on.”

Passiak has now finished the project and said “it feels good” knowing that all the pieces went somewhere and the memorials were built.

“They weren’t giving it to individuals — they were giving it to groups of people that can process everything and interact together. That’s probably the element that I found most rewarding.”/rga

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Remembering 9/11 with reflection, respect

Once again, the threshold of 9/11 is on us.

That date is such a grim reminder of what took place on September 11, a dozen years ago. More than 3,000 lives were lost that day. That date changed the world forever.

Terrorism was defined in the cruelest and the most inhumane way when it came to what attained worldwide notoriety as ‘9/11.’

How air travel since then has been direly affected is an everyday reminder: when passengers traveling by air are required by law to follow whatever measures must be observed join the daily scenes at airports.

On many an occasion, this writer is not the only one who hears how ‘inconvenient’ it is to fly; remembering the many inconveniences whose origins go back to that date when terrorism didn’t just rock New York City, but the rest of the world. After-shocks tell volumes where blackened-out areas still stand out.

Inevitably, the subject of 9/11 arises when friends and kin talk about what happened, told and retold to them by scenes on TV, not only on that day but each time air carriers accompanied the news.

Just to recall the scenes, how commercial airlines were flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon seemed far from real; the viewer would not err when she/he would think what she saw was on reel, a story on science. But those spectra did happen. They were real. Not reel.

The attack on the Pentagon caused the death of 184 people. Forty were killed on United Air Lines (UAL) Flight 93 in Pennsylvania when determined and dauntless passengers were able to prevent another building in Washington to be struck by their own plane piloted by terrorist hijackers.

Had those passengers failed in their plan of attack on the cockpit where terrorists had taken over flight control, who knows whether or not the Capitol or even the White House could have been spared.

It was still breakfast on the West Coast then. The phone rang incessantly. It was Jason, our grandson, a plebe at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland (class 2005) who was on the line. He assured us “all was well,” and not to worry about him. That was the ‘alert’ he gave. Then, he was off the line in just moments. No time for queries nor comments came from us, his family.

Later, we put two and two together. Their grounds, close to the Pentagon were identified by news reports as ‘that close’ to the terrorists’ target when that UAL flight came down.

One question that ensued that day and has morphed into more queries many a time thereafter: “Where were you when 9/11 took place?” That query almost parallels one such question: “Where were you when President Kennedy was assassinated?”

What everyone was doing then doesn’t necessitate slow recollection. Numbers among us can recall what was going on in our lives when 9/11/2001 descended in untold destruction, not only in terms of lives and property, but the inner spirit as well.

A new definition of terrorism emerged.

Panic-stricken scenes ensued. There were pathetically narrated losses seen and heard. Of lives. Of morale. Of sole wage earners. Of budding careerists in their respective fields. Of brave men and women. Of public servants. Of medical teams rushing to save lives. Of how 9/11 became a tragedy of immeasurable proportions. Of nameless and unidentified heroes. Of attempts to scamper to safety from sky-high edifices whose facilities ceased working. Indeed, so many scenes unfolded that did appear over a long period of time on tape.

Remembering 9/11/2011 is today’s reality.

Oftentimes, the term ‘remembering’ takes on an affectionate connotation.

Returning to ‘9/11’ is replete in sadness as it comes to the fore. Yes, it is ‘remembering,’ to a boundless extent. Threats of terrorism cannot be shunted aside.

If only to recall the lessons learned, 9/11/2011 is one date to be together in quiet. Not in any form of celebration. Just respect. Just a few moments of remembrance meant to defer to those who unselfishly gave up their lives so more lives could be spared. — The FilAm

source: gmanetwork.com