In the low light haze of an early morning fall day almost a year ago, a very sleepy group of artists, architects, Maryland department heads, and city planners climbed into a rented van near Baltimore and headed for JFK Airport in suburban New York. Their goal there was to select an object from the 9/11 attack on the New York World Trade Center that would later become part of a memorial at Baltimore’s World Trade center near the Inner Harbor.
Normally, this kind of trip is a pretty good deal for volunteers. You travel to New York with like-minded, interesting, people, look at some great art, grab a terrific lunch at one of the NYC’s finest, and you’re still home to watch the evening news the same day. In this case, circumstances were painfully different. The van’s occupants were the Executive Committee of the Maryland 9/11 Memorial project, a delegation of members of the Maryland Commission of Public Art, the Maryland Port Administration and the Maryland State Arts Council.
The goal of this expedition to Kennedy Airport was to select a salvaged piece of the New York World Trade Center from two remote hangars that housed all the remaining artifacts from the lower Manhattan site. That object would then become part of a memorial to be placed near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor to commemorate the sixty-eight Marylanders who died as a result of the 9/11 attack in 2001.
One of the people traveling in the van was the Eastern Shore’s Alex Castro. Castro, a Chestertown-based artist, architect, and teacher, has served on several art commission committees, but none of them was as difficult as this one. “We thought we were prepared for it, but we walked in and saw all this twisted metal, all that horror. We are all dumbstruck.”
“It wasn’t just the metal. There was a large piece of plate metal that I said, “This is strange, it’s not structural, what is this for?” We started looking at it, and it was part of the Sandy Calder sculpture from the WTC plaza. It was so distorted, and there was his signature! And then to see the first responder vehicles – it was wrenching,” said Castro.
The committee’s selection was a 22-foot-long steel artifact, consisting of three twisted and torn amalgamated steel columns. It will be sited in front of Baltimore’s World Trade Center. While the New York City World Trade Center steel artifact inspired the memorial, Marylanders were, in fact, lost at all three 9/11 sites, and each of these sites will be represented in the memorial. Limestone pieces from the Pentagon’s west wall will also be integrated into the design, and though artifacts cannot be obtained from the Flight 93 site near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, that site will be represented in the memorial by three large pieces of polished black granite.
The committee picked Baltimore-based architects Ziger/Snead as the design team, “because they came in with a very humble concept. There was something about a reverential attitude that had to come to play here; one where you were to go deep into your psyche about what happened on 9/11. So they are placing our selection horizontally rather than vertically for that reason. So it’s a contemplative piece, and that meant a lot to us on the committee.”
The 9/11 Memorial of Maryland will officially be dedicated this coming Sunday, September 11, at 3 p.m. in front of the World Trade Center at 401 East Pratt Street. Click here for information.
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