SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
For years, the artist Sam Holleran has been fascinated by the 9/11 memorials across the country built with salvaged steel from the World Trade Center, memorials like an unassuming 3 foot tall piece of steel outside a fire station in Virginia.
SAM HOLLERAN: It just looks like a very small kind of piece of street furniture. And the surprise that you get when you come across it is really shocking 'cause you don't realize what it is. It just looks like another thing installed in public space. And when you do realize what it is, it's very moving.
DETROW: Working with his brother Max, a sociologist, Sam Holleran began to investigate how and why those pieces of steel ended up in so many seemingly random communities across the country. Who decided they'd go there? Who saved the steel beams? And who distributed them? Their new book is called "Scattered Steel." I spoke to Sam about it and began by asking him to describe the trends he noticed in these monuments.
HOLLERAN: A lot of them were built in the lead up to the 10 year anniversary. I think that was a time when it still felt like the national memorials were moving very slow, and people wanted to create their own memorials to have their own local places of mourning and connection to the event on that 10 year anniversary. There were also a lot of them clustered in the tri-state area, with people who had direct connections to New York City. But you also have them in really, really far flung areas that are very far from New York City and don't necessarily have a connection to New York. But I think that's because everyone experienced the attacks on 9/11 as this really, really intense television event, and bringing a piece of steel from the World Trade Center to their communities made it real. It allowed people to lay hands on these artifacts and to really feel this kind of deep expression of complex and lingering grief.
DETROW: There's almost a - well, not almost. There's a real religious aspect to a lot of this. A lot of the memorials, the steel was formed into crosses. But there's also this idea of a relic, something you can touch, something that you can feel, something that makes you feel part of this thing, even if you only watched it on TV. How did you think about that as you put this book together?
HOLLERAN: I think we were really fascinated by what it means to make a modern relic. One interesting thing is that there was so much steel in the World Trade Center, they had to actually reinvent the way steel was sourced in the United States and take all sorts of steel from outside of the typical Pennsylvania steel towns from all over the world. So in that sense, the World Trade Center was truly global, and the steel from the Trade Center was recycled globally. There's no more steel recycling in the U.S. It's all gone overseas. So there was a decision made very early on to take about 95-, 96% of the steel from the destroyed structures and to take it to India, China, places where they still do steal recycling.
DETROW: I've got to say, I didn't realize that till I read this book, and I found it shocking because, as you document, this steel is treated with such reverence. You know, it went from New York to some of these towns in (inaudible). You know, you know how much this means to people. And yet, the bulk of it just kind of went into other construction projects around the world.
HOLLERAN: I think there was so much of it that it wasn't possible. If there was a way to melt it here or to do something with it here, to reuse all of it, to leave part of it on site, they would have done that. But very early on a decision was made. We need to clear the site. We need to return New York to normalcy, and part of that meant getting all of this steel out of Lower Manhattan. The steel that was retrieved through a special program of the Port Authority was put in this hanger at JFK, and it sat there for a couple years. There were sort of VIP tours of it for people who were in the military and emergency management, high up government officials, and they describe this very sacred space in an airplane hangar with a huge American flag hanging there and all of the steel laid out on the floor.
DETROW: Who was making the decision of what steel beams to keep and why?
HOLLERAN: There was an archive team set up by Port Authority with a couple people on it, and at first, they were actually looking at pieces of steel that showed evidence of twisting or real kind of distress. And in that way, I think it is - there are a lot of parallels with this idea of the body and distress and these Christian paintings from the Middle Ages onward that show tormented and twisted figures.
DETROW: You, at several points throughout the book, compare this to the Berlin Wall in terms of both, again, surprising, I didn't realize how much of the Berlin Wall was just kind of discarded or reused, as opposed to the pieces that we still see, but also the idea of a physical relic telling a story and making a connection and also the idea of what somebody expected to see when they encounter a piece of steel from the World Trade Center or a piece of the Berlin Wall.
HOLLERAN: Yeah, I think the Berlin Wall was a bit of a cautionary tale for people from the Port Authority because once the East German regime fell, they actually started to sell off pieces of their own wall in their last failing moments. And then, afterward, there was a lot more commercialization of the Berlin Wall, which is why you can find segments of the Berlin Wall in shopping malls, in hotel lobbies, you know, not where we typically think about finding a memorial. There also are a lot of commercial ventures that sell pieces of the Berlin Wall to this day, little tiny chipped off pieces in plastic bags that you can buy for 25 bucks at a store in Berlin.
The port authority really didn't want that to happen with steel from the World Trade Center, and they explicitly prohibited any commercialization of the steel. And on the one or two occasions where pieces of the steel did show up on eBay, they very quickly went after the people who'd posted that. So they want it to be something managed by nonprofits for individual people. And that's why it's really interesting, 'cause you have individual firehouses or very small nonprofits receiving the steel to make memorials. And it's not just these big institutions of law of capacity (ph).
DETROW: We're at a 25 year anniversary, which means every year, more and more adults are walking around who have no memory of what actually happened on 9/11. As this day moves into, you know, a quarter century in the past, what do you think the role of memorials like the ones that you looked at are?
HOLLERAN: I think that memorials always have this injunction to never forget. And the sad thing is that people are always going to forget. But I think that the memorials that are made from the steel are compelling enough that even if people have forgotten or if they've never known it in the first place, they will be able to go up to the piece of steel and see that it is something unique, that it's something that's been through something, that's been weathered and been twisted and deformed. And then, hopefully, through the plaques, they can learn more about the attack on the World Trade Center, and they can figure out what they want to make of the attack.
I think we're coming into a new generation now where some of the patriotic bromides that we experienced in the years right after the fall of the World Trade Centers, those are melting away, and we can come to this with fresh eyes and think about memorialization that is maybe a little bit less of the kind of flag waving and soaring bald eagle kind. And I will say that for a lot of the memorials we saw, there was none of that. People were actually not as sort of overtly patriotic in that chest-bumping way. People were actually genuinely mournful and, I think, looking towards what they wanted to give future generations.
DETROW: That's Sam Holleran, one of the authors of the new book, "Scattered Steel." Thank you so much.
HOLLERAN: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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