Dedie Plasencia can still move through the hours of Sept. 11, 2001 with a startling clarity.
He remembers the innocent start to the morning: He woke up early to drive his then-7-month-old son to his own father’s house in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park.
He remembers his uncle, leaning over the roof — “Hey, Dedie, you gotta go to the firehouse. They have a recall. The towers, uh, they’re on fire” — and the drive back to Windsor Terrace. He remembers his wife confirming the worst. “It’s a terrorist attack,” she said.
Plasencia ran the five blocks to Engine 240/Battalion 48, a blonde brick building with a single turret, tucked between two homes on Prospect Avenue.
What followed was a long and grinding horror of searching for survivors, which he can still narrate in specifics. He remembers exactly what bodies falling from dozens of stories up looked like after they hit the ground below. He remembers the nurses moving through the dust cloud and offering to wash his eyes, which were so caked in debris.
“Thank God for them,” he said. “I don't know who they were. I wish I could meet them someday.”
The memories go on and on.
“It seems like yesterday,” he said.
Twenty-five years ago, a promise emerged from the grief of the moment: Never forget. It was a moral directive that Plasencia couldn't help but honor. But now, a generation removed, what does that mean for those whose memories are growing fainter, or the more than 100 million Americans who are too young to recall the day at all? For many, “Never Forget” can’t mean what it means for Plasencia.
The people who hold the day the way he does are a shrinking group. Fewer than 800 current FDNY members were working then, and fewer still were at Ground Zero. Plasencia himself is retiring in February. That leaves the harder question of what, exactly, gets passed to everyone else.
Alice Greenwald, who served as the 9/11 Memorial & Museum's founding museum director and has since retired, remembers how clear it was, even in the moment, that Sept. 11, 2001 would become a sort of dividing line.
“It literally was one of those moments when we all knew, as it happened, that there would be a before 9/11 and an after 9/11,” she said. “It was a demarcation in time.” She said one of her advisers used to put it more starkly: Ground zero is where the 21st century began.
The association between 9/11 and “Never Forget” grew organically, as Nazia Kazi, an anthropology professor at Stockton University who teaches the history of the war on terror, explains it. She traces it to the missing-person posters that went up on lampposts and scaffolding across the city in the days after the towers fell. Slowly, memorial posters replaced those and that, she said, “is where the catchphrase really takes root.”
From there, to her mind, it became “a slogan, a brand name through which the events of September 2001 have become enshrined in America's collective or shared memory.”
“‘Never forget’ is a companion to ‘Never again,’” said Barbie Zelizer, a media and memory scholar recently retired from the University of Pennsylvania, referring to the vow that came out of the Holocaust. Both, she said, were meant to compel people “to keep it in front of mind, what had happened.”
At first, what it meant might have been clear enough: Never forget the nearly 3,000 people who were killed that day. Never forget their families’ loss. Never forget the first responders who ran toward destruction and, in many cases, death.
But its meaning was almost immediately complicated by what followed: the wars, the revelations of mass surveillance, the arrests and deportations, and a new chapter of Islamophobia.
Todd Green, who has spent two decades studying Islamophobia in America, suggests treating the phrase as a question rather than a statement.
“Never forget what?” he asked. He mentions, for example, the Cold War policies that helped grow extremist threats, the Global War on Terror that destabilized a region and led to millions of deaths.
“Never forget that day? Never forget the circumstances that led up to that day? Never forget the aftermath — whether that’s the weeks or the months that followed, or the 15, 20 years that followed?” Green asked. “I think there’s a lot that should be remembered — that would do well for our nation to remember — including obviously the attacks themselves and the horror of that day.”
As the city worked to clear the wreckage from Lower Manhattan, an engineer walked through the rubble, spray-painting the word “SAVE” on the sides of objects that ought to be preserved. Part of the reason was practical; authorities would need to conduct a structural analysis to understand why the towers collapsed. But there was also “a sense of history, that this was an event that we need to … document,” said Greenwald, the former museum director.
When all was said and done, what remained was less than 1% of the 1.8 million tons of debris left over after the collapse. Still, it filled an entire airplane hangar at JFK Airport.
When it came time to start building a collection — a shared memory — for the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, Greenwald and others sorted through it all.
“We had to sort of wrap our heads around, OK, what of all this stuff tells the story we need it to tell?” Greenwald said. They searched for objects that could best convey “the human experience of a historical event.”
On a recent morning, before the museum had fully opened for the day, Mike Sheehan, a retired lieutenant with the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (officially MTA Bridges and Tunnels), guided a group of fewer than two dozen people through the space. Many were too young to remember the day at all. Sheehan addressed them directly.
“For the youngsters especially, I hope today’s an opportunity to learn a little bit more about the events of September 11th, not by reading it in a book or studying a chart, but actually visiting the site,” he said.
The tour begins just below ground level, in the space between where the Twin Towers once stood, and progresses downward, past ghostly projections and recordings of people remembering that day, past giant beams of twisted steel and a fire truck that looks as though it’s unraveling, past photographs of the aftermath.
Sheehan has been giving this tour for 10 years. He wanted work after retirement that would be, as he put it, “meaningful to me.” He remembers that morning itself. He was driving toward the Verrazzano Bridge when he heard reports of the first plane hitting the North Tower. As he kept driving, “little pieces of paper” began to flutter down.
“Then you realize that was the papers that were in these offices that were blown out into the wind and then carried to the other side of the river,” he said.
His wife had worked on the 85th floor the North Tower, though her insurance company had moved long before the attacks. Sheehan has often asked her whether she is interested in visiting the memorial.
“She says, ‘No. I wanna remember it the way it was.’”
The City Council announced last week it would invest $1 million in the 9/11 Memorial & Museum to fund free field trips for New York City students and to create other sorts of educational programming.
“As we approach the 25th anniversary of September 11, it is more important than ever that a new generation of New Yorkers understands what happened that day and carries forward the stories of those we lost,” Council Speaker Julie Menin said in a statement announcing the new funding. “I’m grateful for our partnership with the 9/11 Memorial & Museum as we work together to ensure that ‘Never Forget’ remains a promise passed from one generation to the next.”
The work of keeping a memory isn’t always so formal. A block south of the museum, another collection has grown over the past two decades without the help of money or curators.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Mike Keane was setting up O’Hara’s Restaurant and Pub for the day when suddenly the bar was packed with commodity traders who had evacuated after the first plane hit. “These guys are all big drinkers. So the bar is full at a quarter to nine in the morning,” Keane said.
Then the second plane hit and it was clear something was wrong. Keane emptied the bar. It was just him and a handful of others when the South Tower collapsed an hour later.
“It was like a bomb went off in here,” Keane said. “It was dust and debris everywhere. The windows, everything was broken.”
He spent the next six months working to get his bar reopened for a neighborhood “with almost nobody in it.” On the first anniversary of the attacks, as people sat drinking around the bar, one of the “construction guys” who had been working at the site took a patch from a firefighter who worked out of the firehouse next door — Engine 10/Ladder 10, or the Ten House, the only firehouse inside Ground Zero — found a staple gun and stapled it above the bar.
By the end of that day, there were maybe 20 patches along the top. Now there are thousands, covering just about every inch of the walls and ceilings. They come from fire departments and police forces across the country and around the world. The Swiss Guard have one up. So do the Thai Navy SEALs. When delegations come through the city now, someone from the FDNY or the Port Authority calls ahead: Mike, we've got 25 guys coming.
It’s a pilgrimage of sorts. Still, as the years have stretched on, Keane has noticed that more and more of the people who come to the bar have no memory of the day at all. There are fewer statements like “I know exactly where I was,” as Keane put it.
“A lot of the young kids, I guess it’s kinda like they look in awe of, like, ‘You were here?’” he said. He shares what he can with them.
Every graduating FDNY and NYPD class now spends part of its final week at the memorial museum. The recruits sit through lectures and walk through the exhibits.
Plasencia, the firefighter from Brooklyn, has never gone himself. “I really don’t wanna go down there,” he said. “I don’t know why, but I just don’t need to go down there for some reason.”
He has his own way of making room for the past. Since 2002, every Sept. 11, Plasencia has helped organize a Mass for his battalion at Holy Name of Jesus Church just up the block. Afterward, they gather for lunch. Some years, more than 300 people come: retired firefighters, chiefs from downtown, and the families of Battalion Chief Joseph Grzelak and firefighter Michael Bocchino, the two men the house lost when it responded to the disaster.
“It's great for the families to get together like that,” Plasencia said. “It gets stuff off your chest, you know, when you see old friends. Even retired guys that were there when it happened, they come to this and we all talk.”
Plasencia has already chosen a successor to take over organizing the gathering when he’s done.
Many of those who gather have personal memories of Sept. 11, 2001, just as Plasencia does. Not the younger guys, though.
“During the luncheon, we always talk to the younger guys,” he said. “We tell them … what happened on that day, whatever, for guys that don’t know what happened, and give them a little more information about particular things that happened on that day.”
Some of the people who remember that day can’t bear to talk about it, Plasencia said. But he doesn’t mind. His own son once asked about it, carefully, like his father might not want to answer. Plasencia told him he could ask anything he wanted. His son is an EMT now and comes out of probie school in February, the same time Plasencia turns 65 and will leave the department.
Plasencia feels a certain obligation to pass on the memory. When younger firefighters ask about it, he tries to be specific. “The only way for them to really feel it like I do is to be detailed.” He tells them about the people who jumped and what he saw on the ground. “That's really the only way for them to really understand what happened.”
He folds it into their training, too. Be ready for anything. Know your tools. Know where everything is on the rig. Check it every tour.
And every so often, he’ll sit the newer guys down and show them some footage, shot by filmmakers who happened to be documenting a probationary firefighter downtown the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. He’s moved the film from video cassette to disc, and soon he’ll have to move it to a thumb drive. You hear the thumping of bodies falling from the sky, he said, as they hit the revolving doors and ceiling below.
“It’s pretty dramatic,” Plasencia said. “But that’s the most touching thing that we could do to get them to know what it was on that day.”