THE 9/11 DECADE A Repository for Remains of the Dead

[Armour]

THE 9/11 DECADE
A Repository for Remains of the Dead



A view of the Medical Examiner's tent, set up in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. It was meant to be a temporary structure but still stands and is in use almost 10 years later.
By DAN BARRY
Published: September 4, 2011

 
For nearly a decade, a large white tent has stood on Manhattan’s East Side, out of urban context and hard against the sooty Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. A gauzy drapery divides the tent space: on one side, a quiet makeshift chapel; on the other, three walk-in storage units containing nearly 14,000 human remains from the World Trade Center catastrophe, air-dried and vacuum-sealed.
Share Your Thoughts
Remembering Sept. 11
What did you lose because of 9/11? What did you gain?
Several rounds of DNA-based tests have failed to identify about 9,000 of the remains. The rest have been identified but not claimed, for all sorts of reasons; for example, some families have already buried parts of their loved ones, and cannot bear to do it again, and again.

Someday these remains will be stored at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, which is scheduled to be built deep in the bedrock of the World Trade Center site. The medical examiner’s office will maintain custody of the remains, though, allowing it to conduct more testing when scientific advances allow, or to honor changes in the desires of families.

Until then, this intentionally temporary place, sandwiched between a crammed parking lot and a Gothic-style men’s shelter and stretching from East 29th to East 30th Street, will stand as the city’s truest 9/11 memorial in the city, if not the world. Of the 2,753 victims who died in New York, 1,121 have yet to have their remains identified.

In the beginning, visitors came daily to the chapel, making appointments to sit in reflection, write notes in a ledger or leave a memento or two. Now, says Benjamin J. Figura, the medical examiner’s director of identification, “we average one or two people a month.”

Exposure to a decade’s many seasons has dulled the few Mass cards and photographs that are stapled to a plywood wall once crowded with the faces of the dead. And in the fall of 2009, a trespassing, drunken lawyer with Ivy League credentials set a fire in the chapel that damaged the roof and destroyed photographs, floral arrangements and toy animals stuffed with meaning.

But officials quickly restored the temporary chapel in the temporary tent that is forever pitched in memory.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/us/sept-11-reckoning/dna.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

[Armour]

For nearly a decade, a large white tent has stood on Manhattan’s East Side, out of urban context and hard against the sooty Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. A gauzy drapery divides the tent space: on one side, a quiet makeshift chapel; on the other, three walk-in storage units containing nearly 14,000 human remains from the World Trade Center catastrophe, air-dried and vacuum-sealed.
Share Your Thoughts
Remembering Sept. 11
What did you lose because of 9/11? What did you gain?
Several rounds of DNA-based tests have failed to identify about 9,000 of the remains. The rest have been identified but not claimed, for all sorts of reasons; for example, some families have already buried parts of their loved ones, and cannot bear to do it again, and again.

Someday these remains will be stored at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, which is scheduled to be built deep in the bedrock of the World Trade Center site. The medical examiner’s office will maintain custody of the remains, though, allowing it to conduct more testing when scientific advances allow, or to honor changes in the desires of families.

Until then, this intentionally temporary place, sandwiched between a crammed parking lot and a Gothic-style men’s shelter and stretching from East 29th to East 30th Street, will stand as the city’s truest 9/11 memorial in the city, if not the world. Of the 2,753 victims who died in New York, 1,121 have yet to have their remains identified.

In the beginning, visitors came daily to the chapel, making appointments to sit in reflection, write notes in a ledger or leave a memento or two. Now, says Benjamin J. Figura, the medical examiner’s director of identification, “we average one or two people a month.”

Exposure to a decade’s many seasons has dulled the few Mass cards and photographs that are stapled to a plywood wall once crowded with the faces of the dead. And in the fall of 2009, a trespassing, drunken lawyer with Ivy League credentials set a fire in the chapel that damaged the roof and destroyed photographs, floral arrangements and toy animals stuffed with meaning.

But officials quickly restored the temporary chapel in the temporary tent that is forever pitched in memory.