It has been nearly 20 years since the September 11 attack in the United States and with its anniversary just around the corner, people are remembering the fearsome events that happened during that day more and more.
In the two decades since the horrific attacks by Al-Qaeda terrorists on American soil, a number of memorials have been erected, including two of the most recognizable, the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York City, located on the former site of the World Trade Center, and The National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial in Washington, D.C. (the latter is currently closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic).
Spread across the country, from California to New Jersey, these monuments to lives lost are worth visiting as many still remember that tragic day.
Here are a few more lesser known monuments to honor those who lost their lives during the 9/11 attack:
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Flight 93 National Memorial, Shanksville, Pennsylvania
Flight 93 was crashed by al-Qaeda terrorists into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, missing the U.S. Capitol, their target, by 175 miles. Today that same field serves as the home of the Flight 93 National Memorial.
Maintained by the National Park Service, the memorial is a place of solitude comprised of a Visitor Center featuring an exhibition detailing the tragedy; the Tower of Voices, a 93-foot-tall structure that holds 40 wind-chimes to represent the 40 passengers and crew onboard the flight whose lives were lost; a wall of victims’ names; and a hemlock grove, marking the exact site of impact.
Reflect 9/11 Memorial Sculpture, Rosemead, California
Heath Satow is one of the many artists who created a heartwarming artwork based on the 9/11 event. Reflect is a large-scale metal structure composed of two hands lifting a single 10-foot, 500-pound steel I-beam pulled from the World Trade Center rubble.
To create the piece, which was dedicated on the 10th anniversary of the attacks, Satow welded together 3,000 four-and-a-half-inch stainless steel “bird-like” cutouts to form the hands, each piece representing one of the nearly 3,000 victims of the September 11 attacks.
The memorial is located outside city hall in Rosemead, a city 10 miles east of Los Angeles. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2011, Satow said he intentionally made the cutouts arbitrary, with many people comparing them to angels. “I didn’t want to be too specific. I want the viewer to bring their own ideas to it,” he explained.
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To Struggle Against World Terrorism Sculpture, Bayonne, New Jersey
To Struggle Against World Terrorism is a massive sculpture located on a man-made peninsula in Bayonne, New Jersey, a city with direct sightlines to Lower Manhattan. It was made by Moscow-based sculptor Zurab Tsereteli.
Dedicated in 2006, the ten-story structure, which is often called The Tear of Grief, served as an official gift from the Russian government to the United States. Made of bronze, the towering artwork is jaggedly split down the middle, revealing a single 40-foot nickel-plated teardrop.
In a 2007 interview with The New Yorker, Tsereteli said he came up with the concept when he “saw the people gathered around the American Embassy [in Russia]. The tear that came out of my eye and fell, that gave me the idea for the monument.”
First Responders Memorial, Oak Lawn, Illinois
Erik Blome, an artist-in-residence for the city of Oak Lawn, Illinois, created the First Responders Memorial. using four twisted 22-foot I-beams pulled from the wreckage of the Twin Towers and escorted from New York City to Oak Lawn by a team of local firefighters and police officers.
Upon first glance, the structure is abstract in nature, but close up it contains intricate carvings of a police officer and two hands clasped together as well as a number of other motifs. “You see an event like that and it seems like it’s in some other place,”
Blome told CBS Chicago in an interview at the memorial’s dedication ceremony. “And then when you see the beams you realize how real the event was.
[September 11th] is all about togetherness, it’s all about coming together. I think people held hands that day. People who didn’t know each other held hands that day. When you say first responders, we were all, in a sense, first responders that day.”
Postcards, Staten Island, New York City
This memorial designed by Masayuki Sono, a local architect, is dedicated to nearly 3,000 people who perished on 9/11, 274 were residents of Staten Island, one of New York City’s five boroughs. Inspired by the art of origami paper folding,
the piece is made of two massive fiberglass structures that resemble folded postcards. Postcards points directly across the harbor toward the site of the former World Trade Center and features a series of 9-by-11-inch granite plaques carved into silhouettes, each honoring one of the Staten Island residents who died, plus the single Staten Islander who perished during the World Trade Center bombings on February 26, 1993. (Each plaque also contains the name, age and occupation of each victim.) The memorial, located on the North Shore Waterfront Esplanade.
Memorial Labyrinth, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
Completed in 2003, the Memorial Labyrinth is located in the Boston College campus in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, ten miles west of downtown Boston.
Although not much is written about the labyrinth, the meandering cement maze snaking through the grass was inspired by a stone labyrinth that dates back to the 13th-century and is located inside Chartres Cathedral in France.
Measuring 50 feet in diameter, Boston College’s meandering pathway contains the names of the 22 alumni who died during the attacks.
Moving Memories, Phoenix, Arizona
Using Phoenix’s roughly 300 days of sunshine, the Moving Memories monument by architect Eddie Jones and coLAB Studio, a cooperative of artists and architects based in nearby Tempe, changes throughout the day.
The circular structure, which is located in downtown Phoenix, is made up of a series of stainless-steel panels featuring 54 laser-cut inscriptions that cast shadows onto the concrete below.
The inscriptions themselves serve as a timeline of the attacks and include details of the tragic events that occurred in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania, as well as important dates after September 11.
Phrases include “10:28 a.m. WTC North Tower Collapses,” “Must Bomb Back” and “You Don’t Win Battles of Terrorism with More Battles.” In a 2011 interview with NBC News, Shelley Cohn, a member of the Arizona 9/11 Commission, said, “A lot of what it represents is in symbols and metaphors. It was meant to be poetic, and for people to interpret it on their own.”