THE CEREMONY WAS SCHEDULED to begin at 10 a.m. Mayor Gerald Voss changed the schedule at 8 a.m., without announcement, when he walked to the microphone and said: “We are going to do something first.”
What he did first was read names.
At 8:46 a.m. — the moment, exactly twenty-five years ago, when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City — Voss stepped to the microphone with a list that his office had prepared over the previous week and began reading. He read the names of all 2,977 people who died in the attacks on September 11, 2001: the 2,606 who died at the World Trade Center, the 125 at the Pentagon, the 40 who went down with United Flight 93 in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the 19 hijackers who carried out the attacks, whose names he read last, briefly, without comment.
“I include them,” he told this reporter afterward, “because they were also people, even though what they did was a catastrophe. The names are the names. The record is the record. A town that claims to care about truth has to be able to hold the full truth.”
The reading took fifty-three minutes. Three hundred people stood in the morning sun. The ribbon hung between its posts, waiting. No one left. No one sat down. A few people cried, quietly, the way people cry in public when they don’t expect to and decide to let it happen anyway.
Marge Kuczynski, who was standing near the back of the crowd, said afterward: “My brother Dennis was in New York that day. He worked in Midtown and walked out of the city over the bridge with a million other people, and he was fine, but he has never been entirely fine, you understand. When Mayor Voss read the names, I thought about Dennis and I thought about the people whose names were being read and I thought about the fact that we are beginning something here on this day, and I thought: this is a good mayor. He knows what beginning something means.”
When Voss finished the reading — the last name: Igor Zukelman, killed at the World Trade Center — he stood at the microphone for a moment in silence. Then he looked up.
“A town that forgets is not a town worth having,” he said. “Today, we will not forget. And then we will build.”
He picked up the scissors.
The crowd, which had been quiet for almost an hour, erupted in the kind of applause that has something more than celebration in it — the kind that arrives when relief and gratitude and the knowledge of what you have just witnessed all arrive at the same time.
Voss acknowledged the applause by looking at the ribbon. He lifted the scissors. He cut it. And the town began.