9/11 Garden

September 11, 2020

At the corner of Broadway and Isham Street up here in Inwood you’ll find a big, beautiful Catholic Church – Good Shepherd. Alongside of it there’s a little strip of greenery with a bronze statue of a shepherd holding a lamb, a trellis, some nice flowery shrubs, and a big, rusty iron cross.

It’s a couple of I-bars, actually. They were salvaged from the Pile, as the wreckage of the World Trade Center came to be known during the months following the attack on 9/11 in 2001. That they formed a cross, the symbol of Jesus Christ’s martyrdom struck many as particularly significant given the religious undertones of the attack. Father Devine, the parish priest who seems to know everybody in New York, made a call or two and the thing wound up here. It’s often spotlit at night and it’s not unusual to find oneself the only passerby late in the evening. It’s a somber reminder for some of us of the strangest, most awful, and yet somehow the most amazing day in New York City’s long and storied history. We were one. The whole world was a New Yorker for a moment in time.

A lot of the people passing by nowadays would be unaware of this back story because they were very young or not yet born on that strange day. They may glance at it as they scoot by, perhaps mentally note that it’s a cross, and possibly wonder why it’s so rusty and weathered looking. A grown up could try to explain if asked, but it would only lead to more questions…

A little farther up the hill on Isham there’s a little garden. Here a passerby might notice a circle of stones with minature spotlights shining on tiny portraits of people who used to live around here. They all died, or rather were killed, on September 11, 2001. If you open the gate and go inside for a closer look, you may be struck by the fact that there were a lot of people from Inwood killed that day. And that, damn, they were all so fucking young.