The National September 11 Memorial and Museum, at the World Trade Center site, includes, in its vast collection, The Last Column, the 36-ft., 60-ton steel beam famous for becoming an impromptu memorial in the months after 9/11.
Two years ago, a Newcastle resident helped return the column to Ground Zero after years of storage at Kennedy International Airport’s Hangar 17, the 80,000-sq.ft. temporary home for thousands of 9/11 artifacts.
Chip Holmes, 46, owns Maine Yacht Service. Holmes builds, delivers, repairs, upgrades and stores boats.
A “friend of a friend,” Peter Gat of Hangar 17, watched Holmes move a boat and Gat, looking for a way to transport his unwieldy exhibit, brought Holmes on board.
Holmes traveled to New York City, where, under the watchful eye of preservation experts, he built a skeleton to allow crews to move the column without damaging it.
The Last Column bears names and photographs of 9/11 victims and handwritten messages from family members and rescue workers.
“I could only touch it in a few places so as not to screw up” the painstakingly preserved surface, Holmes said.
Holmes cautiously located clamps and blocking on the skeleton and shrink-wrapped the entire package, just as he might wrap a yacht for winter.
At Hangar 17, however, Holmes got out his propane heat-gun to shrink the plastic shield, only to discover open flame is off-limits in the facility. Instead of completing the job alone in under an hour, Holmes and two others spent an entire day shrink-wrapping the column with tiny heat guns.
The construction of the unique skeleton, the shrink-wrap and other preparations for transport took about a day and a half, Holmes said.
The truck bearing The Last Column left Hangar 17 at 3 a.m. on Aug. 24, 2009, arriving about an hour later. With dignitaries, including the city’s mayor and police chief, in attendance, as well as a significant media presence, a crane, balancing its heavy load with 500 tons of counterweight, lowered the column into place and construction workers welded it to its base.
At the time, the column stood on “a rough dirt floor,” Holmes recalls. “The whole museum got built around this piece.”
Holmes didn’t leave the site until 14 hours later. His frame would remain on the column for two years, protecting the artifact throughout the construction of the museum, scheduled to open to the public next year.
Although working on The Last Column “was a powerful thing,” Holmes said, his exploration of Hangar 17 also led him to artifacts like impact-site steel – unrecognizable chunks of metal from the places where the planes hit the towers.
Holmes has hundreds, perhaps thousands of photographs from Hangar 17. He points out patterns in a shot of twisted metal, otherwise unrecognizable as anything more than scrap. The photograph actually shows “five floors melted together into a four-foot briquette,” Holmes said.
On the other end of the spectrum, Holmes finds the small, personal items – like a pair of slippers – that, against all odds, survived intact – equally moving.
The slippers and the steel “had a more profound impact on me,” Holmes said.
All the same, Holmes plans to visit the city this weekend and his itinerary includes a stop to see the progress of the museum.
For more information about the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, visit www.911memorial.org.
