NEW YORK (AP) — Victims’ families huddled under umbrellas Tuesday in a park to mark the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in the first remembrance ceremony not held at ground zero, an event that failed to evoke the same emotions as the hallowed ground of the World Trade Center site.
“I guess they mean well, but I really wasn’t happy,” said Sal Romagnolo, whose son, Joseph Romagnolo, worked in the trade center’s north tower. “I never got my son back. That’s the only place we have.”
“I get nothing out of this park.”
Around the country, Americans went through familiar mourning rituals as they looked back on the day when terrorists hijacked four jetliners and killed nearly 3,000 people.
President Bush attended ceremonies at the White House and the Pentagon, and the 40 passengers and crew members who died when a flight crashed into a Pennsylvania field were honored as “citizen soldiers.”
The Manhattan ceremonies were held in a public park because of rebuilding at ground zero. First responders, volunteers and firefighters who helped rescue New Yorkers from the collapsing twin towers read the names of the city’s 2,750 victims – a list that grew by one with the addition of a woman who died of lung disease in 2002.
“I want to acknowledge those lost post-9/11 as a result of answering the call, including police officer NYPD James Zadroga,” said volunteer ambulance worker Reggie Cervantes-Miller. Zadroga, 34, died more than a year ago of respiratory illness after spending hundreds of hours working to clean up ground zero.
Hundreds streamed out of the ceremony after about an hour and fewer than 60 remained at the end. The city estimated 3,500 family members and mourners turned out, down from 4,700 attendees at the fifth anniversary.
The city moved the ceremony this year because of progressing construction at the site, where several idle cranes overlooked a partially built transit hub, 1,776-foot office tower and Sept. 11 memorial.
Family members threatened to boycott the ceremony and hold their own remembrance if they were not granted access. The city and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey – which owns the trade center site – allowed relatives to descend a ramp to lay flowers inside a reflecting pool with two 6-foot outlines of the towers inside, and touch the ground where the trade center once stood.
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani returned to ground zero Tuesday, despite objections by several victims’ families and firefighters who said he should not speak at the remembrance because he is running for president.
Giuliani was greeted with a smattering of applause after his brief remarks, which followed the third of the traditional four moments of silence: one each to mark the times when the two planes hit the buildings, and two more for when each tower fell.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has presided over each of the anniversary events, described Sept. 11, 2001, as “the day that tore across our history and our hearts. We come together again as New Yorkers and as Americans to share a loss that can’t be measured.”
As in years past, people clutched photos of their lost loved ones, raising them toward the sky.