Steel from the World Trade Center has spread to every corner of the U.S. When the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approached, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey gave away more than 1,800 pieces of steel saved from Ground Zero, and communities in all 50 states built them into memorials. A few were designed by famous architects, but most were welded by volunteers.
Artist and researcher Sam Holleran first encountered the steel in a posting for a small-town public art commission. The listing described the steel in almost sacred terms and requested that the material be unaltered. Holleran and his brother Max, a sociologist, spent the next several years figuring out how the distribution of these relics turned the steel from the World Trade Center into a nationally dispersed collection of memorials. Their new book is called Scattered Steel: The Afterlife of the World Trade Center.
In this episode, Sam Holleran describes how archivists hand-picked the most "charismatic" pieces of bent steel from the pile at Ground Zero, why firefighters became the keepers of 9/11 memory, and what these 1,800 memorials will mean once the towers have been gone longer than they stood.
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