By Julie Shapiro
The antique chair stood in Kathleen Gupta’s Gateway Plaza apartment for 19 years. It was a wedding present from her mother, made of cherry wood and inlaid with mother of pearl, a reminder of family and celebration.
Then, on 9/11, the swirling storm of wreckage from the World Trade Center crashed through Gupta’s windows. Flames engulfed the chair’s flowered upholstery, exposing the springs and blackening the wood. Shards of debris flew 23 feet into the apartment to puncture holes in the kitchen’s concrete wall.
“The windows blew out and the Trade Center blew in,” Gupta said.
When she and her husband, Udayan, returned to the apartment to sort through their belongings weeks later, Gupta could not bear to throw away the scorched chair. Neither did she have the energy and money to repair it, so she put it in storage, where it has sat for six years.
But now Gupta has found a way to salvage the chair: She is donating it to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, which is being built at the W.T.C.
“I have mixed emotions,” Gupta said in a telephone interview. “I’m honored to do it.” But at the same time, she said, “It’s hard to part with it because it’s so closely tied with my mother, who is elderly now.”
Gupta is one of many Downtown residents who have donated items to the memorial museum. They have given everything from handwritten diaries and family photographs to charred jewelry and singed business cards. They dug deep into their closets, unearthing plastic bags of clothing saturated in dust and other objects they couldn’t discard.
“We probably are interested in almost everything,” said Alice Greenwald, director of the museum, which is now expected to open in 2011. “We’re not looking for Picassos. We’re looking for material evidence of your life experiences.”
Since 9/11 was the most digitally documented event of all time, the museum will collect material for digital exhibits as well. That includes oral histories and residents’ photos and videos, but also e-mails, cell phone messages and Web pages survivors created to let family and friends know they were okay.
The job of soliciting and sorting these items falls to Jan Ramirez, the museum’s curator.
“Museums tell stories, and they tell stories with things,” Ramirez said in an interview in the museum’s office across from the site. People don’t come to museums to replicate the experience they get from reading a book or looking at a Web site, she said, “they come to bear witness.”
Some of the items don’t seem like much, but the story behind them delivers the meaning.
Ramirez gives an example involving firefighter Mickey Kross, one of 14 people to survive the collapse of the North Tower. He was in the Engine 16 firehouse when his friend Christine Gonda called him from her home in Independence Plaza, hysterical. As she told him about the plane she had just seen slam into the World Trade Center, the alarm sounded in the Kross’s firehouse on E. 29th St., ending their conversation. That was the last she heard of him.
Kross was evacuating people from the North Tower when the building came down. Trapped in blackness, Kross didn’t know whether he was dead or alive. Eventually, he saw a shaft of light and slowly wriggled himself upward. The landscape into which he emerged in the early afternoon was unrecognizable.
Kross made his way across the destruction, where he found his name on a list of those presumed dead. He crossed it off. He smoked a cigarette.
That left him with one thing he needed to do: find Gonda and tell her he was alive. Kross talked his way into Independence Plaza, which had been evacuated. Inside, election literature from the Sept. 11 primary littered the hallways. Kross stooped down, picked up a Downtown Independent Democrats door-hanger, found a stub of pencil and scribbled a note.
He later donated to the memorial museum his helmet and the shirt he was wearing, which is light blue where he tucked it into his pants and a dull gray where the dust drenched it, Ramirez said. Gonda also donated the note he slipped under her door: “I’m alive.”
Ramirez was most touched and surprised by the artifacts that show what the World Trade Center meant to residents before 9/11. It was their backyard, their anchor, “a friendly signpost in the background,” she said.
On a watercolor birth announcement from 1998, a stork soars between the Twin Towers to deliver its bundle. Prom photos feature grinning teenagers with the skyscrapers in the background. Holiday cards show toddlers romping through the World Trade Center plaza.
The trauma is still recent enough that Ramirez treads carefully when asking for donations. Rather than launching an ad campaign or calling every resident in Gateway Plaza, for example, she spreads the museum’s mission informally, over mugs of coffee in residents’ apartments. She explains that giving an object to the museum means giving it forever, and she encourages people to feel ready before donating.
“Sometimes it is cathartic,” said Amy Weinstein, associate curator and oral historian for the museum. “They give us objects at the tail end, as the last step in coming to terms [with 9/11].”
Many residents assume that the museum wouldn’t be interested in what they’ve saved, because it’s dirty or damaged, but that’s just the kind of object the museum wants. In fact, Ramirez was hesitant to list any items the museum would not accept. She finally said the museum isn’t looking for something like the rancid contents of a refrigerator abandoned on 9/11.
“It’s hard to get a ‘No’ out of us,” Weinstein said.
Gupta, who will donate the burned chair, also saved safety masks, cleaning supplies and photographs that she took in her apartment the first time she was allowed back inside. Together with those items, she will donate the slippers her husband was given at a New Jersey hospital on 9/11, where he was admitted for chest pains after evacuating Lower Manhattan by boat.
Gupta sees the donation as a way of giving back to the many people who helped her and her family after 9/11: the close friends who helped them find a place to live, the Southern Baptist volunteers who cleaned their apartment and thousands of anonymous Americans who donated to relief organizations that supported residents.
Gupta, who served on the advisory committee for the memorial museum, wants to help ensure the residents’ story is represented in the museum. Outside of New York City, there’s a lack of awareness about what the residents went through, she said.
“It’s an important part of the whole story,” she said.
Gupta recalled the horror of 9/11, when she spent hours thinking her husband was dead. But she also remembered the strong community in the days and weeks that followed, and she remembered the many years the World Trade Center stood as a guidepost for her and her family.
She and her husband, who moved to Gateway Plaza in 1982 and raised their son there, returned to their 10th-floor apartment in the summer of 2002.
“We’ve lived our life around the World Trade Center,” she said.
For information on donating items to the museum, call 212-312-8845 or e-mail jramirez@sept11mm.org.
Julie@DowntownExpress.com
