As a survivor, Tom Canavan felt he had to witness the removal of the
last sizable remnant of the World Trade Center: the staircase that
served as an escape route for him and many others.
Canavan
joined a smattering of survivors and a group of city officials Sunday
at ground zero to watch workers plant an American flag on the
staircase. Then they waited until a crane hoisted the 65-ton structure
and carefully placed it on a flatbed.
The staircase was moved
200 feet to a temporary location near the northwest corner of the site.
It will become part of the World Trade Center memorial and museum,
which is scheduled to open on the 10th anniversary of the 2001 attacks.
"In many senses, we're all survivors of 9/11
-- this city, this country," said Joe Daniels, president of the
foundation that is building the memorial. "And the staircase is a
really potent symbol of that."
The 37 steps that once connected
the plaza outside the twin towers to the street below are the only
aboveground remnant of the trade center complex.
For Canavan,
seeing the staircase again summoned memories of fleeing down the steps
after tunneling out of debris when the World Trade Center's south tower
collapsed.
"Time seemed to move very fast," he said. "It took me
about 20 minutes to tunnel out, just digging. I had no fingernails left
when I got to the top."
Preservationists and survivors argued for years that the staircase remain undisturbed to honor the memory of Sept. 11.
But
state officials announced in 2006 that they would demolish all but one
or two slabs of the staircase to make way for a new office tower,
undeterred by a preservation group that named the steps one of the
nation's most endangered historic places.
The site's owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey,
had said that the 22-foot staircase could not be taken off the trade
center site because it was too tall for traffic lights and overhead
poles and possibly too heavy for bridges.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer's
administration worked out a compromise last year to separate the stairs
from their concrete base and install them at the Sept. 11 memorial.
Avi Schick, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., said moving the stairs was a good compromise.
"We
were presented with what was really a false choice, which is to say
either you get rid of that remnant and you allow rebuilding to go
forward or you keep the remnant and the memory and you stop
rebuilding," Schick said. "And we said that's a false construct... You
can honor memory, you can honor the day, you can honor survival, yet
respect and understand the need for rebuilding to go forward."
