Gordon M. Aamoth Jr.
Edelmiro Abad.
Marie Rose Abad.
A quarter-century after the terrorist attacks that shook New York City and the world — an ashen morning followed by years of grief and repair, rebuilding and war — dignitaries and mourners gathered once again in Lower Manhattan to read aloud the names of those killed when hijackers crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center and sent the twin towers crumbling to the ground.
Milton G. Bustillo. Thomas M. Butler. Patrick Dennis Byrne.
The ceremony on Friday took place beneath a canopy of swamp white oak trees between the two memorial pools where the towers once stood. The pools were designed to appear bottomless, and their cascading waters lent a whispering backdrop to the morning. Relatives held aloft photos of the dead, forever young, as children on the podium spoke directly to grandparents, aunts, and uncles they had never met.
“My dad always talks about how wonderful you were,” one girl said after naming a lost relative. She is among the 100 million Americans born since that day.
Some people used their turns at the microphone to criticize the federal government for continuing to work with Saudi Arabia in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. Family members of those who died have sought to hold the kingdom responsible in federal court, claiming that its government provided support for the hijackers.
Among them was Terry Strada, an official with 9/11 Families United, whose husband was killed in the attack. Her organization has tried for years to pursue legal action against the Saudi government. The kingdom has denied involvement.
“It has been one betrayal after another,” Strada said from the podium. She urged the assembled elected officials to “stand with survivors, stand with Americans.”
Later, a nephew of Lisa Marie Terry, who died in the attack, accused “the deep state” of hiding the truth. He called on President Donald Trump to “release the unredacted files that implicate Saudi Arabia, while what’s left of the victims’ families are still alive to see it.”
Four living former presidents, from Bill Clinton to Joseph R. Biden Jr., stood silently nearby. Zohran Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, was also in attendance, despite a petition signed by thousands of people, including victims’ family members, urging him to stay away. He was joined by former Mayors Bill de Blasio, Michael Bloomberg, and — awkwardly — Rudolph Giuliani, who was in office on Sept. 11 and earlier this week said that Mamdani’s presence at the ceremony “offends me.”
Mamdani nonetheless approached Giuliani at the ceremony. The two men shook hands, and Giuliani’s position seemed to have softened. Cameras captured him apparently telling Mamdani: “I’ll pray for you. It’s a really hard job.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul was there, as was Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and former Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, who had also called on Mamdani to skip the event.
Vice President JD Vance stood in for Trump, who instead attended a ceremony at the Pentagon. In his remarks, the president talked about how Sept. 11 had changed America.
“Twenty-five years after the attacks, we know the world will never return to the way it was at that dawn on that beautiful, peaceful Tuesday morning, 2001,” Trump said, “before the towers fell, before the Pentagon was hit, before the specter of evil, and this horrible, horrible evil came crashing into our lives.”
In New York, as is custom, there were no speeches from elected officials, putting all the focus on the families. The names of the victims read on Friday included the six killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Uniformed firefighters present and past — many older now, grayer — gathered at the ceremony, at churches and, later, in the city’s barrooms, to raise glasses to their 343 fallen brothers.
The effects of Sept. 11 played out for months, years. The Fire Department would go on to be further gutted by mass retirements of high-ranking officers. The Police Department lost 23 officers that day, and was reshaped by the introduction of new tactics, units, and equipment to fight terrorism.
The day is a reminder of how the attacks’ long shadow has reached into many corners of life in the U.S. and beyond.
The U.S.-led global war on terrorism included invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan — the latter Washington’s longest war — and detentions and harsh interrogation of terror suspects in an international network of secret CIA prisons. The U.S. found and killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, but the accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed still awaits a trial 23 years after his capture.
The attacks changed U.S. air travel, led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, prompted new federal surveillance and intelligence-gathering powers and banking regulations and generated ongoing debate over the balance between security and freedom.
Sept. 11 engendered a culture of individual vigilance summed up by the slogan, ” If you see something, say something,” while a wave of patriotism propelled some Americans to join the military, fire departments and police forces.
On Friday, there were the traditional six moments of silence, marked with the tolling of a bell: one for each of the towers struck, one for each building’s collapse, and two for the plane crashes at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pa.
A seventh moment of silence was added this year to commemorate those who had died of Sept. 11-related illnesses. Mamdani’s administration this week released more than 170,000 pages of previously withheld city records about the air quality around ground zero after the attacks. The documents seem to suggest that New Yorkers were encouraged to return to the area before it was safe to do so.
The mournful wail of bagpipes — a fixture at hundreds of Sept. 11 funerals — rang out at the start of the memorial. Elsewhere in the plaza, Yo-Yo Ma played his cello softly behind the reading of the names.
Information from the Associated Press was used in this article.
