The 9/11 Victims
New Jersey Hall of Fame, Class of 2011: Unsung Heroes
The date September 11, 2001, is one that will live in infamy. By latest count, 2,977 victims perished in the 9/11 terror attacks, including 677 individuals from New Jersey.
The 9/11 victims were taken from us at the World Trade Center; at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C; and in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Airlines flight 93 crashed after a heroic effort by passengers to fight back against the terrorists who had seized the passenger plane.
Most of the New Jersey victims were commuters who worked in the World Trade Center. Some were Port Authority police officers who died in the line of duty. All went to work that day with no idea of the unthinkable events that awaited them.
After the twin 110-story towers of the World Trade Centers were attacked that morning, hospitals throughout northern New Jersey mobilized and awaited the injured. None came. By day’s end, cars left behind in commuter parking lots around New Jersey sat as eerie reminders of those who did not return.
As night fell, mourners gathered at New Jersey sites from the Hudson River waterfront to the inland mountain ridges, where they could look east to lower Manhattan. Searchlights illuminated the vast cloud of smoke and dust that hung above the Trade Center site. Mourners from New Jersey and the surrounding states cried in the arms of strangers, wondering how such a tragedy could visit America.
In the years following the attack, New Jersey counties and municipalities erected more than 150 memorials to the 9/11 victims. Some are simple plaques honoring the local dead; some are Twin Towers replicas; some display artifacts from the World Trade Center. Others seek to capture the immensity of the tragedy in soaring structures of marble and bronze. Among the more ambitious: Empty Sky at Liberty State Park in Jersey City; the Tear Drop Memorial in Bayonne; the Monmouth County memorial at the Mount Mitchill Scenic Overlook in Atlantic Highlands; and the Remembrance and Rebirth memorial at Eagle Rock Reservation in West Orange.
As stated at the 2011 New Jersey Hall of Fame induction ceremony, these memorials are “a collective homage to those who perished.” Further, they assure that New Jersey will never forget all that was lost on that fateful day.