Firefighters from across U.S. join New Yorkers to remember, pay respect on 9/11 25th anniversary

NEW YORK – Hundreds of firefighters, most from New York City but others from places as distant as Oregon and Anaheim, carved out tiny moments of dignity Friday morning in lower Manhattan.

They did it on the sidewalk, next to O’Hara’s Bar, a famously firefighter-friendly establishment.

Starting around sunrise and continuing through the morning, uniformed fire workers – usually alone, but sometimes in groups – made their way to the spot along Greenwich Avenue, between Albany and Liberty streets, behind a small wall of American flags and close to four hand-made wreaths stuck to a nearby building.

Then, as rescue dogs barked and distant taxis honked and thousands of people made conversation nearby, they turned their backs to the cacophony and spent a few moments to silently ponder the 343 brothers and sisters who died 25 years ago, at a spot about a block behind them.

“It was hard to concentrate, but I did,” said Ian Yoyocul, a battalion chief with Tualatin Fire, near Portland, Oregon, who is in New York this weekend with about 50 people from his department.

“We owe them at least a moment.”

The quiet dignity parade wasn’t the only spot of incongruity Friday, Sept. 11, when New York – and the world – marked the 25th anniversary of the attacks.

During a day that included several hours of speeches and moments of silence and the readings of each name of the 2,977 people who died in the attacks, officials and un-officials seemed to engage in a quiet test of wills.

Police and anti-terror experts tried hard to orchestrate the thrumming crowd near Ground Zero, an area that now includes the 9/11 Memorial & Museum and a cluster of other buildings and reflecting pools. But thousands of people, with all kinds of agendas, resisted that herding, pressing whenever, and however, for a closer look.

Food cart guys, news workers, lower-level public officials; everybody who didn’t have access to the center of the day’s event – which was set aside for families of the victims, dignitaries and four former U.S. presidents – seemed to be curious and, at times, genuinely moved by what they saw and heard.

“I needed to see it, so I was down there super early, before I opened. So were some of the other guys from around here,” said Sharm Khalil, who sells crispy chicken, fully Halal, for about $10 a plate from one of a half-dozen food carts that do business about two blocks from Ground Zero.

“My mother lost her best friend in the north tower,” Khalil added. “I was a little kid at the time, but she was a nice lady.”

Some of the people crowding the barriers simply wanted to feel closer to the action.

“This is a bigger deal than usual, obviously, because it’s the 25th. We’ve got to do something bigger on the round numbers, right,” said a man wearing a “(Expeitive) Terrorists.com” T-shirt, who declined to give his name.

“But I don’t care what year it is. This is the biggest and best (expletive) city in the world and it was royally (messed) with on Sept. 11.

“Everybody else might be forgetting about it, but not me. I don’t forget that (stuff).”

Others were in New York to express solidarity with firefighters, police, janitors, flight attendants, pilots and stockbrokers, among others, who died in the attacks.

“It’s history,” said Jared Bennett, a captain in the Los Angeles Fire Department who came with his son, Chad Bennett, an LAFD fireman who works near USC.

“That’s part of why we’re here.”

But in a city where TV advertising is peppered with lawyers looking for clients who claim to be injured by the after-effects of the attacks, Sept. 11 also remains news.

This month, New York City officials released information that suggested past city officials knew that the air near Ground Zero, for months after the attacks, was more harmful than was publicly disclosed.

In all, about 9,000 people – more than triple the number who were killed in the attacks – have died in the years since 2001 from health problems caused by poor air and other exposures, according to the World Trade Center Health Program.

“It’s still happening, man,” said D’Andre Fitts, a Brooklyn resident who works at a restaurant near Ground Zero. “Every day, the Sept. 11 stuff comes out and shows you how a lot of people are still hurting from it.”

That concept is why the Sept. 11 event on Friday differed slightly from previous ceremonies, adding a new moment of silence – bringing the total to seven – specifically to remember those who died of related health issues.

The other moments of silence commemorate the exact times that each of the four flights crashed and the moments when each of the World Trade Center buildings collapsed.

Still, for all the history invoked in the ceremony, and the sometimes rowdy crowd, at least some people came to Ground Zero to try to work through feelings still roiling 25 years after the attacks.

“I can look up and describe the clothes people wore when they jumped,” said Paul Gassar, a Seattle resident who worked at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Gasser, who early Friday afternoon was with his wife, Barbara, at the reflecting pools that were built where the towers once stood, said 25 years ago he was a financial advisor for Morgan Stanley, working on the 61st floor of the North Tower, just below where the first plane hit.

He got down the stairs and out of the building, but was just a block away when it started to collapse. Dust, Gasser said, temporarily blinded him, and he was pulled into a grocery by a stranger, a move that he believes may have saved his life.

“It’s a miracle that I got out, that I got the help I did.”

Gasser, a former police officer, said he went back a day later and offered to volunteer at the site. But he was turned away, he said, because he’d worked in the buildings and those workers, at that point, weren’t allowed to be part of the rescue effort.

“That hurt.”

Gasser hadn’t been back to Ground Zero until Friday. He suggested the 25 years was a necessary buffer.

“It changed my life completely.”