9/11 Artifacts

Maria Cecilia Benavente, who worked on the 103rd floor at the World Trade Center, had a pair of backless sandals. Benavente hurriedly escaped when American Airlines Flight 11 went down, taking 25 flights of stairs to reach an express elevator on the 78th floor. She found that her two-inch heeled sandals were slowing her descent. Benavente took them off and continued the trip barefoot while keeping her abandoned sandals close till she arrived at a coworker's parents' house more than 15 miles away in Queens.

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A squeegee tool hidden in plain sight saved the lives of six men on September 11th. Jan Demczur, a window cleaner, and five other people were in an elevator in the World Trade Center's North Tower when it abruptly began to plummet. At the 50th story of the building, they were able to stop the elevator's descent by pressing the emergency stop button.

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A cab driver passing by alerted Bill Biggart, a 54-year-old freelance photojournalist, and his wife Wendy Doremus as they were out walking their dogs that a jet had just slammed into the World Trade Center. Biggart hurried home, grabbed three cameras, and headed to Ground Zero, where he began taking pictures of the Twin Towers as they were ablaze. During his coverage of the 9/11 events, he was the only working photographer that died.

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Rudy Giuliani, a politician, and attorney currently involved in legal and financial issues, was praised in 2001 for his leadership during a tragic situation. Then, on that September day, Giuliani utilized this Motorola i1000Plus cell phone to direct emergency operations at the end of his seven-year tenure as New York City's mayor.

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Jet fuel from Flights 11 and 175 that crashed into the World Trade Center started large-scale, violent fires that could reach 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. According to the museum, "the contents of the building[s]—desks, documents, carpets, ceiling tiles, and even paint—fueled the fire." This clump of coins was among the deformed, melted things found in the building's debris.

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Ivonne Coppola Sanchez, a member of the New York Fire Department's Emergency Medical Services, wore this sweater while looking for survivors at Ground Zero, making it a more recent addition to the collection. Coppola Sanchez later ran across photographer Joel Meyerowitz while working at a temporary morgue, and he took a picture of her wearing the sweater.

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Two days after 9/https://www.11, the family-run Nino's Restaurant on Canal Street in Manhattan started providing World Trade Center recovery employees with free meals. The eatery served countless customers and served as a haven for exhausted first responders for the roughly seven months that followed. Shayt noticed three aprons hanging behind the counter, each "loaded like pizzas with patches—from Canada, and England, and the U.S.—small towns and large." Each patch identified a firefighter, police officer, Red Cross worker, or other first responders who had donated a piece of their uniform as a token of appreciation.

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United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on the morning of September 11, and curators were tasked with gathering artifacts related to the tragedy. The 58-year-old flight attendant Lorraine Bay's crew log and an in-flight manual are among the few remaining physical remnants of the hijacked aircraft. Lorraine has 37 years of experience as a flight attendant. Bay entered the specifics of each flight she took into the journal, marking up the blue link with the flight numbers, dates, and other information.

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