Some ceremonies remembering 9/11 reflect on the tragedy with speeches and music, but Floral Park lets silence do the work.
Residents and officials will gather outside Village Hall at 8:30 a.m. on Monday, the 16th anniversary of the terrorist attacks, for a ceremony around a piece of twisted steel taken from the World Trade Center site.
The event usually has just a few speakers: Mayor Dominick Longobardi and some local clergy, the village deputy mayor, Kevin Fitzgerald, said. Longobardi will read the names of the 11 village residents killed in the attacks, and the Floral Park United Methodist Church will toll its bells at 8:46 and 9:03 a.m., the times when planes struck the twin towers in downtown Manhattan.
At last year’s ceremony, the bells ringing to mark the first plane crash broke almost 10 minutes of silence among the crowd of about 150 people.
“It allows people to reflect and sit quietly and think about maybe where they were that day — remember the tragedy that it was,” Fitzgerald said.
The centerpiece of the ceremony is a monument made from the World Trade Center relic which the village erected in 2011.
Two village firefighters worked for two years to obtain the 15-foot beam from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The names of the village’s 11 victims are inscribed on the monument’s base.
Fitzgerald was in his office at Park Avenue and 46th Street in Manhattan when terrorists flew the two airplanes into the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001. After hearing about the attacks on the radio, he walked outside and saw “thousands and thousands of people” covered in dust, he said.
Though he was further uptown working for the investment bank Bear Stearns, Fitzgerald knew many people working in the downtown Financial District who were killed in the attack, he said. Traveling home to Floral Park that night, Fitzgerald saw “wall-to-wall ambulances” on the Long Island Expressway, he said.
Fitzgerald now works for JP Morgan Chase in Brooklyn, the borough where he grew up. He said remembrance ceremonies like Floral Park’s remind him of the national unity that followed the attacks and has similarly followed other tragedies, such as Hurricane Harvey striking Texas last week.
“I just hope and pray that it never happens again,” Fitzgerald said. “That day changed everything.”
Floral Park’s ceremony starts at 8:30 a.m. Monday, Sept. 11, at Village Hall, located at 1 Floral Blvd. A second ceremony will be held at 5:30 p.m. at the Reliance Firehouse, located at 2 Holland Ave.
The Town of North Hempstead will also hold its annual 9/11 memorial service honoring the 56 town residents who died in the attacks at 8 a.m. Monday at Mary Jane Davies Green, located across from Town Hall on Plandome Road in Manhasset.
Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano will host a sunset memorial service at the county’s 9/11 Memorial in Eisenhower Park in East Meadow at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 7. The names of county residents who died in the attacks will be read.
