NEW YORK — Just as Sept. 11 was unthinkable, Sunday was inevitable: the 10th anniversary of a day that stands alone. In history. In memory.
Three-thousand six-hundred fifty-two days have now passed. At 8:46 a.m. EDT — the time when the first plane slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center — 87,648 hours had gone by. That's 5,258,880 minutes, or 315,532,800 seconds.
"We can never unsee what happened here," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Sunday at ceremonies at Ground Zero.
President Barack Obama read Psalm 46, which talks about God as "our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear."
Former President George W. Bush quoted Abraham Lincoln on the casualties in the Civil War as he commemorated the casualties of Sept. 11. "I pray that our heavenly father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement," Bush read from a letter Lincoln had written in 1864 to a mother whose five sons had died in the war.
"President Lincoln not only understood the heartbreak of his country, he also understood the cost to sacrifice and reached out to console those in sorrow," Bush added.
At Ground Zero, a silver bell tolled and moments of silence were observed at the times the hijacked jets slammed into the two World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pa. The bell rang twice more, marking the times the two towers fell.
Then former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was approaching the end of his tenure on Sept. 11, 2001, stepped to the lectern. "The perspective that we need and have needed to get through the last 10 years and the years that remain are best expressed by the words inscribed by God in the book of Ecclesiastes," he said before reading the famous passage that begins, "To every thing there is a season."
"A time to be born, and a time to die," Giuliani read. He was applauded after the last line: "A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace."
Once more, the names of the dead were recited — solemnly, but sometimes with poignant, personal reminiscences. One man was thanked for looking down from heaven and helping the Dallas Cowboys. Another relative mentioned "your laughter, your smile and your meatloaf." And Jefferson Crowther stood at the microphone with a red kerchief in his shirt pocket.
Its significance became clear when he got to the last name he read.
"And my courageous son, Welles Remy Crowther," he said, his voice cracking. "The man with the red bandanna." Welles Crowther had worn a red bandanna on Sept. 11 as he tried to help people escape from the World Trade Center.
The 10th anniversary played out against a different backdrop than the first anniversary, in 2002, or the fifth, in 2006. For the first time, Osama bin Laden was dead. For the first time, too, there was tangible progress toward fulfilling the promise to rebuild at Ground Zero — a promise made in the aftermath of the attacks but delayed by squabbling over architects, plans and finances.
Buildings are rising between Church and West Streets in Lower Manhattan, and the National September 11 Memorial will open to the public on Monday. Relatives of those who died at the World Trade Center got a first look on Sunday.
If they were to measure it, they would see that the memorial covers about half of the 16-acre World Trade Center site. They will see that the names of the dead have been inscribed on the walls of two reflecting pools that now fill the footprints of the old towers — pools that hold 550,000 gallons of water and are lined with 3,968 panels of granite, each weighing 420 pounds. A museum is to open next year. For the memorial and the museum together, the plans called for some 8,151 tons of steel and 49,900 cubic yards of concrete.
Mary Dwyer of Brooklyn, whose sister, Lucy Fishman, worked in the south tower, said it was moving to be able to stand, for the first time, near where Fishman had died.
"It's the closest I'll ever get to her again," said Dwyer. She added that she is 36, the same age her sister was on Sept. 11, 2001.
This report includes material from the Associated Press.
