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Last Standing Piece of WTC Brought Down; May Become Memorial
The last standing piece of the World Trade Center towers -- a seven-story twisted metal ruin that has come to symbolize the terrorist attacks -- was torn down Tuesday and saved for possible use in a memorial.
"We're going to preserve as much of that wall as possible," Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said before workers attached cables to the structure and began bringing it to the ground. "We may be doing a memorial with some or part of that wall."
The remnants of the south tower -- the one struck by the second jetliner and the first to collapse -- have been captured in scores of photos of ground zero since the Sept. 11 attack on the twin 110-story towers.
Amanda Gallaghre, a Manhattan tour guide, was one of several people watching near the site as the last chunk of the building came down. She was supposed to lead a tour of the trade center on the afternoon of the attack.
The metal wall "should be part of a memorial, so it can stand as a lasting memory to all the people who died there," she said.
Removal of the tower will also make cleanup efforts safer and easier, the mayor said.
Preserving the ruined tower as a memorial was suggested by Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and by John Tierney in his column Tuesday in The New York Times, saying: "It's the building hanging on, still refusing to fall, just like New Yorkers."
Berlin, London and Hiroshima have erected monuments from wartime debris.
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