THE NEW YORK TIMES: In public and in private, New York marks 9/11 anniversary

At 14 minutes to 9 on Thursday morning, for thousands of people in New York City and across the region, time stopped, and silence descended, filled by memories of another balmy blue-sky morning two dozen years ago.

Then, on a memorial plaza near the bottom of Manhattan, a bell tolled, bagpipes played, and survivors and relatives of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks began reading the names of the dead, as New York’s most sombre annual ritual unfolded for the 24th time.

Gordon M. Aamoth Jr. Edelmiro Abad. Marie Rose Abad.

The recitation continued as a cellist played mournfully.

Gary M. Albero. Jon Leslie Albert. Peter Craig Alderman.

The toll from the attacks continues to grow: Deaths over the years from illnesses caused by toxic materials in the air and in the rubble at ground zero have almost certainly surpassed those on Sept. 11 itself.

According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 24,000 responders who worked at the site or at the debris-sorting pile on Staten Island have developed cancer. Over 8,000 responders and survivors have died, though the agency does not track whether the deaths are caused by 9/11-related illnesses.

On Thursday at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in lower Manhattan, mourners in the crowd held up photos of loved ones as family members read the victims’ names. People walked the perimeter of the reflecting pools at the World Trade Centre site, laying flowers and American flags around the etched names of the deceased.

In Brooklyn, firefighters with Engine 205/Ladder 118 lined up in the bay of their firehouse, clasped their hands and bowed their heads to mark the time the first plane struck.

Eight members of the firehouse died in the attacks, including Scott Matthew Davidson, father of comedian Pete Davidson, and Vernon Cherry, a 29-year veteran who had planned to retire at the end of 2001.

“We are in the shadow of them,” Christopher A. Smith, captain of Ladder 118, said.

Other remembrances were more private. Valentina Lygin, 78, visited the World Trade Centre plaza on Wednesday and laid a flower by the name of her son, Alexander Lygin, at one of the memorial pools.

Alexander Lygin was 28 when he perished in the north tower, his mother said. He worked on the 104th floor as a computer programmer and had planned to get married that October.

Valentina Lygin recalled rushing with her husband from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan that day. “We just said, ‘We are here to get our son and take him home,’” she recalled. Later, his driver’s license was found in the debris.

Lygin, who lives in North Carolina, visits New York twice each year to honour her son: on Sept. 11 and on his birthday, Jan. 16.

“What I want is for people to remember,” she said.

New York has changed, healed and rebuilt since 2001. The population of the community district that includes lower Manhattan has more than doubled since 2000. The city — where Islamophobia spiked after the 2001 attacks — is on the precipice of electing its first Muslim mayor: Zohran Mamdani, a state Assembly member who was a nine-year-old growing up in Manhattan when the towers fell.

While candidates often pause campaigning on Sept. 11, its political significance did not go unnoticed this week. On Tuesday, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running for mayor, held a news conference with Sal Turturici, a former Fire Department paramedic who helped with recovery efforts. Turturici, who developed cancer he linked to working at the site, endorsed Cuomo, saying he had fought for benefits for 9/11 families.

Mamdani and Cuomo, who trails him in the polls, were at the 9/11 Memorial on Thursday. So was the current mayor, Eric Adams, who is also running for reelection.

Kash Patel, the FBI director, attended, as did Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York and two past New York mayors, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. There was also a memorial event at the Pentagon, attended by President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump.

Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee for mayor of New York, went to a ceremony at Tribute Park in the Rockaways in Queens. He laid a red rose on the “Navigator Star” mosaic, an installation dedicated to Sept. 11 that has severely deteriorated from years of disrepair and from damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Sliwa said he had laid the rose for Nancy Morgenstern, who died in the attacks at age 32.

“She didn’t have anybody here for her,” Sliwa said.

The reading at the 9/11 Memorial paused five more times, representing the moments when the planes crashed — including Flight 93 in western Pennsylvania — and the towers fell.

After each interruption, the readers, some of them grandchildren of the dead who never knew their grandparents, resumed their grim roll call, the names echoing across the plaza.

Robert B. Nagel. Mildred Rose Naiman. Takuya Nakamura. Sean Gordon Corbett O’Neill. Betty Ann Ong. Michael C. Opperman.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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