Family Room for Relatives of 9/11 Victims Is Recreated in Albany

Albany, New York: Twenty stories above ground zero, its existence and whereabouts known only to those who needed it, the Family Room served for a dozen years as a most private sanctuary from a most public horror.

In that time, what had been spartan office space at 1 Liberty Plaza was transformed by victims' relatives into a shrine reserved only for them.

A profusion of intimate expressions of love and loss filled its walls, its floors and, finally, its windows, obscuring views of the World Trade Center site below, as if to say: Jim and John and Lorraine and Harvey and Jean and Welles and Maritess and Gary and Katherine and Jonathan and Judy are here with us, not down there in the ruins.

"What tower? What floor? That was the way other people saw our loved ones," said Nikki Stern, whose husband, James E. Potorti, was among those killed on Sept. 11, 2001. "It was adamantly not how we wanted to define our loved ones. The Family Room was the beginning of the storytelling that was controlled by the families."

This week, 150 miles north of ground zero, the Family Room - and a thousand stories of love and loss - has opened to the public for the first time, at the New York State Museum in Albany.

The exhibition speaks of the personal communion between the victims' relatives and those who were killed Sept. 11, when terrorists took down the twin towers. Even as the attack fades in the popular consciousness, a visit to the Family Room is a reminder that for relatives of the dead, the mourning has never ended. Quietly and out of view, family members transformed a 20th-floor office space into a shrine.

The objects on display in Albany - snapshots, a votive candle, stuffed animals, a Bible in Korean and English, models of the twin towers, artificial poinsettias, a state police sweatshirt, rubbings from the memorial, a red bandanna and a pair of wire-frame eyeglasses attached to a piece of paper with the message, "So you can see in heaven" - convey some sense of whom they lost.

The Family Room opened in April 2002 in space donated by Brookfield Office Properties, the owners of 1 Liberty Plaza, a 54-story skyscraper across Church Street from the trade center site. By presenting what was known as a medical examiner's family identification card, victims' relatives were admitted to the 20th floor during regular workdays and at nights, on weekends and on holidays.

When the Family Room at 1 Liberty Plaza was replaced this summer by a new private gathering space in the National September 11 Memorial & Museum pavilion, the State Museum painstakingly documented the older room and acquired what contents family members themselves did not choose to reclaim.

Mark A. Schaming, the director of the State Museum, watched Monday as finishing touches were being applied to the exhibition.
"This is at the heart of it," he said of the intensely personal mementos in front of him, "and it almost eclipses that."

He meant the giant pieces of deformed steel and the half-crushed fire engine behind him.

There are materials in the Family Room collection related to about 1,000 victims, Schaming said, or roughly one-third of all casualties that day.

"It is the most singular collection of the faces of people who were killed on 9/11," he said.

The State Museum worked with the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and the memorial museum to notify victims' relatives of the impending acquisition.

"They were given the opportunity to claim or donate," Schaming said.

That opportunity will remain available for at least two years, he added.

"They can approach us and say, 'This is the only photo of my son and I want it back,'?" Schaming said. "We don't want to have anything in our collection that a donor doesn't want us to have."

That is not to say that the arrangement was easily made.

"The opening to public scrutiny of those messages, remembrances, images and ephemera that were intended to be private and personal was indeed a very difficult decision made by family members," said Anthoula Katsimatides, a former official of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. whose portfolio included the Family Room. Her brother, John Katsimatides, was killed at the trade center 13 years ago.

"I think it was the right decision," she said. "I felt the need to protect it and the emotions that had been unleashed within. And yet now, after all these years, I feel it's time for people to see our pain, our anguish, our love and our strength; to experience all that we felt and feel about our loved ones, in its purest and most uninhibited form."

Anguish and love are both evident in a glittering birthday card intended for Judy Hazel S. Fernandez, depicting a happy frog on a lily pad, under a bouquet of pink water lilies, dragonflies flittering about. She was 27 when she was killed at the trade center.

"It's your 35th b-day today," the handwritten message says. "We miss you so much and you will still be with us at all times. Keep watch on us."

Wrapped in tissue, stored in an acid-free box with a graphic notation as to where in the Family Room it originated, the birthday card is a potent but tiny fraction of a collection that museum officials estimate as occupying about 300 cubic feet.

"We consider ourselves a temporary home," said Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the state Board of Regents, under which the State Museum operates as part of the Education Department. "We're going to use this opportunity to find a permanent place closer to ground zero that would be of significance to the families."

About 700,000 people a year visit the museum, Schaming said. For those who cannot make the trip, the museum has posted on its website extraordinarily high-resolution panoramic views of the Family Room. They permit a viewer to step back and take in the entire space or zoom in on something as small as a Mass card.

You could pass hours looking at them. But you may find yourself turning away from the screen after only a few moments, faced with such enormous bereavement expressed on such an intimate scale.