Where the Twisted Wreckage of the World Trade Center Went

Rising 36 feet and weighing 58 tons, the steel beam is layered with handwritten tributes, prayers and messages of resilience left by first responders and relatives of those killed.

Known as The Last Column, it now stands watch inside New York’s 9/11 Memorial and Museum. It was the final remnant removed from the World Trade Center site, marking the end of a grueling nine-month rescue and recovery effort.

The column is one of the largest artifacts among the thousands of pieces of warped steel and crushed concrete preserved in the underground museum in downtown Manhattan. Yet it raises a larger question: what became of the rest of the nearly two million tons of debris hauled away from Ground Zero 25 years ago?

A new book sets out to answer that question with the most comprehensive account to date.

Based on extensive research and interviews, Scattered Steel: The Afterlife of the WTC by Samuel Holleran and Max Holleran traces how pieces of the fallen towers were dispersed to all 50 states and far beyond, sometimes ending up in places few would expect.

‘As early as the night of the attacks,’ the authors write, ‘trucks laden with debris were heading out of the still-smoldering WTC site, taking the Battery Tunnel to Brooklyn and, from there, crossing the Verrazano Bridge to Staten Island’s Fresh Kills.’

Fresh Kills, once the largest landfill on Earth and long rumored to have been a dumping ground for mafia victims, quickly became overwhelmed. Less than two days after the attacks, thousands of tons of pulverized concrete and mangled steel were arriving at the Staten Island site.

Officials soon adjusted the process. Larger steel sections were routed first to scrapyards in New Jersey, where FBI agents and archeologists examined each piece by hand in the search for human remains. Non-metal debris continued on to Staten Island.

Within months, most of the steel recovered from the site — about 95 percent — had been sold on the international scrap market.

‘Over 200,000 tons were sold to wholesalers, primarily in India, China, and Turkey (some of whom were not made fully aware of the origins of their purchase),’ write the book’s authors.

‘By the first anniversary of the attack, most of the metal frame from the structures was beginning a new life in Asia as rebar, cladding, and even cookware.’

Of the steel that remained – beams contorted into painful-looking twists, some items tiny, others massive – most was held in storage at JFK airport’s Hangar 17 for nearly a decade, largely forgotten about until interest in turning the material into permanent memorials grew.

Initially, pieces were gifted to local churches, and also to fire houses and police departments, in recognition of their life-saving work and to acknowledge a sense of alliance with their fellow first responders in New York.

‘One early memorial… was placed in a prominent position at the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, a Catholic parish that is steps from Manhattan’s Penn Station and historically served workers in the nearby printing and tailoring trades,’ write the authors.

‘Father Mychal Judge, a priest at Saint Francis’s who was also an FDNY chaplain, rushed downtown to the WTC on 9/11 to minister to victims; he was struck by a piece of debris and killed, becoming the first recorded casualty and the only clergy member to die in the attacks.

‘A piece of crumpled steel, brought to the church by the fire department in 2002, was placed in a recessed space off the church’s nave, and a gold-plated rose was fastened below it so that it appears to grow from the steel.’

In November 2024, the rose was stolen. And while the thief was later arrested and charged, the rose was never recovered.

Another memorial emerged just two days after the attacks, when construction worker Frank Silecchia spotted a 17-foot crossbeam sticking out prominently from the rubble. Because of its obvious resemblance to a cross, it was adopted as a symbol of hope by his fellow ‘hard hats’ and was even blessed by a priest on site.

It, too, is now housed in the 9/11 museum.

Similarly, even before the clean-up was complete, recovery workers at Ground Zero were cutting out primitive shapes – hearts, crosses, Stars of David, plain circles – as a kind of memorial.

These were passed on to visitors – to politicians, and to military officers to put on their dog tags – and kept by workers as good luck talismans. 

‘When we had a little slack time,’ ironworker William Quinlan told the authors, ‘we would cut out some crosses… We would give those crosses to the families. And they loved it; they really appreciated it. And it made us feel good.’

Only very few pieces of WTC steel were sent overseas. Less than a year after the attacks, for instance, one of the first public memorials was unveiled in Ontario, Canada – in a park that celebrates the love and loyalty of a family dog.

In Beautiful Joe Park, in the town of Meaford, stand two carved stones that include an I-beam from the WTC. The monument is dedicated to the sniffer dogs who searched for survivors.

The book notes: ‘It is meant to commemorate a Port Authority Police Department dog named Sirius that worked with Officer David Lim, who put the Labrador in its kennel after the Twin Towers were hit and was unable to retrieve the kennel from the basement of the South Tower before the collapse (Lim survived).

‘Sirius is listed in many places as a fallen officer.’

The following year, London opened a memorial garden in Grosvenor Square, featuring a piece of salvaged steel girder preserved in resin.

And nine years after that, a much more significant, twisted stack of steel was unveiled in the city. It found a permanent home in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in 2015.

One piece stands outside the NATO headquarters in Brussels, and another on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Israel. The five-acre monument is the only one outside of the US that lists the names of every victim, including five Israeli citizens.

One of the most significant international installations exists in Padua, Italy. Called Memoria e Luce (Memory and Light), it is shaped like an open book, with the open page pointing to the Statue of Liberty in New York.  

Within the 56-foot tall glass and steel sculpture is a 20-foot steel WTC beam.

Of course, large-scale projects like this did not come cheap. The Padua project, for instance, cost more than ten million euros ($11.5 million). But much smaller civic projects also happened across all 50 states, carried out almost on a DIY basis. A piece of steel would be ordered for free from a 612-page Port Authority PDF, transported at the town’s own expense, and often simply mounted on a simple plinth over the course of a weekend.

‘Most have been erected in liminal spaces between suburban office parks and parking lots,’ note the authors, ‘on roadsides, and outside public buildings in small towns. 

‘Some are lacking a plinth or landscaped surroundings; others are in areas that have not historically been home to memorials. 

‘The steel column at the Fire Training Center in Overland Park, Kansas, for instance, stands a stone’s throw from the ‘burn buildings’ used in fire training – a jarring juxtaposition. 

‘A narrow five-foot-long piece of steel plate is mounted on a staircase landing in the small Holocaust museum managed by a Fort Lee, New Jersey, synagogue. 

‘Unlike traditional memorials that announce themselves with familiar iconography from roundabouts and promenades, the memorials made from WTC steel are often in unexpected, and unexceptional, spaces.’

In almost every one, however, the steel beams have been kept in their original form – a visceral reminder of the destruction that rained down on New York on September 11, 2001, and the human pain that continues today as a result. 

One exception is the massive seven and a half tons that were melted down and used in the hull of the USS New York. The ship’s motto: ‘Strength forged through sacrifice. Never forget.’

In a deeply moving, large-scale work of art in the 9/11 Museum, one that commemorates the victims through 2,983 individual watercolor squares, a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid has been forged from WTC steel. It reads: ‘No day shall erase you from the memory of time.’

And, the book adds: ‘The Mars exploration vehicles Opportunity and Spirit, both launched by NASA in 2003, each include pieces of aluminum from the World Trade Center that were repurposed to serve as protective shields for cables. 

‘The fragments on both rovers are engraved with American flags and are expected to remain intact for millions of years.’

None of this has been without controversy, however. 

While the painstaking search through the wreckage resulted in around 60 per cent of human remains being positively identified and returned to loved ones, for more than 1,000 victims’ families, there has been no such closure.

They argue that ‘microremains’ – those too small for visual identification or caught within larger pieces of material – still exist at Fresh Kills, and have called for the rubble there to be moved to a cemetery. 

A lawsuit filed by the group WTC Families for Proper Burial reached the Supreme Court but was ultimately dismissed.

For those families, these memorials therefore take on an even more sacred significance.

‘The days after 9/11 brought few intact bodies to those searching for the thousands of casualties,’ write the authors. 

‘The dead were already spoken about as martyrs, the rescuers as heroes, but their remains were only present as dust. Alternative death rites were needed.

‘The proxy funerals and mourning rituals were performed not on bodies but on an architectural component.

‘The dissemination of ‘relic steel’ helped to create some sense of collective closure to comfort the nation.’

Scattered Steel: The Afterlife of the WTC by Samuel Holleran and Max Holleran, is published by Cornell University Press, September 15