A retired FDNY battalion chief who spent weeks working on the smoldering Pile after 9/11 is devoting his retirement to a deeply personal mission: creating handmade tributes for the Bravest who answered the call that day.
John Ricketts, a former Fire Department leader, has spent the last five years building 78 scale models of the Twin Towers, each designed to hold rusted steel recovered from Ground Zero.
Many of the pieces are being given to FDNY members who raced to the World Trade Center during the terrorist attacks 25 years ago and survived, along with families of firefighters who never came home.
“There was one chief I worked with who had, on his locker, left a note: ‘Tell my wife I love her and tell my family’ ” before heading to the WTC to help with rescue efforts after the attack, Ricketts said.
“He didn’t know if he was coming back. And he didn’t.
“It’s a special group of people in the Fire Department,” Ricketts told The Post from his workshop in Plainview, LI, where he has poured countless hours into sanding, cutting, measuring, gluing and assembling the emotional keepsakes.
The project began taking shape shortly before Ricketts retired in December 2021, after then-FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro approved his handwritten request for steel from Ground Zero so he could create a few mementos for his own family.
Ricketts thought he might receive a small piece of metal. Instead, he was given a rusted, half-inch-thick plate roughly the size of one and a half manhole covers.
He then spent months sanding the steel down and slicing it into sticks that he perfectly wedged into the 8.25-inch-tall wooden towers, which he planted on a stand that slants to replicate West Street in Lower Manhattan.
All the towers appear exactly the same in size and stature, but each has its own unique steel size and wood type.
Ricketts sourced the timber from personal, well-loved sources across the Big Apple, including his family’s furniture, discarded blocks scavenged from Steinway & Sons and even branches from the Sycamore tree that graced his childhood home in Bayside, Queens.
The steel also holds extra special meaning for Ricketts. His father was an iron worker and helped build the World Trade Center. Ricketts signed his father’s name, alongside his own and his fellow probation firefighters, on an exposed beam during a training visit to the buildings in the 1980s.
Ricketts returned to the site on 9/11 as one of the more than 15,000 first responders who rushed into action.
He had been on vacation and at a PTA meeting in Nassau County when the news broke.
Ricketts has given away 65 of his Twin Towers so far and hopes to give away the remaining 13 before Christmas.
Some of the structures sit on the mantles of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, the Office of the Fire Commissioner and several firehouses, but Ricketts has reserved most for those who were at Ground Zero, as well as the families of those who were killed that day and others who have since died from 9/11-related illnesses.
The craftsman said nearly all of the recipients have sent pictures of where they put the art.
“Sometimes they come down, and we do a woodworking project,” he said. “I say, ‘Come on over, we’ll make some sawdust, and we’ll have some laughs and see what we can do!’
“We have fun, instead of … [think about] that terrible, terrible day.”
