The determination runs eleven pages and approves five locations for one rescue. Choosing among them, the office says, was never its job.
NEW YORK—Citing four published descriptions that place the same event in four different locations, the Interior Department’s Office of Commemorative Siting and Historical Placement has approved a Ground Zero marker at each of them, according to a determination circulated Thursday to regional staff.
Tuesday’s remarks set the process going. Speaking at a Tunnel to Towers event on the White House Ellipse, the president said two firemen lifted him off the ground near the U.S. Steel Building, now One Liberty Plaza, because the structure was about to come down. The Atlantic set that account beside his earlier versions of it on Wednesday. There are four, and they do not agree on where he was standing.
“The office does not adjudicate accounts,” said a senior official at the siting office, who requested anonymity because the determination has not been released. “It places markers. Where the record supports four locations, the office is obligated to four locations. Ranking them against one another would be an editorial judgment, and we are not funded to make one.”
Four Sites for One Rescue
A three-person survey team walked the candidate locations Wednesday morning. First is the lobby of One Liberty Plaza, which Tuesday’s telling can be read to place him inside. Second is a sidewalk position on Broadway, drawn from a January 2016 campaign stop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he put the building some distance off at the moment the two men took hold of him. Third sits on Church Street and corresponds to a 2021 Newsmax interview, in which he heard creaks and warned first responders the tower was coming down. Fourth is the block where he was recorded walking with reporters on September 13, 2001, the only one of the four supported by video.
All four lie within 1,400 feet of one another. The determination records that distance and treats it as a point in the program’s favor, since a visitor on foot can reach every site inside twenty minutes.
Tuesday’s ceremony honored first responders. Trump presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the mother and sister of Welles Crowther, a 24-year-old equities trader and volunteer firefighter who guided as many as 18 people out of the South Tower before it fell. Of Crowther, the president said the man in the red bandana had become “more famous than me.” He said he did not like it.
Writing a Ground Zero Marker That Fits Every Version
Commemorative text permits the phrase “on or near this site,” which the office uses when a location is known to within a block. The determination extends the formula. Language approved for all of the markers states that the event took place on, near, or at some remove from the site, on a date it gives only as following the collapse.
“You cannot cast bronze around a moving target,” said Dorothy Ruddock, 64, a senior fellow at the Institute for Commemorative Standards in Arlington, who reviewed the draft text at the office’s request. “So the wording has to survive a revision to the account. You write the plaque today in a way that already covers whatever the story turns out to be in November.”
The Fifth Site Was Added Thursday
Hours after the ceremony, the president wrote on Truth Social that he had been at the site shortly after the collapse rather than on the day of it, with a large group of construction workers. Staff logged the post as a fifth description and opened a fifth candidate site. Nobody has established where such a group would have been working, and the determination carries that location as pending.
Cost per Ground Zero marker is set at $41,300, and the total comes to $206,500, a figure that assumes five. Commemorative work has been accumulating at the department. Newswax reported last week on a foreign policy analyst who read a state preservation officer’s objection to the president’s planned arch as a compliment.
What the Ground Zero Marker Cannot Say
No firefighter has come forward to confirm any version of the rescue. Snopes reported Friday that no evidence places him inside or around One Liberty Plaza, and that the building was not at risk of collapse in the days after the attack. CNN found that he was miles from the World Trade Center on September 11 and was not carried from any building near the site that day. Richard Alles, a retired Fire Department deputy chief who held a supervisory role at the site, said in 2019 that he knew of no one who had ever seen the president there.
His own buildings have figured in these accounts before. In a phone interview from Trump Tower on the morning of September 11, 2001, he said that 40 Wall Street, a property he owned, had become the tallest building in downtown Manhattan. Records kept by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat do not support that.
Office standards require a corroborating account on file. No marker is cast without one. Asked what happens if none arrives, the senior official placed the question elsewhere. “Corroboration is a records matter and siting is a siting matter,” the official said. “Records has been asked to advise. Until it does, the sites stay approved.”
The determination closes on maintenance schedules. Whichever of the five markers a visitor reaches first, the text will be the same, and none of them will name the two men.
Developing.
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