JFK Hangar Which Housed 9/11 Relics to Close

From the mangled first responder’s emergency vehicles to shafts of broken metal, some 2,500 relics from 9/11 have been held in Hangar 17 at John F Kennedy International Airport.

Now, Hangar 17 is slated to close permanently at the end of the summer once the last of the final few relics--including concrete sections from the parking garage, a mangled elevator motor and a section of the North Tower antenna--are cleared out.

The artifacts that were once housed there have been adopted and put on display by more than 1,400 groups and foundations both within the United States and internationally, according to a recent LA Times article.

“Because it was such a unifying event, I think that a lot of smaller towns, emergency services and schools really want to create a continuing knowledge about what happened and find a way of connecting it to US history,” Amy Passiak, the archivist supervising the dissemination project.

For Passiak, who has served on the project since 2010, the goal has been to keep the memory of 9/11 alive. Photographs of some of the artifacts in Hangar 17 are featured in the book Memory Remains: 9/11 Artifacts at Hangar 17 by Spanish installation artist Francesc Torres.

Items previously housed in the hangar include the steel tridents from the façade of the North Tower and a mangled fire truck crushed from the fall of rubble on 9/11. Today, both are on display in the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

By Madeline Lipton, 9/11 Memorial Communications Intern