Twenty-five years after the Twin Towers fell, some of the most powerful 9/11 remembrance in America isn’t happening in Lower Manhattan. It’s happening at a handball court at Avenue X and Bedford Avenue in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where about 400 names of local victims are painted on the wall. There’s no committee, no president, no formal organization behind it. It started with a man known as Rockin’ Ray, and it grew because an entire neighborhood decided the names were staying up.
The people who gather there carry the day with them. Dirk Delph was buried in debris for nearly two hours when the first tower collapsed and still deals with asthma and GERD. Carlos Rodriguez, a sanitation police officer on 9/11, lives with sleep apnea, heart irregularities, and emphysema. Mary Bracken’s daughter Lucy Fishman was 36 and working on the 105th floor of the South Tower when she died. It was her son’s first day of school.
This year brought something new. Giancarlo Rodriguez, Carlos’s son, was born after 9/11. He repainted the memorial wall with his Boy Scout troop. A generation that never lived through that day picked up a brush and made sure the names stayed legible for the next one. That’s how remembrance actually survives, not through official ceremonies, but through families and neighbors who keep showing up.
Is there a place in your community where local memory lives? Tell us about it.
