NYT: 9/11 Shrine, With the Tragic, Toxic Dust

[DeepModem Mom]

9/11 Shrine, With the Tragic, Toxic Dust
By GLENN COLLINS
Published: August 25, 2006


(James Estrin/The New York Times)
Jeans and other apparel that were dusted with 9/11 debris in a Lower Manhattan store window.

It is always dangerous to disturb toxic dust, but this dust is historic, and possibly sacred.

This week, a crew in hazard suits navigated a sealed bubble at the New-York Historical Society to recreate an eerie time capsule of Sept. 11, 2001, as the fifth anniversary approaches.

Starting on Monday, the workers began carefully carrying dust-covered Levi’s jeans and begrimed, flag-bearing Ralph Lauren sweaters out of storage. Then they meticulously positioned them as they were first preserved under glass in the storefront of Chelsea Jeans, a block from the World Trade Center. Enclosed by the store’s owner, David Cohen, the impromptu shrine became a place of pilgrimage for thousands of tourists, mourners and recovery workers in the year after the attack.

“Here I am, trying to preserve what I normally clean off,” said Alan Balicki, the senior conservator at the society, who is accustomed to removing grime from rare maps and prints and the occasional Audubon folio. For this job, he wears a hazard suit. “It’s strange to be so carefully preserving something that is so destructive.”...

***

The exhibition, “Elegy in the Dust: Sept. 11th and the Chelsea Jeans Memorial,” opens today at the society at 77th Street and Central Park West, and will be on view through Jan. 7. Amy Weinstein, the curator, called it “a visceral reminder of the terror, grief and emotional turmoil of that day.”...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/25/nyregion/25chelsea.html

[RethugAssKicker]

1. "sacred dust"....

Give me a break !

[DeepModem Mom]

2. I think they mean that the dust is partly made up of human remains....

none more sacred than others.