Inadvertent mistakes made in helping to create the town’s Sept. 11 memorial to six Secaucus residents that died in the World Trade Center will be corrected, town officials said during the caucus and regular town council meetings on Sept. 24.
Spurred an article that appeared in the Sept. 22 Secaucus Reporter, Councilman John Bueckner asked at the caucus meeting about how the mistakes came about as well as requesting for a final accounting on the cost and source of funding.
Several people noted since the unveiling of the monument on Sept. 11, 2002 that a victim’s name was misspelled, that the time of the first strike on the north tower was wrong and that Mayor Dennis Elwell’s name appears on the monument when no other official’s does.
“I’m hearing all kinds of stories about it on the street,” Bueckner said, in asking for a report on the reasoning and the financing.
Town Administrator Anthony Iacono, one member of the mayor’s committee responsible for the memorial, said most of the details for the monument were selected back in January, 2002 – at a time when there was still come confusion about the location of victims’ families, the names of the victims as well as the exact time of the first strike on the North Tower.
Iacono said he had based the attack time on a report issued from CNBC and that the 8:46 a.m. time was later selected as the official time. Councilman Bob Kickey said one book on Sept. 11 showed the time at 8:47 a.m. Iacono said other reports claimed the attack as 8:45 a.m. Iacono said it would cost about $300 to make the correction.
Iacono added that Richard Cudina’s name was misspelled on the monument because the town had received the spelling from a neighbor in Harmon Cove after the man had moved out of Secaucus.
“At that time, the addresses of family members were not available,” Iacono said. “Recently we’ve spoken with a relative who said the family will be considering our memorial as his grave since nothing was found of him.”
The family is located in Camden County, but apparently not yet emotionally ready to make the trip north. Iacono said the family did not express great dismay over the misspelling and that the mistake would be corrected at no cost to the taxpayer since the stone cutter was going to donate the replacement stone.
Elwell said one of the local parents that lost a son in the attack had approached him saying the memorial would serve as the family grave, since nothing was found of that man either.
“The idea of the memorial is to provide people with closure, and people are actually treating it as their loved one’s grave,” he said. “Many people go there to meditate.”
The final tally on the memorial put its cost at $65,000, Iacono said. About $10,000 of this has been raised through private donations, the rest has been paid for from a fund used to furnish the library.
“We have an ongoing fundraising effort,” Iacono said. “We can raise all of it and even set up a Sept. 11 scholarship fund later if we want.”
Iacono said the town had received 48 e-mails in praise of the memorial. Elwell said NJN News 12’s Jersey’s Talking with Lee Leonard a television talk show – broadcast throughout the state – had named the Secaucus memorial the best in Hudson County.
Political issue or inappropriate criticism?
In the public portion of the council meeting, Board of Education member and 2nd Ward Council candidate Tom Troyer also asked for details concerning the selection of information for the memorial and whether or not members of the Town Council had final say in what eventually appeared.
Troyer seemed particularly vexed by the fact that Elwell’s name appeared on the monument when no other public official’s did, except for the president of the United States.
Troyer accused Elwell of a change of heart about putting names on things from when Troyer and Elwell previously worked together as part of the town’s Independent party. Elwell, Troyer claimed, had refrained from such public credit-taking in the past.
“You’ve changed, mayor,” Troyer said.
Elwell disagreed with Troyer’s charge and said this had nothing to do with taking credit.
Saying criticism of the town’s memorial to the six Secaucus victims of the Sept. 11 attack were petty, Louise Rittberg, one of the committee members, explained the reasoning behind committee choices made for the memorial.
“I’m not here to defend myself or the members of the committee,” Rittberg said. “I’m just here to clarify a few things about what this memorial should mean to the community.”
Rittberg said the statements engraved in the memorial were not meant for the people who had lived through the Sept. 11 tragedy.
“This is not for us today. Everyone in this room was alive on Sept. 11, 2001. We don’t need a memorial. We don’t need names. We don’t need flowers, granite and concrete. We don’t need anything to remember,” she said. “This is for those who come after us. It is for the children. It’s for the grandchildren. And it’s for people here 25 years from now. They look at that and they never forget. It is not for us that we put up signs that we will never forget – we can’t forget.”
Rittberg said that when people go to the monument in the future, they need to see some facts, and she compared it to the Pearl Harbor Memorial.
“They need to see statements from the people who were there at the time,” she said.
For this reason, she thought it appropriate that the mayor’s quote be included, because he was the mayor at the time of the event, and was part of the ceremonies held in the town a few days after the attack.
Rittberg, in a separate interview, said that she had noted the error when the brick with the time was laid, and told Iacono it would likely have to be replaced later.
Rittberg, who has served on previous committees of this kind – in 1992 on the Columbus Day Committee and in 2000 as part of the town’s 100th anniversary – said as a member of the committee she did not expect to get glory or money from its from her efforts; it was enough to have been part of history. Rittberg wrote some of the inscription on the memorial, but her name doesn’t appear. She was proud to have her words etched in stone.
Rittberg criticized the petty criticism over the monument, saying that such talk takes away from its purpose.
“Do we forget what Sept. 11 was all about?” she asked, noting that many people who did not come to the council chambers to complain were complimenting the beauty of the memorial.