New York City is home to dozens of monuments marking the terrorist attacks and commemorating the thousands of lives lost on September 11, 2001.
Some are official, like the reflecting pools situated in the footprints of the Twin Towers. Others are less grand but equally powerful—street murals of American flags, an inconspicuous bronze plaque put up by a First Avenue hospital, and a Central Park memorial to children who lost parents on that terrible day.
Then there’s the statue of a firefighter on East 43rd Street, half a block from Bryant Park. Here, a nine-foot bronze figure of a fireman kneels on a granite base, one hand on his helmet and the other on his forehead in anguish, distress, and maybe prayer.
“The Kneeling Firefighter,” as it’s called, is not an exquisite piece of art, but it’s poignant and moving. It’s also something of a surprise to come across outside the headquarters of Emigrant Bank on an unglamorous stretch of Midtown that doesn’t seem a likely place for any kind of memorial.
What the statue does have, however, is an unusual backstory involving coincidence and perhaps fate.
The story of The Kneeling Firefighter begins in Missouri in 2000, when the Fire Fighters Association of Missouri commissioned the statue to honor those who have fallen in the line of duty.
Designed by Pittsburgh-based Matthews Bronze and cast in Parma, Italy, the statue was shipped back to the United States, landing at Kennedy Airport on September 9 and then bound for Missouri, according to fireengineering.com.
The Kneeling Firefighter was in customs at JFK on September 11—which became a horrific day of terror and mass casualties that paralyzed the city and put a stop to all air travel.
With hundreds of firefighters lost or missing at what remained of the World Trade Center, Matthews Bronze decided the statue, still detained in customs, should stay in New York City, and they would create another one for the Missouri group.
“It was fate that the 2,700-pound statue arrived in the United States on September 9 at Kennedy Airport,” a post on the Matthews Bronze website states.
“The statue, which was originally intended to be shipped by ocean freight to the United States for a mid-October delivery to the Missouri Firefighters Association, was air freighted to the United States at the direction of Matthews product manager to ensure the October delivery.”
An executive at the company “drove from Pittsburgh to the airport and put the statue on the back of a flatbed truck,” explained the New York Post on September 20, 2001. “Then he drove the statue to Midtown, where it was parked Tuesday in front of the Milford Plaza Hotel on Eighth Avenue at West 44th Street.” (Third photo, via Matthews Bronze)
The Kneeling Firefighter remained at this site, placed on a temporary granite foundation by the Milstein family, which owned the Milford Plaza. The Milford Plaza was a fitting site for the statue, as the hotel donated money for supplies as well as hundreds of rooms for search and rescue workers.
The statue went into storage at some point until 2011, when the Milstein family found its permanent home on East 43rd Street outside the Milstein-owned Emigrant Bank, according to fireengineering.com.
It’s hardly New York’s only firefighter memorial. Every September 11, the Fireman’s Memorial on Riverside Drive and 100th Street, built in 1913, attracts many mourners. City firehouses themselves also serve as makeshift memorials.
But The Kneeling Firefighter was actually in New York City as 9/11 unfolded—and it’s the first commemorative statue honoring the 343 members of the FDNY who perished while trying to save lives at the World Trade Center.
[Third photo: Matthews Bronze]
Ephemeral New York 