This large plaque contains the names of all 184 victims of the Pentagon attack. The seals across the bottom represent the Department of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard. A copy of this plaque hangs in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfields Pentagon office.
Description: This apron is covered with uniform patches from grateful patrons of Nino's restaurant, a relief center for World Trade Center recovery workers.
Context: Many Americans looked for ways to help after the September 11 attacks. One New York City businessman, Antonio Nino Vendome, turned his family restaurant into a relief center. Staffed by volunteers and supported largely by donations, Nino’s served hundreds of thousands of free meals twenty-four hours a day to firefighters, police officers, Red Cross workers, and others at the World Trade Center site. For many, Nino’s became a refuge, a place to find companionship and support as well as a meal. Many of the workers left their organizational patches as tokens of thanks, which Nino attached to kitchen aprons and hung on the wall.
Driving on a highway adjacent to the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, Penny Elgas stopped as she saw a passenger jet descend, clip a light pole near her, and then crash into the Pentagon. Arriving home, Elgas found this plane fragment in the back seat of her car (she theorizes that it dropped through the open sunroof). Feeling that it was her patriotic duty to preserve the fragment as a relic, she crafted a special box and lined it with red, white, and blue material.
This elevator emergency sign was recovered from the World Trade Center after September 11, 2001. It is rectangular in shape and has a hole cut out of the center for the emergency button used by the fire department. The sign reads “In Case Of Fire, Elevators Are Out Of Service.” The 99 elevators were normally the lifeblood of the World Trade Center, but during the September 11th attacks many workers were trapped inside. This sign was recovered from the debris at the Staten Island recovery site at Fresh Kills.
Description: This poster depicting parts of an airliner’s flight recorder was produced to help law enforcement officers locate the missing "black boxes."
Context: Police investigators combed the debris of the World Trade Center looking for personal objects and evidence about the hijacking. High on the list of things to find were the two flight recorders (“black boxes”) from each of the two planes that had been used to destroy the Twin Towers. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) created a poster to show all the law enforcement officers at the Staten Island recovery site, most of whom had never seen a flight recorder, what they should search for. No flight recorders were recovered from the World Trade Center debris.
This white dessert plate has a blue and yellow crescent pattern around the lip of the plate. There is a small, black, lattice arrow symbol on the back of the plate. This plate was part of the collection of dinnerware used in the "Windows on the World" restaurant located on the 107th floor, Tower 1 of the World Trade Center. The china survived because the owner of the restaurant had taken the china home for a private function.
