Friday, September 11, 2026
Together We Remember
The 25th Anniversary Remembrance Ceremony at the 13th Precinct
Once again in front of the 13th Precinct, honoring those lost twenty-five years ago at the World Trade Center.
Photograph by our neighbor Ira Fox
Dear Neighbors,
On Friday morning, twenty-five years to the day, we gathered once again in front of the 13th Precinct.
So many of you came. Neighbors stood shoulder to shoulder with the officers of the 13th Precinct and Emergency Service Truck One — the men and women who were there for us in 2001 and are there for us still. The sidewalk in front of the Precinct was full. Twenty-five years on, that is a promise kept.
We honored the memory of the 2,977 lives taken that day — among them the twenty-three NYPD officers, including 13th Precinct Officers Robert Fazio and Moira Smith, and Brian McDonnell of Emergency Service Truck One. We remembered the forty-four who were our neighbors, among them the photographer Bill Biggart. And we remembered September 12, when this community asked what it could do to help — and then did it, for eight and a half months.
On display at the 13th Precinct: a memorial to the work of the Block Association and our Gramercy Park neighbors in support of the first responders.
That work did not end when the command center closed. In the years since, we have planted and tended the Remembrance Garden at the Precinct’s entrance on East 21st Street. We sponsored a wellness program for World Trade Center responders at the Olive Leaf Wholeness Center on East 23rd Street, the only one of its kind in the nation. We held memorial concerts and vigils at Calvary Church and Brotherhood Synagogue. And we made the E-Men videos, so that the children of the fourteen Emergency Service officers lost on 9/11 could learn, directly from their parents’ fellow officers, about the lives their parents lived and the dedication and bravery they showed. The story of all of it, from the first hours to today, is on our World Trade Center pages.
You can read my remarks from Friday morning here.
Ahead of the anniversary, AM New York came to see the Gramercy Park Block Association’s 9/11 archives: fifty photo albums from the eight months after the attack, more than twenty binders of clippings, and the cards and drawings children sent from around the world — the ones officers would read, and weep over, coming off the pile. You can read their story here.
Twenty-five years have passed. The bonds remain. The promise remains. To everyone who stood with us on Friday — thank you.
With much love and gratitude,
Arlene Harrison
President, Gramercy Park Block Association
Friday Morning at the 13th Precinct
Photographs by our neighbor Ira Fox
Photographs from earlier ceremonies are on our World Trade Center pages.
Photographs
