A Sept. 11 relic gets a hero’s welcome

As they stepped inside the hangar, nine years fell away.

Todd Nelson was back in Alaska, nursing a hangover. Frank Decaro was pulling the day shift at a press shop. Kim Jacobs can’t remember where he was as the second plane banked and throttled up over Manhattan, but he can’t forget his first thought, almost childlike in its wonderment: Is this war?

Like much of the rest of America, the three men from Montgomery County, Pa., have moved on since Sept. 11, 2001. But Hangar 17 hasn’t. Tucked between runways at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, it hasn’t changed by a single degree or drop of humidity in nearly a decade. Walking into this mammoth warehouse this month, they first caught sight of a row of salvaged bicycles, still locked to a rack by the messengers who left them behind in 2001.

And all around them were the twisted and tortured beams of the former World Trade Center.

“Unbelievable,” said Nelson. A construction worker, he had rented a video camera to document his visit. He swung it around, zooming out and out and out. “I look at this stuff every day for a living and it don’t mean anything. But this does.”

Nelson took it all in — rows of crushed police cruisers, eerily clean subway signs, monstrous trident beams that once lined the bottom floors of the north tower and the south tower. But again and again, his camera turned toward Evidence #H-0146, a 13-foot steel I-beam that had come to represent so much of his hopes.

On a recent Saturday, Nelson and his friends joined hundreds of motorcyclists on a 90-mile journey to deliver the beam to its new home at an American Legion post in eastern Pennsylvania, an hour’s drive north of Philadelphia. Just as it did for one of the towers, the beam will provide the backbone for a Sept. 11 memorial that’s being built in East Greenville by the Sons of the American Legion Squadron 184.

Decaro picked his way through the rubble in the hangar, snapping pictures. During the ride up, he had cracked bawdy jokes and cut off drivers with the delight of a New York cabbie.

But in Hangar 17, he was quiet.

“Geez,” he said. “It’s like it happened yesterday.”

They’re here for # H-0146, a beam that weighs more than 6 tons. It once held up a floor joist in one of the towers and now looks like a giant police nightstick.

For years, the Port Authority kept the wreck that was the World Trade Center locked up as restorers labored to preserve whatever they could. Now the remains are being split up, sent to museums, municipalities or nonprofit groups that ask for them. The Sons planned a giant motorcycle procession to take #H-0146 back to East Greenville.

Strung out along a state road that quickly gives way to farms and low-rise industrial parks, East Greenville is one of those towns where you can still know everybody. Just half a square mile and with little more than 3,000 people, it has one foot in the past and one in the present — the 86-year-old Grand Theater sits next door to a Subway sandwich shop. Drive down Main Street and someone will invariably honk a greeting.

The beam will be part of a memorial that includes two mini twin towers, built with concrete the Sons poured themselves, and a stone Pentagon. They’ve called the beam by its evidence number, but in conversation, it’s just the Steel.

Through repetition, the name took on a talismanic quality. We’re taking the Steel home. Nobody is going to stop us with the Steel around.

Before the trio from East Greenville left the hangar, Peter Gat, who has supervised the cataloging and conservation of tower relics, told them to wait. He looked around his desk and pulled out a flag, put it back, found a bigger one. For as long as the steel beam had sat in Hangar 17, he explained, this flag had flown beside it.

“Put this on top of it,” he said, handing it to Nelson.

The man was speechless.

With a few final clangs, the Steel was secured on the rollback trailer, and Nelson fist-bumped Decaro. Driving the beam to the Marriott Courtyard in Newark, where it would spend the night, Nelson marveled, “Everyone passing by here probably thinks we’re just hauling scrap metal.”

The next morning, the procession, buttressed by a police escort, got moving with a roar. Bikers flashed the victory sign and tooted their horns.

Hundreds lined the streets of East Greenville and nearby Pennsburg to greet the procession, and hundreds more waited at the post.

When it finally arrived, the party began in earnest. Nelson climbed onstage for a speech. Jacobs met up with his old Legion friends. Decaro got a beer.

The beam sat in the rollback, parked alone behind the monument. It was a homecoming — but it was very far from home.

amcgill@mcall.com