Granted rare access to the World Trade Center site in December 2001, Lucinda Rogers created 40 ink-on-paper drawings from life, capturing the people, places and quiet acts of care that shaped the immense recovery operation. Here, she reflects on her experience of drawing at Ground Zero and documenting the aftermath of September 11.

I went to New York in December 2001 because I wanted to experience the city in its injured state, a place I had loved and drawn since 1988. There was an empty space in the sky where the twin towers used to be seen and at night a white light from the arc lamps glowed just above ‘Ground Zero’.

Strange scenes all around compelled me to draw. Gigantic amorphous pieces of the building being loaded onto trucks, with barriers, checkpoints and mud on the usually clean Wall Street streets. Queues for the roughly constructed viewing platform, the city’s latest visitor attraction. T-shirt stalls with piles of new FDNY designs.

My friend Reverend Pippa Turner suggested getting permission to draw behind the barriers, where she was part of a multi-faith team of clergy whose rota ensured that one of them would always be on the site if needed. They performed a short blessing for any human remains, however small, that were found and brought to the morgue housed in a temporary shed on Broadway before being taken away for identification.

On the edge of the World Trade Center, Saint Paul’s Chapel – built in 1764 and unharmed – shut its doors to the public to become a centre for firefighters and the personnel working on the immense clearing operation. The space was a comfort used by all faiths. Like the streets outside, the chapel did not look normal: upstairs the pews were full of boxes of supplies and the organ was surrounded by camp beds. Downstairs, police in full uniform lay sleeping on the pews. Food donated by fancy restaurants was served from grand silver-covered dishes. The walls of the chapel were covered with hundreds of homemade cards, messages and embroidered banners sent to the rescue workers from all over the country: “Keep Your Spirits Up… Oklahoma Loves You!” The railings on the street held family photos, mementoes and desperate “missing” messages.

I drew at all hours with no agenda except to report what I saw in ink on paper. This might involve short and sometimes profound interactions, but otherwise I worked unnoticed: there was too much else to think about. While making a large drawing at night on the firehouse roof, I became aware of a man sitting further away in the dark, crying. One evening, I was taken on a quick buggy ride to the edge of the enormous craters, known as ‘The Pit’, where I did an impossible ten-minute pencil drawing in the thick of the foul ruins, with their distinct smell.

It was only after the drawings were all finished that I felt emotional and then overwhelmed by the contact I had had with the event. In retrospect, the pictures provided an insight into places where cameras were not allowed at the time.

By now, the story has countless facets and has twisted itself into many different shapes in search of different truths, but I always think back to the people who were given the physical task of clearing the site after September 11. There was a calm, respectful order to their work, but it was fuelled by pain and exhaustion and a collective horror that I will never forget.

All images © Lucinda Rogers.

---

9/11 Concert at Southwark Cathedral

On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, The Outcry Ensemble presents a programme of American and British music reflecting on loss, memory and the human cost of violence at Southwark Cathedral.

From Ives’s questioning stillness and Cage’s ritual silence to Barber’s profound lament and John Adams’s extraordinary On the Transmigration of Souls, this concert honours those who died in the attacks, and all those in America, Britain and across Europe whose lives were lost in the years that followed.