I was entirely unaware of mostly all of this. But it’s fascinating.
From last week’s New York Times.
For nearly a decade, a large white tent has stood on Manhattan’s East Side, out of urban context and hard against the sooty Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. A gauzy drapery divides the tent space: on one side, a quiet makeshift chapel; on the other, three walk-in storage units containing nearly 14,000 human remains from the World Trade Center catastrophe, air-dried and vacuum-sealed.
Several rounds of DNA-based tests have failed to identify about 9,000 of the remains. The rest have been identified but not claimed, for all sorts of reasons; for example, some families have already buried parts of their loved ones, and cannot bear to do it again, and again.
Also, this:
Of the 2,753 victims who died in New York, 1,121 have yet to have their remains identified.
And also, this:
In the beginning, visitors came daily to the chapel, making appointments to sit in reflection, write notes in a ledger or leave a memento or two. Now, says Benjamin J. Figura, the medical examiner’s director of identification, “we average one or two people a month.”
Oh and then turns out there’s a douchebag element to this:
And in the fall of 2009, a trespassing, drunken lawyer with Ivy League credentials set a fire in the chapel that damaged the roof and destroyed photographs, floral arrangements and toy animals stuffed with meaning.