The museum’s 9/11 artifacts remember the thousands of people who died, but also, when a sergeant’s boots were pulled out of the rubble, the lucky few who survived.
The top of the black leather boots is scratched, with the laces worn. Its plants have completely disintegrated.
“They’ve suffered an ordeal, you can tell right away,” said Jan Seidler Ramirez, chief curator of the 9/11 National Memorial and Museum.
But for JJ McLoughlin, 28, they represent a miracle.
“It’s pretty amazing that someone who has taken up less than 220 floors with these boots has been taken out alive,” he said.
That someone was the father of JJ, the Port Authority Police Sergeant. John McLoughlin, one of 18 people who came out of the wreckage of the World Trade Center after the two buildings collapsed.
“It took a heroic effort by hundreds of people to get my dad out,” JJ McLoughlin said. “There were a lot of bad things that day, but this is a piece that can be looked at and actually thought, ‘Hey, there’s something positive.’
McLoughlin, on duty in Midtown when he boarded the first plane, had years of experience at the World Trade Center. He rushed to the scene to organize evacuation work with a group of four non-commissioned officers. McLoughlin was leading them through the underground plaza between the two towers as the south tower came down, burying them under 30 feet of twisted, burning rubble.
Only McLoughlin and rookie officer Will Jimeno survived the 22 hours it took to extract them from the wreckage, after an epic multi-agency effort that began when a pair of U.S. Marines heard the weak Jimeno screams for help. Lots of cops, firefighters and EMTs cheered as they helped pull McLoughlin’s stretcher out of the hole.
“This rescue lifted the spirits of the nation,” Ramirez said. “No one knew then that there would only be one more living human being.”
The incredible story received Hollywood treatment in the 2006 film “World Trade Center” directed by Oliver Stone, starring Nicolas Cage as McLoughlin.
“My dad isn’t a very sentimental guy,” JJ said. During the months of subsequent recovery, he kept only two items of his 9/11 uniform: the sergeant’s coat of arms and boots.
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“He credits the boots for saving his feet and letting him walk again,” the son explained. It was pure luck that McLoughlin was patrolling and wearing Rocky utility boots that day, instead of normal shoes for his turn at the desk.
“Where he was crushed, the dress shoes would have offered no protection,” JJ said. “But his boots do.”
McLoughlin, now 69, is “a private person,” his son said. “I think he appreciates the museum, but it’s not emotionally something he wants to endure.”
So when the McLoughlins cleaned closets last year as they prepared to sell the family home in Goshen, New York, it was JJ who saved his father’s 9/11 boots from the landfill.
“My dad said, ‘Throw them away; he didn’t help them,'” JJ said. “I’m not the most sentimental person either, but I think I understood that they had a little more significance than maybe him.”
In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, he contacted the closed museum and offered to donate the boots to his permanent collection, joining at least another 20 pairs of shoes (handkerchiefs, slippers, sneakers, needles) already in his treasure.
“All of these objects are a testament to someone’s very specific experience,” Ramirez said.
“In this case, it’s not an escape story, but a story of rushing to help, and then the dramatic rescue story,” he said.
Ramirez compared the more than 70,000 artifacts collected from the museum to the words in a dictionary: the basics of the new narratives that delve deeper into our understanding of 9/11 and its consequences.
“We are constantly building our vocabulary as historians,” he said. “Every time something goes into the collection, we add a piece of the puzzle.”
The museum also aims to pay tribute to the 2,977 people who died in the attacks, he said.
“We try to make sure that these statistics, as bold, horrible and telegraphic as they are, never deprive us of the humanity behind each and every one of the numbers,” Ramirez said.
To accomplish this mission, the curators continue to collect common and accounting objects (a childhood teddy bear, glasses, a half-point piece) that talk about the lives of the lost.
“When families give us these objects, it’s an act of faith: faith in education and faith that we can keep alive in memory through the generations.”
Adding McLoughlin’s boots to the collection, Ramirez said, “I think another candle has been lit.”