For some, the hill represents New York’s resilience; for others it is an open wound. Below are the ruins of the September 11, 2001 attacks mixed with human remains.
The site in Fresh Kills, on Staten Island, was the largest outdoor landfill in the world until it closed in March 2001.
After Al Qaeda hijackers reduced the Twin Towers to steel and concrete stacks, the site was reopened to house World Trade Center rubble.
Today it is a place that generates dismay for some relatives of the victims.
The first trucks arrived on the night of September 11, 2001, and for ten months Dennis Diggins led the work of transporting 600,000 tons of debris from the “Zero Zone.”
“I don’t know what it would be like if I had a relative here. But I can tell you that the material has been treated with the utmost respect,” Diggins recalls 20 years later.
“It’s not mixed with garbage, there’s a separation,” he adds from the top of the hill from which the Lower Manhattan is seen.
The area became a small town, with thousands of sanitation employees, police officers, FBI and Secret Service agents.
They all combed the site in search of clues, valuables and remains that could help identify the victims.
Kurt and Diane Horning were among the relatives of those killed in these attacks who quickly visited the area. His son Matthew was a database administrator who died when the North Tower collapsed an hour and 42 minutes after it was hit by one of the hijacked planes.
They were stressed as soon as they arrived: the place was full of seagulls and mud. They found a credit card, a shoe, a watch.
One worker told them that for the first 45 days, for lack of equipment, they worked with rakes and shovels.
“The idea was to work within the budget, quickly (…) ‘Let’s show the country’s resilience and not stop the dead.’ And that’s what they did,” Diane says.
Diggins says instead that neither he nor his workers treated the area like a normal landfill and operated “with respect.”
“It was always known that there were human remains. We never stop thinking about it,” he says, visibly excited.
He also claims that once the trucks left the site he hired divers to search the surrounding spring and make sure nothing had been left uninspected.
– “Garbage” –
Between the start and end of the operation, the hill, which offers a breathtaking view of Lower Manhattan, where the Towers were located, rose more than 25 meters.
Separated from the rest of the hill by an insulating layer, the pile of rubble was covered with plastic tarpaulins.
The Horning believe some of Matthew’s remains are buried there. To date only a fragment of his son’s bone has been recovered.
His attempts to remove all the remains were rejected by the city government, then in charge of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
“It was a double loss. Some fans decided it was a good idea to blow my son up in the air. But then my own government decided it wasn’t good enough to bury,” Diane says.
The Horning and other families proposed that the remains be sent elsewhere to Fresh Kills that had never housed garbage, but failed.
In 2005, 17 of them took legal action. They tried to get the case to the Supreme Court, but the judges refused to examine it.
“I personally felt responsible for dragging other families into this. Now they have no hope and I have to live with it,” laments Diane.
The site still dumps more than 40,000 cubic meters of methane per day of decaying garbage deposited there for many decades.
When safe, New York authorities plan to open a memorial park on the site in 2035.
But the Horning are not interested.
“He’s a garbage man,” Diane says. “It’s like on Christmas morning you give your son a nicely wrapped package and when he opens it there’s rubbish inside.”