The flag that was hoisted above the rubble of the World Trade Center hours after the terror attacks of 9/11 – and which became a symbol of American hope and resilience after it was photograophed by then-Record photographer Thomas Franklin – officially returned to lower Manhattan on Thursday.
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The yacht’s owners, Shirley Dreifus and the late Spiros E. Kopelakis, were so surprised when first told the flag might have resurfaced that Kopelakis wondered whether the call was a prank, Dreifus said.
“I’m honored that the flag will be displayed next to my picture”, he said, adding that he thinks its appropriate home is the National September 11 Museum and Memorial, which does “an especially good job of telling the story of a really painful history, explaining it in a meaningful way”.
What’s known is it showed up at a fire station in Everett, Washington, in 2014, four days after the History Channel featured an episode on its disappearance. He was holding a plastic bag with a 3-foot by 5-foot USA flag inside and a halyard – the rope and the brass and silver hardware used to hang the flag on a pole. It has been donated to the 9/11 Memorial Museum.
First published in The Record on September 12, firefighters raise the American flag at Ground Zero on September 11, 2001.
The flag’s absence, he said, “just felt like a hole in the history of this site”.
An American flag hoisted at ground zero hours after the September 11 terror attacks has taken its place at the World Trade Center complex after disappearing for more than a decade. Somehow, the flag went missing. Chubb CEO Evan Greenberg said in the statement that the return of the flag is a “timely reminder of the spirit of our heroes and the resolve of a great city and a great nation”. New York City officials tried to track it down, to no avail. We were never pressured to say it’s the flag. But a man who said he was named Brian dropped off the flag and an attached halyard at an Everett fire station in November 2014, St. Clair said.
The episode, which uses a grainy video to show that the flag disappeared on the night of the terrorist attack, was broadcast on October 31.
Since then, the flag has been analyzed by police and forensic experts.
And 15 years later – nearly to that unforgettable day – the men who found it are taking it to its rightful home.
Among those who died on that fateful day were 343 firefighters.
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“We got to handle the flag several times”.
