New York Place

“We Will Never Forget”

At the request of Larry Davis, Director of the California Exposition & State Fair, the City of New York donated 125,000 pounds of wreckage for the World Trade Center to be used exclusively for the monument.

The massive I-Beam, weighing 2,000 pound per foot, was extracted from the World Trade Center Site. It had been a horizontal support beam from the second sub-street level floor of the North tower. The I-Beam, along with four other large pieces of steel, were shipped via rail to California.

During the 2002 California State Fair, the raw beam was viewed by over one million guests, giving many of them first direct encounter with the devastation of September 11, 2001.

Laden with fire retardant, it seemed almost inconceivable that the massive WTC structures could have been destroyed by a single senseless act of terrorism.