NEW YORK, NY December 15, 2003 —

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For fifty years, the Fresh Kills landfill was a repository for those things New York City determined to be disposable. That role was forever changed when the landfill became a crime lab for the recovery of human remains, personal effects, and evidence from the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. The enormous recovery operation is the subject of an exhibit at the New-York Historical Society. WNYC's Amy Eddings reports.

One way to tell the story of the recovery effort at Fresh Kills is with numbers. On any given day, fourteen hundred people toiled there. They sifted through 1.6 million tons of World Trade Center material. They found four thousand, two hundred and fifty-seven human remains. They retrieved fifty-four thousand personal items. Four thousand photographs. Thirteen hundred vehicles.

The exhibit, Recovery, at the New York Historical Society, attempts to boil down these staggering numbers into something the mind, and the heart, can grasp.

James Luongo: One of the things that I see is like, the aluminum from the side of the building, the facings of the building.

Inspector James Luongo was the police department's top man at the site.

Luongo: I see the rebar. We would curse the rebar every day, because as you walked around, it would jump up and hit you in the leg, or hit you in the shin.

Now, the concrete reinforcement bar is catalogued and under spotlights in a spare, white room. Now, the twisted piles of steel, the small city of trailers and Quonset huts, the conveyor belts and sifting devices, are seen only in photographs on a wall. Special agent Richard Marx headed up the FBI's operations at Fresh Kills.

Marx: So, for us it was a daily thing of seeing this stuff around, and now I'm seeing this in a museum treated with white gloves. So I think it's very - unusual, because history doesn't happen this quick. Suddenly I'm seeing things that I saw a little less than a year ago, and it's a little unnerving.

Sanitation Department Chief Dennis Diggins ran the landfill at Fresh Kills, which had stopped receiving city garbage at the time of the terrorist attacks. It was re-opened for eleven months, just to handle the World Trade Center material.

Diggins: To look around where the World Trade Center material is, and it's all barren and just blank. And when you think of the hundreds of people that were up there, and the activity that was going on, the equipment, the infrastructure it's amazing to see it again. It just brings it back like it was yesterday.

Diggins, Marx, and Luongo are at the exhibition's opening because they were top officials during the recovery operation, but also because they helped make the exhibit possible. Fresh Kills was considered a crime scene, and authorities didn't like the idea of museum officials roaming around. Negotiations took several months. Amy Weinstein is an associate curator of the New-York Historical Society.

Weinstein: And so it was a slow - but rewarding - educational process. We developed a rapport. We saw the fabulous job, the difficult job, that they were doing, and they saw the importance of what we were doing.

Special agent Marx, Inspector Luongo, and Sanitation Chief Diggins became curators. They set aside objects for a consortium of museums, including the Smithsonian.

Some of the more than fifty artifacts on display at the Historical Society have heart-stopping incongruities in them.

In one small display case, there's a round blue and yellow glass paperweight, remarkably intact, save for the web of scratches on its surface.

Across the room is a photograph of two handguns, fused together in a pool of molten metal.

There's a charred, partially melted, fire hose . lying near a dog-eared New York City street atlas, smudged with soot, but still legible.

A few steps away is the crumpled trunk of a white police car, with its number, 1250, emblazoned in blue. Police officer Marcello Paveda was in the car at the World Trade Center when the second plane hit. Parts of that plane fell on the trunk, and hood, of the car. Paveda doesn't like to talk about that. He prefers to remember the good times.

Paveda: My partner and I, we spent close to two years in that vehicle. So. And especially, the day before? He actually waxed the car, the day before.

Rodriguez: I got a photo of it!

Paveda's partner, Jose Rodriguez, flips through a stack of photographs.

Rodriguez: and I brought photos of like, me and my partner in the car before, before the accident, on happier moments, eating doughnuts ..This was the chariot of the fleet. It had the highway lights this was .everybody loved this car.

A set of keys dangle from the dented trunk. Officer Paveda brought them with him to the exhibition's opening.

Paveda: When they called me, I said, I have the keys on me. // And they fit right in the trunk, I go, oh, it still works.

Amy: You're gonna keep the keys.

Paveda: I'm going to keep the keys.

Rodriguez: We're talking about taking the trunk! (Paveda laughs.)

The exhibit, by its very nature, presents what was recovered from the World Trade at Fresh Kills. What was lost is present, too. It pervades the room. Diane and Kurt Horning walk around the room, taking in the exhibit. They lost their son, Matthew, who worked in the Twin Towers. Little of his remains were found.

Diane Horning: One of the pictures in particular shows a gray mound of small particles. And it's labeled as pulverized concrete, and glass, and so forth. But it never mentions cremated remains. And we can't lose sight of that. Of what is there, cremated remains.

The Hornings believe the remains of their son, and of many others who died with him, are in the material that was sifted to a quarter inch in diameter dust that was left at the former garbage dump. The Hornings don't want the dust to remain there. They've formed a group, WTC Families for Proper Burial. Thirteen thousand people have signed the group's petition, requesting a re-sifting of the World Trade Center material left at Fresh Kills. Kurt Horning.

Horning: Here is - Here is Fresh Kills now. But they don't bother to tell people what it's become - something we don't want to accept, but everybody has admitted, it's a cemetery.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has started the process of converting Fresh Kills into a park, and he has said the area where the World Trade Center debris should be commemorated in some way. The Hornings say it's ironic officials took care to set aside objects for museums, while ignoring the tons of sifted debris that they believe contain what's left of their son. Bloomberg's office didn't return calls seeking comment. Sanitation Chief Diggins and FBI agent Marx say it wasn't their decision to make. Police inspector Luongo refuses to discuss the subject.

Luongo: I'm I'm not going to get into that at all. Everything was searched thoroughly. I'm not gonna get into that today.

At the Pentagon crash site, an FBI spokeswoman for the Washington field office says sifted material from that recovery effort was also sent to a landfill. In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, in the forested field where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed, the sifted material was left where it was found.

Wallace Miller: We had the advantage out here, we have a very bucolic area out here, I mean, it could be a park on its own. There are beautiful hemlock trees that are 75, 100 feet high.

Wallace Miller is the coroner of Somerset County, Pennsylvania. He was in charge of the recovery effort at Shanksville. He used the sifted material to fill the crater left in the earth by the airplane.

I mean, it's interesting that it happened at that particular place, but, you know (laughs) it was a quirk of fate. And again, the problems that New York faces .I just really, I just can't even imagine.

Everything about the World Trade Center, and their destruction, and what it took to recover that site, eludes comprehension. Speaking at the New-York Historical Society, Christy Ferer, who lost her husband, is grateful for the Recovery exhibit.

Ferer: And I just want to say, these workers lived eleven months sifting through the debris and the lives that were left behind. The emotional stamina and energy - I don't know whether you all can imagine what that's like, 8 hours a day. But I will forever have that in my heart.

At the World Trade Center site, the task of re-building, and remembering, slowly continues. The Recovery exhibit is a reminder that there is another site where the World Trade Center attacks were played out, another place where what is gone will be remembered. That place is a landfill.

For WNYC, I'm Amy Eddings.