KINGSTON – About 75 people
attended the ribbon cutting the Trolley Museum of New York’s exhibit of
PATH Car 143, which survived the World Trade Center collapse 15 years
ago, during the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The debris was
donated by the Port Authority last December, after being stored in an
airport hangar in Queens since the original event. Kingston Mayor Steven
Noble was joined by State Senator George Amedore and Assemblyman Kevin
Cahill, who all made brief remarks.
PATH Car 143 now a permanent exhibit in Kingston
An emotional Mayor Noble cut the ribbon, dedicating the exhibit. He choked up recalling his young son’s reaction to a destroyed police car, one of the other World Trade Center exhibits located behind the main building.
“He saw the NYPD car crushed, and he said ‘dad what happened to that car?’ And I said ‘a building fell on it,’ I didn’t really know what to say. How do you tell a five-year-old boy? But as he gets older, and as we continue to remember, we’ll be able to do that,” Noble said.
Assemblyman Kevin Cahill, center, State Senator George Amedore, right
in the fully restored car
“It meant a lot to us when this train car became available, because it’s something of a touchstone, that we have here in Kingston now, that we can all pass on to the next generations,” said Trolley Museum President Erik Garces. “There are kids in high school who have no memory of those events. In a way that’s good, because children should grow up without fear.”
But Garces said those kids “are not going to have that same sense of purpose that we all felt in those days afterward, when America stood as one.”
The car itself, on the inside, evokes an eerie sense of déjà vu for visitors who were former Manhattan straphangers. Although the electric motors are ruined, and windows have been replaced to keep out rainwater, the intercom still works, as a conductor demonstrated with a welcome-aboard announcement.
