BY IAN M. TORRES
While most New Yorkers won’t attend the 9/11 memorial, everyone in the city looks forward to the Tribute in Light. It is a lasting public art installation that remains a constant, commemorating the events of that day – honoring those who lost their lives and celebrating the unbreakable spirit of New York.
Standing six blocks south of the World Trade Center Memorial, on the roof of the Battery Parking Garage, the twin beams reach up to four miles into the sky and are positioned into two 48-foot squares, echoing the shape and orientation of the Twin Towers. Tribute in Light was created by several artists and designers who were then brought together under the Municipal Art Society of New York. They can also be viewed from a 60-mile radius around lower Manhattan.
Tribute in Light consists of 88 vertical searchlights arranged in two columns of light to represent the Twin Towers. Presented six months after 9/11, Tribute in Light began as a temporary commemoration, becoming an annual event every year thereafter.
Cosmo Wilson, a lighting designer for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, has been helping with the operation of the two-week long process of Tribute in Light since its inception.
“We have 90 fixtures. We’ve had 90 fixtures for I think 18 years, and they all still work. We’ve never had one go down, and if we have a lamp burn out and we replace it, we have two spares in case we need one,” said Wilson.
The annual preparation usually begins on the first day of September. “We are trying to give ourselves enough time, we got to take them out of storage,” he said. This year, however, due to rain, the process began two days later than usual, but everything worked out in a timely manner.
Every year, for approximately 50 weeks, the lamps are stored and then are taken out prior to the event. They have to be put back in place. “They’ll have to be placed in their footprint properly and measured to maintain the design,” Wilson said.
“Then we have to run, we have to run the cables to them. You run the power to them. And so that is generally the first day, we get them set in position. On the second day, we get power to them.”
Once turned on, an inspection is done, making sure all of the lights are working properly. On the third day, focus shifts to the alignment of the lights. At ground level, the lights are adjusted with the help of spotters with binoculars to make sure they’re straight, which Wilson says can be time consuming.
“We also do a thing called bench focus where you focus each fixture so that the beam is the same size – not too fat, not too thin. So that’s just focusing the light, then you actually focus the beam in the sky, and that takes two nights,” Wilson explained.
The process can be time consuming, with potential delays.
“The problem is when it’s raining, we can focus here on the ground, but they can’t see it from the distance, so we have rain nights like this. We come in usually the night before, the 10th, and we turn them on just to check them one last final time.”
Once everything is finalized, the beams are illuminated from dusk on September 11th until dawn the following morning. With periods of 20 minutes in between, the lights are turned off to allow migrating birds, affected by and trapped in the beams, to escape.
The lights are then disassembled and stored. “We pack them up on September 12th. We check the lamps out again, we seal them, we put covers over them. We store them in an enclosed area so the weather doesn’t get to them. They sit there for 50 weeks and then we pull them out,” he said.
“Most people just think they’re always there and they think they’re at the fountains and I think they just think they’re on all the time, but they’re on one specific day, and it’s September 11th.”