By Mike Littwin
Rocky Mountain News (Colorado)
Copyright 2006 Denver Publishing Company
NEW YORK CITY — Lee Ielpi is your tour guide to hell.
To get there, you walk into a storefront on Liberty Street. The sign says the place is closed. But you know better.
You walk through the door. Lee Ielpi sighs. You get in line. There’s French radio before me, Australian TV after.
This is where Ielpi and others have set up a temporary 9/11 Tribute Center, right across from ground zero. It opens a week from today — a week from the fifth anniversary — and will stay open for maybe five years until a permanent memorial is built.
Admission is free, although donations are welcome. But you know better than to think anything here comes free.
Ielpi - he says just call him Lee - is not supposed to be giving tours this day, just a few days before the anniversary. He’s helping to put up the final touches. But you ask, and he can’t resist taking you through the five galleries. That’s why he’s here.
Attention, he says, must be paid.
They built the $3.4 million center because, Ielpi says, “We saw thousands and thousands of people looking down at a hole who didn’t know what the hell they were looking at.”
And so he takes you into the first gallery, which shows you the Twin Towers before 9/11 — back when they were a two-fisted symbol of American financial might. There’s a video of people passing through the plaza, and the images play onto a nine-foot representation of the towers. It looks like you’re starting off easy — but not with Ielpi.
“Many of the people you see here,” he says, “you’ll never know — because they’re dead. You don’t have to know that. We didn’t put up a sign that says they’re dead. You just have to know this was a beautiful place.”
And then there’s the second gallery. And the beautiful place becomes the chaos of memory. You see a video of firefighters in the lobby, directing the rescue operation, just before the buildings fell.
“Many of these men, many of these men, they’re all gone,” Ielpi says. “They’re not here any more.”
He points to the commissioner. “Gone,” he says. He points to Father Judge. “Gone.”
He points and he points. Gone. Gone. Gone.
He points to the men as they flinch. These are not men who ordinarily flinch, but this is the most extraordinary time. Bodies are falling all around them. These are the jumpers.
“They don’t make much noise when they hit the ground. You watched that French documentary? You hear the noise over and over and over again. That’s only on one side of the tower, and only when a body hits the canopy, not when it hits the ground.”
He stops, looks at you.
“It rained people that day.”
We talk endlessly of 9/11, but we don’t like to talk about the jumpers. You don’t see photos of the jumpers. They jumped because they had no choice. The fire gave them no other option. Ielpi shows me firefighters on the way up the stairs, who would die on the 78th floor. “These men had only one mission. To stop people from jumping from 100 floors up.”
They’re gone.
You take it in. And then you take in Ielpi’s lessons. That’s really why he’s here.
“What you people have to convey,” he says, “is not the sadness, and not that I lost a son, but our ignorance. Unless you convey this, it’s going to happen again.
“It’s probably not going to happen in Denver, right? But what if it happens right now? Does it affect Denver, because right this minute, you’re dead?
He pauses.
“I don’t talk too much like this.”
But you guess that he does. He says he doesn’t know what exactly he wants people to do. Write their congressmen. Get people to follow the bipartisan 9/11 commission’s recommendation. Something.
“You’ve got to fight this terrorism in a different way, in a better way - not by carrying a big stick, but, I mean, by educating. It’s not going to happen if Denver is complacent.”
As I listen about Denver, what I hear is the part about his son. He lost a son. It turns out Lee Ielpi was a firefighter for 26 years. His son Jonathan was 29 and followed him onto the job. It’s what sons of firefighters often do. Sons and fathers and brothers and uncles. Jonathan was among the first to get to the towers.
He called his dad before he left the station. There were 19 men who left from his station.
All of them died.
All of them.
You walk through the galleries. In one, there’s a window frame from one of the planes. They don’t tell you which one. They don’t want to know which one, Ielpi says.
There’s a steel beam from the towers bent into a forbidding form of art.
Complacency, Ielpi says. Ignorance.
There is a wall of more than a thousand photos. In one, Jonathan Ielpi is lying on a bed with his two sons.
There’s a photo of a crushed ambulance. And Ielpi tells me of a fire engine they found with the motor still running.
“This is very powerful,” he says. “You people - I mean this in a nice way - you people on the other side of the river, on the other side of the country, can’t become complacent.”
We look across the room to a helmet and coat in a glass case.
“This is my son’s turnout coat,” he says. “This is my son’s helmet. There were 2,749 people murdered here. There were only 174 whole bodies found. He was a whole body.
“We were lucky. We were very fortunate. When you read a person was identified - this person was identified, that person was identified - they’re talking about pieces of bodies. In this site, 19,948 body parts were found. Jonathan was found whole.”
Lee knows, because he was one of those digging for bodies. He was one of the fathers who came day after day for months. It was early December when he got the call. He carried his son out of the pit.
Of the display of his son’s helmet and coat, he says, “I don’t go there very often. It depends on the day. It depends on the day.”
He looks again.
“That’s ignorance. That’s complacency.”
Yes, he lectures. He’s an activist. He’s a leader of the Sept. 11 Families Association. He helped get this museum built. In these cases, there’s always a debate about how much influence families of victims should have, how much does grief count.
You remember Ann Coulter’s more- than-tasteless remark about the 9/11 wives enjoying their husbands’ deaths.
Ielpi speaks with authority. He was in a rescue squad and you can imagine him telling someone desperately injured that he wouldn’t let him die. He reminds me a little of the post-9/11 Giuliani, with the same kind of New York swagger. He even looks a little like Guiliani. And he speaks with enough confidence to say he doesn’t have all the answers.
You listen, though, when he tells you to look at the badge number on his son’s helmet - 12642. It was originally Lee’s badge number. And when Jonathan died, the number went to his brother Brendan, also a firefighter. They retire numbers of firefighters killed in action - but this one might not get retired. Lee says his grandson Andrew, Jonathan’s 15-year-old, wants to be a firefighter. The number would go to him.
You don’t reduce 9/11 to the story of one family. And yet, it’s hard to know how to tell the story of 9/11 in a way that makes sense. A made-for-TV movie about 9/11 becomes a national controversy. They hold a Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for firefighters Sunday, and it can’t start until the church is cleared by bomb-sniffing dogs. Dick Cheney is on TV to say the administration wouldn’t change a thing about its response to 9/11. Bill Clinton gives a speech about fear-mongering. And I’m watching a person on one of the panel shows say we have too many versions of the story, and I think she’s right.
In Lee Ielpi’s version, he tells a story about a local-TV video featuring his son Jonathan and his crew walking down the street on 9/11. On Liberty Street. Ielpi had never been able to force himself to watch the video, but, finally, years later, he did.
“There were Jonathan’s men coming down the street, and they freeze the video,” Ielpi says. “Everything stops. He’s standing right in front of this place . . . of this place.
“So maybe it was preordained. I don’t have the faintest idea. I’m not intelligent enough to figure those things out.
“But, p.s., I’m here.”
It’s five years later. He is here. And if you want to see him, just check your complacency at the door.