Grand Canyon: Common Ground in a Beautiful Place

In the parking lot near the Grand Canyon Visitor Center was a large group of Americans of South Asian descent, separated from us by a half dozen empty parking spaces. Five or six of them came over and the biggest guy asked, bluntly, “What is this for?”

Jon, in an explanation he’d already given a few dozen times but continued to do so with sincerity and humility, explained the connection of the I-beam cross found in the Trade Center rubble and this one. Then he invited them to write notes and put them into the heart of the cross.

For the first time, we saw people balk at the idea.

“You mean, like a prayer?” one of them asked.

“Could be,” Jon answered. “Or just a quick message, whatever you want.”

“But we’re not Christian.”

The idea, the question, had never come up until this moment. I wondered if Jon had considered the thought. I know I hadn’t.

“It’s all right,” Jon said. “To me this cross is a symbol for all people, all races, all backgrounds and religions.”

“How does this represent all religions?” asked a young man named Malind.

“Different parts come together to make this piece,” Jon explained. “On 9-11 all these firemen, and other people too, were all running around trying to help people. It didn’t matter who was what color or race or religion, it was just people sacrificing themselves to help others. It was people coming together. And I guess that’s what this piece means to me.”

I’m not sure if they were wholly convinced, but Malind and his friends quietly wrote notes and put them in the cross. I couldn’t hear what they were saying when they were back with their group. I only saw Malind and the others gesturing and pointing at the cross as they spoke.

Calabasas, CA: Too Young to Remember. Too Moved to Forget.

Dr. Bob Dworkoski spoke quietly, eyes taking everything in. ‘It’s hard to put into words. This is just a moving, powerful experience.’

The Headmaster of Viewpoint School went on to explain that he ‘didn’t know how having this sculpture come to campus would work out.’ Watching his students reaching into a box of paper and pens, writing down their thoughts and climbing a stepladder to slip their notes into the heart of the cross it was clear that the message – some message – had gotten through.

What does 9-11 mean to someone who was five years old at the time? To someone who was too young to have any memory of that day? To someone who didn’t even exist ten years ago, and only knows of a place called New York from TV?

Holding an almost impossibly heavy chunk of steel from the World Trade Center in their hands, the students seemed to grasp, to some degree, the horror of that day.

As time goes by these young men and women, these rough-and-tumble boys and giggling girls, will journey into adulthood. As they do, they will gain some kind of clearer understanding of just what happened on that terrible morning – and how the world they would eventually inherit had been changed forever.

Brentwood, LA: Official Unveiling at Leslie Sacks Art Gallery

This morning we found ourselves in the middle of a lights-flashing police cruiser and fire engine escort, winding down the canyon road and out onto the Pacific Coast Highway toward Brentwood and Leslie Sacks.

Reverend Georgiana Rodiger led a prayer and blessed the cross with holy water from the Jordan River. (Yes, that Jordan River.) Jon offered his thoughts, expressing his hope that everyone who looks upon this cross will reflect on their own lives and think of their place in a world that is much bigger than any of us.

I read the names of the firefighters stenciled in gray on the backs of their heavy yellow turnout gear. One of the men, white-haired and tanned, with weathered skin and deep eyes, was named Yamashiro.

Afterward we got to talking, and I found out that years ago his parents had emigrated from Japan and settled in Hawaii where they grew pineapples and sugar cane for a living. He knew a few people back in Japan, though he didn’t visit much. I wondered if he’d felt more affected by Japan’s disaster of a couple months prior than he had in the aftermath of 9-11. He was in the unusual position of being in the middle of the two disasters, both geographically and in terms of his past and present heritage.

I didn’t broach the subject. It didn’t really matter. I wanted to know more about the trip his parents had taken, leaving their country to start something new in a place far from home.

Official Press Release: St. Peter's 9-11 Cross

Jon took the hunk of Trade Center steel from my hands and put it back on his workbench. “We’ll leave in about three days,” he said. “After the unveiling.”

“Be weird to leave before the unveiling.”

“Wiseass. I mean right after. On Wednesday. Lee wrote up a press release for it. He’s putting it out first thing tomorrow morning so we pretty much have to get this thing done by then and hit the road."

“Press release, nice.”

“Yeah, I think it would be cool to get a little attention. Oh yeah, that reminds me. I hired a PR firm to help us get in touch with people in the cities we’re going to.”

“You mean like DC and New York?”

“Yeah, plus a few other places. We should sit down later and plan out a route. I’m thinking we go through Nashville.”

Three days. That would make it May 18^th. We’d be on the road for four or five days, a week at most. Even if we took a little longer my wife would be fine, staying with my mom, having some help with the boys. Still, her spoken sentiment of ‘Take your time! Have fun, and be careful!’ would only hold up for so long. A cross-country trip with an old buddy sounded great. But so did figuring out the rest of our life.

Artist Jon Krawczyk and 9/11 Memorial Cross

Begin Pilgrimage to St. Peter’s Catholic Church, N.Y.C.

Unveiling and Departure Wednesday, May 18, 8:00 AM

Los Angeles, CA – May 16, 2011 - Los Angeles sculptor Jon Krawczyk has completed fabrication of a fourteen foot tall stainless steel cross incorporating fragments of steel from the World Trade Center. These relics of 9/11 were provided by the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum, presently under construction at the site of the World Trade Center. The base of the cross will serve as a podium for a stainless steel book, still in fabrication, whose pages will be engraved with the names of those who perished as a result of the 9/11 attacks.

Krawczyk’s 9/11 memorial will take the place of the cruciform I-beam girders found standing in the ruins of the World Trade Center, then moved to St. Peter’s Catholic Church near Ground Zero. St. Peter’s, the oldest Catholic church in New York, was damaged in the attacks of 9-11.

Krawczyk’s 9/11 Memorial Cross will be unveiled at Leslie Sacks Fine Art, 11640 San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles (Brentwood) California 90049 at 8:00 AM on Wednesday, May 18th and depart for the East Coast immediately thereafter.

Krawczyk, accompanied by long time friend and author Kevin Kato, will shepherd the artist’s 9/11 Memorial Cross by open truck to Shanksville, Pennsylvania (the crash site of United Flight 93), and the Pentagon in Washington DC, stopping along the way in Santa Fe, Indianapolis, Memphis and Nashville before placing the cross in storage until the original Ground Zero girders cross, now standing at St. Peter’s, is moved later this year to the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

Artist’s statement: “When installed, the cross will be polished to a mirror finish so each and every onlooker will see himself or herself reflected in it, hopefully thinking about those who sacrificed before them, and then considering what their own sacrifice will be. But before they think, I want people to see the beauty first – the beauty of existence, the beauty of the cross, then remember the destruction and find a better way.”

Costs of the 9/11 Memorial Cross are underwritten by a group of anonymous donors, the artist and Leslie Sacks Fine Art. Jon Krawczyk is represented by Leslie Sacks Fine Art.