For Christina Taylor Green’s family, September 11, 2001, is a day of both tragedy and celebration. It was the day their daughter was born.
Nearly 10 years later, Christina was killed in the Tucson mass shooting that targeted politician Gabby Giffords. She had not yet turned 10.
Dick Eggerding remembers Christina mostly as a baseball player.
“I kind of remember her. I used to go over and watch the kids play,” Eggerding said. “She was a real good hitter. She was up there with the boys.”
Eggerding, 93, is the creator of the Arizona Heroes Memorial in Oro Valley. For the past five years, he has worked to make a tall concrete medallion and garden the centerpiece of a memorial in honor of first responders, five miles away from the field where Christina played Little League.
“I call it a living memorial,” he said. “I wanted it to be freestanding on its own – a living memorial honoring those who get up every morning, plus the dead.”
An angel and three pieces of history##
On the east side of the James D. Kreigh Park stands an angel sculpture measuring 9-feet, 11-inches tall. It faces toward a baseball field where Christina used to play. She was the only girl on a boys’ Little League team, playing with her brother.
It was created by artist Lei Hennessey-Owen. She lives in Pennsylvania and was so moved by Christina’s story that she wanted to make a special art piece, calling the statue ‘Freedom’s Steadfast Angel of Love.’
“It was really hard to watch her sweet parents — her mother, in particular, said something like, ‘She was born on a horrible day of tragedy and she died on a horrible day of tragedy,’” Hennessey-Owen said. “That really hurt all of us to hear that. So, we decided that we were going to do something special for her community and her family.”
Hennessey-Owen contacted a friend, a New York fire chief, to help incorporate artifacts from the September 11 attacks into the sculpture.
The result is one of the few art installations in Southern Arizona that includes artifacts connected to all three crash sites; large rocks from the crash site of flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania close to where Hennessy-Owen lives; metal from the pentagon; and steel from the World Trade Center.
Eggerding added a metal plaque beside the sculpture explaining where each piece came from.
Days before the angel was unveiled, Hennessey-Owen recalled a family friend rearranging the artifacts before they were welded in place.
“He looked at the pieces and he just started placing them the way he thought they should go. And I let him do it because I knew he was a close friend of the family,” she said.
Bringing the World Trade Center to Gila Bend##
The pieces of 9/11 found in Southern Arizona are part of a much larger effort to preserve the physical remnants of the attacks.
Between 2010 and 2016, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey collected and distributed pieces of the World Trade Center to fire stations, police stations, museums, non-profits and memorials around the country.
The Christina Taylor Green memorial inspired Fred Hull to seek a piece for Gila Bend.
“They were going to cut it up and make a memorial thing for that little girl,” Hull said. “So I went back to Gila City Council and said, ‘Hey, they're giving the stuff away. You want to apply.’ They said, ‘Yeah, let's go ahead.’”
After the town received approval from the Port Authority, a Gila Bend resident drove a two-ton, 12-foot-tall steel column from the World Trade Center from New York to Arizona.
It was unloaded by Hull and his friend and initially held in the city firehouse for one year. It now stands in the town’s 9/11 Memorial Park.
“Now, that piece has not touched dirt since we got it in our possession,” Hull said.
For Hull, preserving the artifact is about more than simply displaying it.
“I don't care how we do it, I don't care how disabled a person is, you have to have it where he can get up there and touch it,” he said. “Because it's got a life to it. You touch it and you can feel the electricity in it.”
Remembering without an artifact##
Not every memorial needs a physical piece of the tragedy.
In Tucson, ceramic artist David Campbell created a sculpture in 2002 with eight high school students as part of a Tucson Pima Arts Council summer project.
The work does not contain an artifact from September 11. Instead, it represents the idea of rebuilding after destruction.
“We worked out some ideas, but they kept coming back to wanting to do something that represented coming out of 9/11 stronger,” Campbell said.
Together, they developed an image of a superhero emerging from rubble and holding the Earth aloft. Beneath the sculpture is an inscription: “Together we rise.”
Located along the route to the Tucson airport, the sculpture does not explicitly announce itself as a 9/11 memorial.
For Campbell, that ambiguity is part of the purpose of public art.
“I think that the impact goes maybe beyond what it is actually physically made of,” he said.
Preserving the memory##
Twenty-five years after 9/11, Southern Arizona's memorials preserve different pieces of the same history.
Some use steel and stone taken directly from the sites of the attacks. Others use sculpture and symbolism to represent resilience and recovery.
Together, they give people different ways to remember an enduring tragedy — and, in some cases, to physically encounter a piece of it.
Eggerding continues to advocate for an annual gathering of remembrance at the angel dedicated to Christina Taylor Green. But as the years pass, he has also become concerned about the sculpture's future and the maintenance it requires.
“That's why I'm going to make darn sure that this thing is maintained properly,” he said. “I don't want it to fall into the wrong hands.”
This story is part of the AZPM News series "Remembering September 11," exploring how 9/11 affected Arizonans and continues to shape our communities.
