BY JENNIFER KOHLHEPP
Staff Writer
PHOTOSBY SCOTT PILLING staff Chet and Jamie Halka, of Halka Nurseries in Millstone, watch as World Trade Center Memorial Foundation members look over their trees for planting at the ground zero memorial for those who perished on Sept. 11, 2001. At left, some of the many swamp white oak trees chosen for the memorial. Millstone Township has been chosen to keep some lives safe until ground zero is ready to sustain them.
A 30-acre parcel owned by Millstone’s Halka Nurseries at the corner of Back Bone Hill and Stillhouse roads will serve as the holding facility for more than 400 trees that will ultimately be planted at the former World Trade Center site in a memorial being created to remember and honor the thousands of people who died on Sept. 11, 2001, as well as those killed in the Feb. 26, 1993, bombing.
“My father supplied the trees for the World Trade Center, and it’s nice to be able to do the memorial for them,” Chet Halka Jr., owner of Halka Nurseries, said.
The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation Inc. is the nonprofit that was founded in 2005 to realize a memorial at the World Trade Center site. The foundation is raising the funds for, overseeing the design of and will ultimately operate the $510 million memorial. On Nov. 17, members from the foundation toured Halka Nur-series to see the holding facility and select trees for the memorial.
Joe Daniels, president of the foundation, said, “Selecting the trees has added another dimension to this project. It’s the other, living and organic side to the heavy construction. It’s great and uplifting.”
Designed by Michael Arad and Peter Walker and Partners, a California-based landscape architecture company, the memorial, called “Reflecting Absence,” was selected from a worldwide design competition that included 5,201 submissions from 63 nations.
“This is the most important project I’ve ever worked on,” Walker said. “We’re commemorating an event in modern times that many Americans feel the most about. It’s emotional, immediate, and it has changed all ways of life.”
PHOTOSBY SCOTT PILLING staff Joe Daniels, president of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, looks out over the part of Halka Nurseries in Millstone where the trees for the memorial at ground zero will be held until they can be planted in New York City. The memorial consists of two voids that reside in the original footprints of the Twin Towers surrounded by a plaza of trees. Waterfalls will cascade down the sides of the voids into recessed pools with the names of those lost arranged around the pools at plaza level.
The trees and memorial will stand atop a seven-story below-ground museum designed by Davis Bordy Bond. The museum will document, preserve and describe the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and Feb. 26, 1993.
“The memorial will demonstrate the process of regeneration and life and vibrancy, as well as offer a place for people to come to mourn the loss of so many innocent people,” Lynn Rasic, the foundation’s vice president of public affairs, said. “It will be a place to come to look toward the future and to be inspired and … filled with hope.
Landscape architect Peter Walker (l-r) and arborist Paul Cowie discuss their plans for the World Trade Center memorial site. “Through the seasons, the trees will add a different feeling to the memorial,” she continued. “In the spring they will be budding and growing leaves, and in the summer they will shade people visiting the site. In the fall they will provide color, and in the winter the bare branches will add a different feeling to the memorial.”
Halka recalled that he was selling trees on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
“I remember my wife, who was the municipal clerk at the time, called me and said an airplane just flew into the Twin Towers,” he said. “We turned on the TV at the office and saw what was going on.”
Halka’s daughter said that although the events of Sept. 11, 2001, did not impact her family directly, the day was a terrible experience shared all over the world.
“It’s a great honor to be involved in something that will be remembered by everybody,” she said of having the opportunity to work on the memorial project.
No stranger to filling tall orders for trees, Halka Nurseries has supplied stock for numerous memorials and the White House as well. The nursery is also expected to provide trees for the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., according to Halka.
Walker said the memorial will feature approximately 400 swamp white oak and sweet gum trees, which will create a canopy over the plaza in the warmer months.
The surface of the Memorial Plaza will be made of elongated pieces of stone and low plantings of grass, mosses and flowering ground covers. The design provides benches for visitors to the memorial, area residents and workers. The memorial glade, a small clearing in the grove, will create a space for remembrance ceremonies. The glade will be ringed by sweet gum trees.
“The sweet gums will turn the glade red about the time of Sept. 11,” Walker said.
Walker said his firm’s memorial design is intended to remind the visitor of the natural cycle of life. The Memorial Plaza will convey a sprit of hope and renewal, he said.
In September 2005, the first five trees for the plaza were tagged in Eastport, N.Y. By the end of this year, the foundation is expected to tag a total of 437 trees so that there is an overstock, according to Walker.
“We have to look at over 2,000 trees to get 400 matching trees of which 350 will be swamp white oaks and 50 will be sweet gums,” Walker said.
The memorial project’s arborist, Paul Cowie, said, “Trees are just like people in that they all have personalities and characteristics. To find that many to match is going to be a difficult thing.”
The trees will all come from within a 500-mile radius of the World Trade Center site, primarily from New Jersey, with additional trees from locations in Pennsylvania and near Washington, D.C.
“There is a symbolic reason to having trees from each of the locations that there was a plane crash on Sept. 11 at the memorial site,” said Lynn Rasic, vice president of public affairs at the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.
The trees that the foundation selects for the memorial will be fertilized and pruned in their current locations until spring 2007, when they will be dug up, boxed and transported to the holding facility at Halka Nurseries. At the holding facility, the foundation will have the trees monitored, irrigated and fertilized. They are expected to grow to 25 feet by the time they are transported and installed at the plaza in 2009, according to Rasic.
“The trees are supposed to be all uniform when they are moved to the plaza,” Rasic said.
The trees will be moved to Halka Nurseries, which is 38 miles “as the crow flies” from ground zero, in order to acclimate them in a climate that resembles that of the World Trade Center site, according to Halka. They will grow accustomed to one another and the microclimate conditions of the area. During the holding time, weak trees will be culled from the group, according to Walker, and the rest of the trees will be pruned, fertilized, watered and protected against pests.
Peter Walker and Partners decided to use swamp white oaks and sweet gums because the trees are similar in many regards, which will allow for a uniform feel throughout the memorial plaza. Both species can grow to over 80 feet in conditions similar to those in lower Manhattan, and have a strong, sturdy appearance and course textured foliage, according to Walker. They increasingly resemble each other as they age, he said.
Swamp white oaks and sweet gums are extremely hardy trees that are accustomed to growing in both swamps and relatively dry conditions. White swamp oaks are able to withstand urban conditions and are among the easiest trees to transplant, according to Walker.
“White swamp oaks are the least tender trees,” Walker said. “New York is a tough place to grow trees. These trees are not susceptible to the normal problems that trees have in the city.”
Halka added that the trees are also resistant to an Asian beetle that can kill trees, which is prevalent in New York City.
According to Walker, the trees selected have a life expectancy of 100 years.
Walker said it will take a few months of planting two to four trees each day to install them all at the memorial site before the memorial opens in 2009.
Once placed in the plaza, the trees will actually sit and grow atop the underground museum. A series of precast concrete tables will suspend the plaza over troughs of planting soil that run the full width of the plaza. The suspended paving system will allow the soil to remain uncompacted. Many urban trees live in stressful conditions because they are planted under pavement where people walk and drive, according to Walker, compacting the soil so that roots cannot gather water and nutrients.
Walker said his firm started using the suspended paving system about 15 years ago when designing the landscaping for Sony headquarters in Japan.
“This technology is rare,” he said. “It’s not the conventional way that you plant trees in the backyard.
“We have had extraordinary success with this method, though,” he added. “No trees have died.”
The Memorial Plaza will be one of the most sustainable, green plazas ever built. The project is pursuing Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification under the LEED New Construction (NC) Green Building Rating System, a program of the U.S. Green Building Council.
“This will be one of the biggest open spaces in lower Manhattan,” Rasic said.
The memorial has also been designed to collect the stormwater that falls into tanks below the plaza surface. The stormwater storage potential will exceed the irrigation needs of the plaza so daily and monthly irrigation requirements for the trees will be net by the harvested stormwater.
Through the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., $250 million in government funding will be provided for the memorial’s construction. A visitor orientation center will be funded through a separate $80 million allocation from the state of New York.
The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation is raising $300 million in private support for the memorial, of which $260 million will go toward constructing the memorial and the museum and $40 million will be designated for museum planning and foundation operations.
The foundation has already raised $145 million in private donations from more than 26,000 donors from 18 countries and all 50 states.
For more information or to make a donation, call 1-877-WTC-GIVE (982-4483) or visit www.buildthememorial.org.