By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
A piece of the World Trade Center acquired for a Sept.11 memorial in Princeton will go to St. Paul’s Church, to end a controversy that had erupted because the steel beam had a cross cut out of it.
The beam will go near the former convent, possibly near a prayer garden that will open next year to people of all faiths, said Ray Wadsworth, a former borough councilman who sits on the pastoral council at the Catholic congregation on Nassau Street.
He went before the Princeton Council on Monday, when officials passed a resolution to authorize displaying the 10-foot-long beam at the church. Mayor Liz Lempert called it the “perfect home for the beam.”
“We know the steel’s in good hands,” Councilwoman Jo S. Butler said.
The outcome resolves what had began five years with a plan to create a local memorial and morphed into a thorny legal issue raising questions about the separation of church and state.
The steel was obtained from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 2012; it has been in storage ever since, now draped with an American flag at the firehouse on Chestnut Street. The project met a legal hurdle, however.
American Atheists, a Cranford-based organization, vowed to sue if the beam were made part of a memorial on government property. The group’s objection dealt with a cross having been cut out of the beam, something ironworkers were doing after 9/11 to create keepsakes for victims’ families or to accompany the bodies of victims recovered from Ground Zero.
Town officials put the memorial on hold, with Mr. Wadsworth stepping forward to approach Monsignor Joseph N. Rosie, the leader of the church, about bringing the beam to St. Paul’s. One Princeton firefighter who led the effort to create the memorial and bring the beam to Princeton is happy with where it is going.
“I think it’s a great place, it’s going to be right on Nassau Street,” said Princeton firefighter Roy James outside the council meeting room. “And realistically, it’s going to give the town everything that we wanted to do in the first place. It’s going to give (the beam) visibility, it’s giving to give a place where people can sit and remember and touch and just do whatever they need to do to feel better.”
Details still need to be worked out to move the beam from the firehouse to the church, Mr. Wadsworth said.
Bruce I. Afran, the attorney for American Atheists, said Tuesday that putting the beam on private property “is completely in line with our tradition of religious freedom.”
To mark the 15th anniversary of the terrorist attacks, St. Paul’s had an outdoor display of thousands of small American flags with the names of all the victims killed that day. The tribute also recognized victims of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and the first responders on 9/11 who died of subsequent medical problems they had developed as a result.
“I mean, we had so many people stop by and see it,” Mr. Wadsworth said of the flag display.
