Craft Arts

Dan McWilliams made a spur-of-the-moment decision.

That morning, hijackers crashed two planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. By half past ten, both skyscrapers had collapsed. Fires burned and toxic ash choked the air in New York’s Financial District. Nobody yet knew how many people had died—save that the number would be “more than any of us can bear,” as Mayor Rudy Giuliani told reporters that afternoon.

McWilliams, a firefighter with Brooklyn’s Ladder 157, was walking past the North Cove marina, just a block from where the towers once stood, when he spotted an American flag on a yacht. Inspiration struck, and he took it, enlisting fellow firefighters George Johnson (also Ladder 157) and Bill Eisengrein (Rescue 2) to carry the flag to the southeast corner of the wreckage—what would later be dubbed “Ground Zero.”

Spotting a