Key Takeaways
- The 9/11 Memorial arranges its 2,983 names through “meaningful adjacencies,” preserving relationships among relatives, friends, colleagues and people who bonded during their final hours.
- The design places Richard Barry Ross beside his daughter’s best friend Stacey Leigh Sanders, while Victor Wald sits beside Harry Ramos, who stayed to help him escape the North Tower.
- Architect Michael Arad’s team honored more than 1,200 family requests by building scale models and manually arranging every victim’s card until all requested connections fit.
If you try to find a loved one’s name at the 9/11 Memorial by scanning from A to Z, you won’t get very far. That’s because the 2,983 names surrounding its twin pools were never meant to read like a list. In many cases, the people who were close in life remain close there, too.
Architect Michael Arad, who watched the second plane hit from the roof of his apartment building, rejected the idea of alphabetical order early.
“There are three Michael Lynches whose names are inscribed on this memorial,” he told NY1. “If we were just to write Michael Lynch, Michael Lynch, Michael Lynch, how would you know which name belonged to which person?”
But the arrangement carried more weight than simply fitting thousands of inscriptions onto the Memorial. At the time, remains hadn’t been identified for roughly 40% of World Trade Center victims, meaning many families had no gravesite to visit.
Early plans called for the names to appear at random, an idea that drew pushback from families and ultimately didn’t sit right with Arad either.
“I decided that we should reach out to family members of the deceased and ask if they wanted the names of their loved ones to be arranged adjacent to other victims that the deceased had known during their lives,” he said.
The idea became known as “meaningful adjacencies.” Names are grouped by where people were and who they were with, then arranged to preserve the connections between them.
More than 1,200 requests were ultimately honored. Some families asked to keep relatives, friends and colleagues together. Others named people their loved ones had barely known before Sept. 11, but formed a bond with during their final hours.
As Arad put it, the goal was to keep “family and friends together, as they had lived and died.”
Those connections can tell entire stories in just two names.
Richard Barry Ross was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, while Stacey Leigh Sanders worked in the North Tower and was the best friend of Ross’s daughter, Abigail. She lost both her father and her best friend that morning. Today, their names sit together.
Victor Wald, 49, and Harry Ramos, 45, shared a very different connection. The two men worked three floors apart in the North Tower but had never met until they were trying to escape. When Wald could go no farther, Ramos and a colleague stopped to help him. Ramos ultimately stayed with Wald while his colleague continued down. Neither man made it out, and their names are now side by side.
Making over 1,000 deeply personal requests fit within a single memorial proved incredibly complicated. Experts told Arad it was “statistically impossible,” so his team built scale models and made a card for every victim. One associate spent more than a year moving the names around, trying to make all of the connections work.
“It looked like that room in A Beautiful Mind,” Arad recalled.
In the end, the team found a place for every request. “When you walk up to these panels, you don’t see the order. But, in fact, they are very carefully organized.”
Twenty-five years later, the names still do what he intended. They remember not only who was lost, but who they were to one another.
