Beginning on September 14, tables with lengths of yellow ribbon were set up outside the south entrance of Memorial Hall, staffed by volunteers from student organizations and the University faculty and staff. Campus community members were invited to use the ribbons to write personal reflections on the week’s events, messages of support for the families of victims, as well as hopes for the nation’s future. 

Please note that captions for all images and transcriptions of the ribbons shared here may be viewed by clicking the “i” icon to the right of this text.

Ribbons were then tied to rope lines stretched in a series of low rows across the Green. Students, faculty and staff, Newark community members and other friends of the University were encouraged to spend time reading these messages and pausing in the Ribbon Garden throughout the day. Participants were also able to make donations to the American Red Cross when filling out their ribbons.

The Ribbon Garden remained on the Green from September 14 through September 23, 2001. Over 4000 ribbons were added to the garden during that time, with widely varying messages, both wordy and succinct. Hopes for future peace and national healing hung beside angrier messages, while voices mourning the many dead were juxtaposed with thankful messages from those who personally knew survivors in New York and Washington DC. The Ribbon Garden stood as a microcosm reflecting the many conflicting emotions of that time.

Having amassed this campus-wide reaction to 9/11, the University fortunately made the decision to permanently save the ribbons and their messages. As the Ribbon Garden was taken down in late September 2001, ribbons were collected and transferred to the University Archives and Records Management (UARM) office in Pearson Hall. Here the process began to stabilize the ribbons for preservation, sorting, flattening and numbering each ribbon and then starting the process of recording the thousands of messages shared in the garden.

Over 150 volunteers from throughout the campus and the local community assisted UARM staff in this process.  Many of these volunteers worked to transcribe each ribbon and entered the messages into a searchable database. For those ribbons with drawings, descriptive text was created (i. e. a drawing of a heart and American flag.) Native speakers and scholars of 17 languages were consulted to translate the many ribbons partially or completely written in languages other than English.

After the transcription process was completed, UARM staff and volunteers packed the ribbons into numerically-ordered bundles, placed these bundles in archival storage boxes and maintained the collection in climate controlled storage within University Archives.

Even with proper handling and careful storage, these ribbons have grown more fragile over the past twenty-five years. As volunteers were setting up and supplying the ribbon garden, they purchased a wide variety of ribbons, focusing on color, not necessarily on quality.  This type of decorative ribbon is designed to be a transient material, never meant to last decades. For this reason, the ribbons themselves can no longer be displayed, and UARM staff has begun the process of scanning the ribbons to preserve their content.

The small number of ribbons shared here are representative of wide categories of messages that can be found within the collection. Many, many people offered prayers on their ribbons – prayers for victims and their families, first responders, the communities where the attacks took place, for hope, for courage, for the blessing of the nation and for peace. 

(For those who would like to see more of the collection that has been scanned this far, please click the related pages tab to the right of this text.)

Other ribbons reflect the anger, confusion, and deep grief of those days with calls for revenge against the nations and groups supporting the terrorists, calling for national demonstrations of power and some sort of justice to be done for the victims.

Those adding messages to the garden used their ribbons in a variety of ways. While many wrote on the ribbons horizontally, some used their ribbons vertically to fit more text. Others wrote on both sides of the ribbons or added simple drawings or stickers to their ribbon. However simple or complex the design, the message on each ribbon represents a person dealing with their own emotions and reactions, whether from a remove or knowing victims or their families personally, like the person who wrote this ribbon, expressing sympathy for a loved one who had lost their father.

Members of the University’s international community were no less touched by the events of 9/11, and a number of them chose to leave messages of support and care in their native languages.

In the aftermath of the terrorist acts, people from many nations found unity in their common shock and grief.

Since the University’s central campus is located in the middle of Newark, it was natural that the Ribbon Garden became a center of response and remembrance for community members as well. Families of faculty, staff and students, as well as those who simply lived nearby, could easily access the garden on South Green and take a ribbon to add their own reflections.

A number of the ribbons memorialize particular people lost in the attacks, whether local to the Newark area or someone known to the author of the ribbon. This particular ribbon memorializes Matthew Flocco, a Newark native serving in the Navy, who was killed in the attack on the Pentagon.  

The first responders of the Fire and Police Departments of New York City were also memorialized and honored on many of the ribbons for their enormous heroism on September 11 and their ongoing response in the recovery efforts at Ground Zero. This particular ribbon honors and prays for FDNY, NYPD and all rescue professionals. The ribbon’s author also showed great intentionality in writing their ribbon, including a range of lyrics from Billy Joel’s Miami 2017 and a drawing of an American flag.

The flag drawing also helps to illustrate the problematic nature of preserving transient materials like these ribbons written with permanent markers.  The flag has clearly become smudged by the ink from the drawing bleeding out into the ribbon, and there is no way to reverse this process. Fraying can also be seen on the edges of the ribbon when zooming in on the image.

Here, another ribbon honoring first responders shows fraying and tears in the material. A number of the ribbons in the collection are beginning to tear along weaker areas of their fabric or paper, despite proper storage and minimal handling. Since the ribbons spent several weeks exposed to the elements while hanging in the ribbon garden, many have microtears, weakened or fraying borders and other small signs of damage that simply cannot be repaired due to the nature of the material.

Temporary and spontaneous memorials rise after many events, from traffic accidents to the passing of a notable person to major disasters. Many items added to such memorials, like these ribbons, are not designed to last for the long term, and present preservation challenges to institutions large and small. UARM staff have begun scanning the ribbons to maintain the messages of the University’s September 11 Memorial Ribbon Garden in perpetuity, but they can only slow the degradation of the ribbons themselves.

The University of Delaware has continued to mark the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks over the years.  In 2002, a large candlelight vigil was held on the South Green with participants seated where the ribbon garden had stood a year before.

University administrators, student groups and local religious leaders looked back at the previous year and remembered alumni and friends of the University who had been lost in the attacks, acknowledged the pain and changes of the world during that time, and called for peace and hope in the future.  Similar vigils were held in several subsequent years, as well as other campus events, including displays of American flags and other patriotic symbols, opportunities to students to reflect looking back at the events of 9/11 from a greater distance and lectures and forums around international issues which have been dedicated to the memory of those lost.

Additional holdings related to 9/11 are available in the Quarantelli Resource Collection at the University’s Disaster Research Center. A few of these are featured here- for research appointments and more information about this collection, email elq-resource@udel.edu

American Dunkirk, 25 Years Later

Twenty-five years after the fact, what does disaster resilience look like? Zoom in close on the events of September 11, and we see that resilience on 9/11 is formed of innumerable points of human activity, like the dots in a newspaper photo or the pixels on a screen, each with their own color, their own shade.

One of those activities on 9/11 was the maritime evacuation of Manhattan. By most estimates, 300,000 to 500,000 people were transported from Manhattan by an improvised fleet of tugs, ferries, sightseeing boats, and other harbor vessels. With destinations in New Jersey or other points in New York City, a shoreside support system evolved to receive and care for the evacuees, eventually including fleets of buses. Some boats stayed on the job for several days, ferrying first responders and supplies. A community disaster will engage people who aren’t disaster workers, and it will show that high-tech is an aid, not a substitute. When cell phones were out during the evacuation, and radios were jammed with traffic, the sailors used hand signals. When firefighters needed to replace the damaged infrastructure at Ground Zero, a retired fireboat, the John J. Harvey, was there with its vast pumping capacity.

Since 9/11, we have developed high-tech tools for communication, and drones have added a new set of capacities for gathering images and other data. But disasters still demand basic work and refresh the importance of technologies that had been considered slow or inefficient or obsolete, and community disaster response depends on the creativity and improvisation of regular people working alongside official responders. Twenty-five years on, onsite work by human beings in an affected area is central to disaster management, and as yet there is no replacement for the ingenuity, local knowledge, and stamina of people closest to disastrous events.

Flight 93 National Memorial Commemorative National Monuments Token – 10^th Anniversary

This commemorative National Monuments token was created in honor of the 10^th anniversary of the September 11^th attacks in the United States. The front of the token has the number 93 in the center, in reference to the American Airlines flight number of the airplane that crashed in rural Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, surrounded by the traditional 40 stars to represent the 40 passengers and crew who took action on that day to thwart an attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Flight 93 memorial site in Shanksville, PA is featured on the reverse, along with the text “A common field one day, a field of honor forever.”

Heroes of 2001 Semipostal Stamp

Issued June 7^th, 2002, the Heroes of 2001 semipostal stamp was sold for 45 cents, and proceeds from the sale were transferred to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to provide assistance to the families of the emergency relief personnel killed or permanently disabled in connection with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The stamp was created by USPS Art Director, Derry Noyes, based on a photograph by Thomas E. Franklin of the Northern New Jersey Newspaper, The Bergen Record.

This was the second time a semipostal stamp had been issued- the first was the Breast Cancer Research stamp, which sold from its issue through December 2003.

Map of Building Destruction in Lower Manhattan

Created by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s GIS unit, the map pictured was one of many produced and distributed to responders on-site after the 9/11 attacks. These maps, which contained information relevant to the emerging response (depicting topics such as building damage, feeding site locations, operations centers, etc.) were printed regularly, sometimes daily, to give personnel on the ground a sense of how the response was emerging and keep them up-to-date on emergency operations.

“For more information on these and other items, please visit: https://www.drc.udel.edu/drc-quarantelli-resource-collection/”