By Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
LOWER MANHATTAN — When a friend brought Bill Spade a World Trade Center Christmas ornament that was found amid the wreckage at Ground Zero, Spade didn’t want to look at it.
Spade was the only member of FDNY Rescue 5 to survive 9/11, and the flattened ornament once sold at the center’s gift shop brought back too many memories of the attack.
Five years later, though, Spade began to see the ornament — which has "Peace on Earth" inscribed on its back — in a more positive light, and he recently lent it to a new exhibit at the Tribute WTC Visitor Center.
"The ornament, like New York, was damaged, dented, bruised, but it stood strong," Spade said in a statement accompanying the display. "It reminded me that when the towers were coming down, there was only one thing I really thought of and that was my family; my wife and two boys."
The new Tribute Center exhibit, called "Memories & Meanings: Objects Speak," showcases 22 items that people saved after 9/11, and their own words about how their view of the object changed as time passed.
"People are beginning to look at objects of horror with a greater sense of compassion, acceptance, and a little less pain," said Wendy Aibel-Weiss, director of exhibits and education at the Tribute Center. "A certain amount of healing has taken place."
Also on display are a cup and saucer from Windows on the World, a pair of men's dress shoes that a Port Authority worker was wearing when he was evacuated and the ID card of a Cantor Fitzgerald employee who was killed. One of the most powerful pieces is a tree collage made with scraps of the singed paper that floated over to Brooklyn after the attack.
Karen Seiger, 45, a Battery Park City resident, contributed the set of pocket dictionaries that sat on her desk in the World Financial Center. Seiger, who did international marketing for American Express, regularly used the rainbow of Russian, Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian and German dictionaries in her work.
She left the dictionaries behind when the World Financial Center was evacuated on 9/11, but they were returned to her in a box several months later, along with the other items from her office. The sight of the dictionaries, which had traveled with her around the world, was heartbreaking, she said.
"It’s about loss and the changes in the world that nobody would have expected," said Seiger, who has returned to using the dictionaries regularly for translations. "When I look at the little dictionaries, I see life before and life after."
The "Memories & Meanings" exhibit at the Tribute Center, 120 Liberty St., will run through fall 2011.
