
On Sept. 11 more than 2 billion pounds of steel came
crashing to the ground. The crash was so powerful it registered on the Richter
scale. The chapel was less that hundred
feet from tower Seven of the World Trade
Center .
It wasn’t until Sept. 14 that anyone was able to inspect
what was left of St. Paul’s. Miraculously,
where workers expected to see a pile of rubble, they instead found a completely
intact chapel. Not a window had been broken (one was cracked). Not an inch of the walls or the roof had been
compromised.
The sycamore saved the church. The tree was crushed by a huge steel beam blown from the tower. Inside St. Paul's
Chapel, from the arched ceiling, fourteen colonial crystal chandeliers swayed
but did not fall.
In the weeks that followed. St. Paul’s became
a place of worship and a place of rest for those
who worked tirelessly at the epicenter of the tragedy. Later the sycamore tree succumbed to the
extensive damage from falling debris and was cut down. Its roots and stump remained at St. Paul’s
until Steve Tobin was commissioned to
excavate and reproduce the root in bronze.
Steve Tobin was born
in 1957 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He
studied theoretical mathematics and worked in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In 1989
he became the first foreigner invited to build his own glass studio in Murano,
Italy and in 1994 built his first foundry, and began to cast bronze.
Mr. Tobin paid for
the entire project. He first considered trying to raise the money, he said, but
decided that it would take too long. So he took out a home equity loan to pay
for everything: bronze, foundry costs, salaries for 10 assistants,
transportation for the stump.
On September 11, 2005
a tree root, sculpted in bronze, was unveiled in honor of the fourth anniversary of
9/11. It took three days to transport the 6,000-pound bronze sculpture 70 miles
from artist Steve Tobin's Pennsylvania foundry to the courtyard of the Trinity
Church at Broadway and Wall St.
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