At the “Tribute to Our City” Reception, neighbors come out and share their lunches on Havemeyer Street while enjoying live performances by New York based artists.

During the sidewalk reception, friends and neighbors come to the City Reliquary to view this year’s “Tribute to Our City” Community Collection. A wide variety of items have been displayed this year which pay tribute to New York while remembering September 11th. The items on display have special meaning to their owners and show the diversity in how fellow New Yorkers remember and pay tribute to their city through the collection of personal artifacts.

“I moved to New York three weeks before 9/11, and I had just started seeing someone. The day after the towers were hit, I took a backpack with clothes and some CDs and we drove in his SUV to RI where he had friends and I had family. We were stuck in traffic for a long time and I remember listening to this CD. Even though it was such a crazy, awful time, it was also the time when we started to really get to know each other. He’s still one of my best friends and I always think about that trip when I listen to this CD.”

“When I moved to New York in October ’02 I visited my aunt in her temporary office in the Woolworth building. She had lost her building (#7) and many friends and colleagues on 9/11. This photo of her, myself, and my brother was on her desk. It had been in the bottom of a shoebox of snapshots, but now almost seemed like a picture of lost world.”

“I bought this card in Woodside, Queens after I walked with friends over the bridge from Manhattan that day. I felt sort of weird buying it – reacting to the events of the day with an act of commerce seemed almost blasphemous – but it still felt like the right thing to do. I had to fold it to put it in my wallet (an oversized tooled leather mexican thing, big enough to hold foreign currency) but once that was done, I didn’t give it much thought. But in the months and years afterward, when I cleaned it out, I found I couldn’t throw it away, or even put it away in my box of mementos. The tears are really just from being toted around for so long. I lose things all the time, but you know how it is, the things you think you’ll surely lose because you don’t need them wind up being the things you keep for the longest. Every time I opened up my wallet and cleaned it out, I would fold it back up, and put it back in. Mostly, I used it to divide business cards and membership cards, to keep security cards from demagnitizing credit cards, stuff like that. I figured I’d know what to do with it at some point. And, when [my friend] Emily told me about [this] project, I did.”

This photo album was found near a garbage can and filled with photos taken at the World Trade Center. Some photos show a proud chef in full uniform with his equally proud parents. While the full story of this album remains a mystery, it seemed essencial to its finder that the photos not be erased from history by falling into the waste basket. Perhaps the original owner found the images too difficult to keep, but stopped short of disposing of them completely and decided to leave them just to the side of the garbage can. Now the annonymous finder may serve as a gaurdian of these images so that the memories they represent can survive.