In the early morning hours of September 11, 2001, Mark Aeling was just waking up when he received a frantic call from family.
“They told me to turn on the TV and right as I turned on the television, I saw the second plane hit the second tower,” Aeling recalled. “It was very intense.”
Within an hour and a half, both towers would be reduced to rubble.
Now, 20 years later to the day, the St. Petersburg artist has re-purposed a significant part of that rubble: the final World Trade Center steel beam removed from Ground Zero.
“There are signs of a lot of heat exposure on the piece of steel, there are spots that look like the inch-and-a-quarter-thick steel plate was pushed around like soft wet clay. It was pushed around by incredible forces,” he said.
