9/11 World Trade Center Memorial (Gone)
Green Bay, Wisconsin
Two blindingly bright 30-ft tall stainless steel towers, exaggerated in narrowness, stood along the Fox River, next to the Nitschke Bridge at the Neville Public Museum. The prime spot had been taken up by the popular Green Bay Packer Receiver statue until the WTC 9/11 Memorial arrived (then the Receiver was sent packing up the road...).
The WTC 9/11 Memorial was dedicated on June 1, 2005. Names of victims were engraved on the Pentagon-shaped granite base and a 34-inch chunk of an actual WTC girder was mounted on the front. The main inscription read: "In Loving Memory to the Known and the Unknown, the Found and the Unfound."
Literal WTC tower replicas as 9/11 memorials are somewhat rare (most towns opting for somber, artistic abstractions). At the time this went up, there were plans to build 50 more of these memorials, one for every state in the nation plus Washington, DC.
But those plans fizzled; this is the only example.
And that's not such a bad thing. It was rejected by Madison before it came here. Its inscription mixes up the flight numbers of the two crashed airliners. By 2009 its base -- built, it was later learned, of cheaper, interior granite -- was cracking. By 2014 most of its roughly 3,000 engraved names were illegible. And on April 4, 2019, Green Bay finally tore it down.
