Exploring the 9/11 Memorial & Museum Object Collection Online, 25 Years Later
In the days leading up to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, I spent some time exploring the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.
I had just started my junior year of high school when September 11 happened. Twenty-five years later, I found myself returning to that history in a very different way, not through the familiar television images of the towers or the large pieces of wreckage that have become symbols of the day, but through individual objects preserved by the museum.
One object immediately caught my attention.
A pair of bloodstained women’s high heels.
They belonged to Linda Raisch-Lopez, who worked for Fiduciary Trust on the 97th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. The light-brown patent leather heels were new and barely worn on the morning of September 11. In the museum photograph, they still look like ordinary professional shoes, the kind someone might have chosen for an ordinary day at the office.
It was the dried blood around the back of the left shoe that made the object difficult to look away from.
According to the museum’s historical notes and curator’s comment, Raisch-Lopez had arrived at work around 7:30 that morning. When she and her colleagues saw flames coming from the North Tower, she decided to leave. She removed her new heels before entering the emergency stairwell and began the long descent barefoot.
She had started on the 97th floor.
That fact alone is difficult to comprehend. A walk down from nearly the top of a skyscraper would have been exhausting under ordinary circumstances.
This was anything but ordinary.
The museum’s account places her on the 61st floor when Flight 175 struck the South Tower above her. She heard a terrible noise and felt the building sway.
Of everything I read about her escape, that was one of the details that stayed with me most. She was still sixty-one stories above Manhattan when the skyscraper around her moved from the force of the impact.
It is difficult to imagine being in her place: not yet knowing exactly what had happened, only that something terrible had just happened to the building she was trying to escape.
She kept going down the stairs, still barefoot, until she reached the concourse and made it outside.
Even then, the escape was not really over. Raisch-Lopez began walking north along Church Street. She had gone several blocks before realizing that she was still barefoot and carrying the heels she had removed high above the city. She put them back on and continued walking.
By the time she reached Canal Street, she heard the South Tower collapse behind her.
Only a short time earlier, that tower had been her workplace. Her desk, her office, the people she had worked beside that morning and the familiar routines of an ordinary workday had all been inside it. Now she was walking away from a building that no longer existed, with no way yet of knowing what had happened to her coworkers.
Still, she continued north.
Eventually Raisch-Lopez reached the Hudson River pier at 39th Street, where people were waiting for ferries to New Jersey. According to the museum’s account, it was another woman waiting in the ferry line who finally alerted Raisch-Lopez that her feet were bleeding.
The barefoot descent and the long walk through Manhattan had left her feet cut and blistered, and after she put the heels back on, blood from those injuries stained them.
The dried blood remains visible on the shoes preserved in the museum’s collection.
Raisch-Lopez eventually crossed the Hudson and was reunited with her family at home in New Jersey around 1:00 that afternoon. She survived, and she kept the shoes as a physical reminder of what she had endured.
There are many objects in the museum collection that carry the dust and destruction of September 11. Some are larger, more recognizable and more immediately associated with the scale of the attacks.
But these shoes affected me more than any of them.
Perhaps it is because they remain so ordinary. They were not emergency equipment. They were not pieces of a building. They were simply a pair of high heels that a woman had worn to work.
The dried blood changes them.
It makes the physical reality of the escape impossible to separate from the object. The shoes are not merely associated with what happened to Raisch-Lopez; they still carry evidence of what her body endured while she was trying to survive.
There is something almost startling about seeing the blood in the museum photograph. At first, it can look like the kind of detail that might have been added to a costume or a film prop to suggest that a character had survived something terrible.
But this is not a prop.
The blood is real.
So is the story behind it.
Raisch-Lopez began that morning as an employee arriving for work on the 97th floor. Within hours she had walked barefoot down dozens of flights of stairs, felt the South Tower sway when it was struck above her, escaped onto the streets of Manhattan, heard her workplace collapse behind her, continued north on injured feet and finally made her way home.
The shoes survived with her.
I may never experience this particular object the way I would if I were standing in front of it inside the museum in New York. An online collection cannot reproduce the physical presence of an artifact or the atmosphere of the place where it is displayed.
But the encounter was still meaningful.
Twenty-five years after September 11, I found myself looking not at the entire catastrophe, but at one woman’s survival contained within a pair of ordinary shoes.
Linda Raisch-Lopez carried those heels down from the 97th floor.
She made it out.
She made it home.
And the shoes remain.
Sources
National September 11 Memorial & Museum
Linda Raisch-Lopez — Pair of Women’s High Heels
Object Collection, Accession No. C.2010.297.1
Object description, historical notes and curator’s comment.
View the object on the museum’s website:
https://collection.911memorial.org/Detail/objects/27714
Object Credit
Pair of heels
Gift of Linda Raisch-Lopez
National September 11 Memorial & Museum Collection