Bicycle
- Description
- Canyon River brand men's mountain bike with blue-green metallic paint, straight handlebars, and eighteen gears. There is an aluminum rack mounted above the rear tire. The bike has three bunches of synthetic flowers secured to it: a bunch of orange and yellow roses is attached to the left handlebar and a bunch of red, white, and blue roses and carnations is attached to the right handlebar. Red roses with white flowers are attached to the rack directly behind the seat. A necklace and a rosary are twisted around the handlebars. The bike is slightly dusty.
- Historical Notes
- Locked to a street sign on Broadway near Cedar Street, a block from the World Trade Center, this abandoned bicycle soon became an impromptu shrine to the messengers and delivery persons presumed to have been killed at the World Trade Center. Flowers, coins, notes, and religious items were left at the memorial in the months that followed. A tribute sign written in English and Spanish accompanied the bike.
Curator's Comment
The abandoned messenger bike shrine quickly came to symbolize the unknown nature of loss following 9/11. According to Michael Raisch, a former Rutgers University art student who documented the bike through sketches and photographs several times, it was suggested that the bike belonged to an immigrant delivery messenger on a breakfast sandwich order who never returned from the Twin Towers. Over time, accounting for the full scale of September 11th victims became complicated by issues of citizenship or worker status. The unknown nature of the messenger bike shrine forces viewers to think about the complexity and diversity of people killed that day.
- Accession Number: C.2015.57.5
- Dimensions: 42 in X 28 in X 67 in
- Dimensions (Metric): 106.68 cm X 71.12 cm X 170.18 cm
- Source: The New York Historical (NYH)
- Credit Line: Collection 9/11 Memorial Museum, Transfer from the New-York Historical Society
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