Tears flow at N.Y. Sept. 11 ceremony

By Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff

NEW YORK -- On Fulton Street in downtown Manhattan, one block from the World Trade Center site this morning, the streets were lined with flag-bearing residents who had come to pay their respects. As they watched the Ground Zero ceremony on a large-screen video monitor, the mood was somber, but not anxious.

“To me, it’s honoring, remembering, and showing the strength of the country,” said Dan Gralton of Queens, who was distributing the small flags.

He said his mood was “somber but grateful for what we represent as a country.”

At the site itself at Fulton and Church streets, it was a beautiful late summer morning, reminiscent of that fateful morning 10 years ago. Security was tight, with barricades set up and K-9 officers and SWAT teams deployed.

Benjamin Garcia, a Guardian Angel from Manhattan, said a friend of his who responded here to help out as a civilian a decade ago is dying from illnesses he contracted from environmental contaminants at the site.

“It would be nice in this world if we can love each other like brothers and sisters,” he said.

The ceremony, attended by both President Barack Obama and former President George Bush, included the reading of the names of the victims, as well as six moments of silence, beginning with the first at 8:46 a.m., marking when the first plane hit the North Tower.

Michael Behan of East Hampton, N.Y., held a Marine cap over his heart as a choir sang the national anthem on the screen

After the anthem concluded, Behan said that he had traveled to the site to pay respect to the lives lost in the attacks, to the responders, to the servicemembers who have lost their lives in the last 10 years, and to the rebuilders.

“It’s a humbling day and a good day to be an American,” Behan said. His son, a Marine, is stationed in Spain.

Alan Hyams of Ashland, Va., began to cry as he watched the names of the dead being read by their relatives. “I can never feel the loss they feel, but I can empathize. Everybody lost something that day. I lost the invincibility that we, as a nation, thought we had.”

Hyams said he was a member of the 9/11 Foundation, a group of 3,000 motorcyclists who for the past 10 years have visited each of the the three sites of the attacks.

Ceremonies are planned in Massachusetts, across, the state, in New York and Washington, and across the nation today.