An Astoria architect who planned, designed and oversaw construction of city schools had to improvise on the fly to bring a symbol of hope back to Ground Zero years after the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers 25 years ago.
Ronaldo “Ron” Vega, 68, who was born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen before marrying and moving to Astoria in 1987, was sitting in his windowless cubicle at the headquarters of the city’s Department of Design and Construction (DDC) in Long Island City when he was alerted that the worst event in New York City history was being written in Lower Manhattan roughly seven miles away.
Ronaldo Vega at Ground Zero, where the DDC oversaw the removal of 1.8 million tons of wreckage following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center 25 years ago.Photo by Sui Mai
“My wife actually called me from Astoria and said, ‘Hey, a plane just hit the North Tower, you know, I just thought I’d tell you about it,’ and it was the first day of school and I was just finishing paperwork,” Vega recalled. “Within a few minutes, the whole office was buzzing. I realized our office building [next to LaGuardia Community College] had a great vantage point of downtown Manhattan and from our vantage point it looked like someone was holding a cigarette up and the smoke from the cigarette was being blown to the north. And then we saw the second plane hit so then we knew, this was no accident. We knew it was something more.”
DDC teams arrived at the scene later that afternoon while Vega worked on logistics at the Queens office.
Vega (l.) during a pre-shift meeting at Ground Zero.Photo credit: Archivists Jason Scott & Dr. Jonathan Burgess
“I was already on the clock for the Ground Zero rescue recovery team, I just wasn’t there physically,” Vega told QNS. “I joined the team later because they didn’t want to engage the architects and engineers until they had the perimeter streets cleaned up a little bit to get us a bit closer.”
He joined other DDC staff who had voluntarily suspended their ordinary assigned duties to serve at Ground Zero on Sept. 18 and remained on site for the duration of the recovery period working his final shift on July 12, 2002. Vega usually worked the night shift as the DDC coordinated hundreds of contractors in a herculean around-the-clock demolition and salvage effort to remove 1.8 million tons of debris so rebuilding could begin. That the mission was accomplished in eight months instead of several years as predicted by experts was considered to be miraculous.
“You know, history is written by the victors, and in many cases, we were the victors here,” Vega said. “And I don’t mean it in any bad way, but the NYPD and the FDNY, you know, they took all the glory.”
Vega’s DDC helmet with decals and signatures from celebrity visitors at Ground Zero.Courtesy of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum
Like the first responders, the DDC crews ran towards the danger and helped in the search and recovery effort while protecting them from further structural collapse while the fires burned for months, reinforced the slurry wall to keep the Hudson River from flooding the complex and securing massive amounts of freon from the World Trade Center HVAC system that would have turned into mustard gas if ignited. Unlike the rich histories in the NYPD and FDNY, the DDC was formed just five years earlier.
“Most of us were absolute strangers to each other,” Vega said. “It was almost like watching a World War II movie where a bunch of ragtag folks were thrown together and became this unit, and then the unit became like the most decorated unit in the war. That’s what we felt because we were a very young agency. We had just started in 1996, and so we just were basically starting to get our bones together by 2001.”
Some graffiti at Ground Zero listing names of the DDC response team.Photo by Ron Vega
In the 1900s, all city agencies had their own construction division which led to redundancy and more layers of bureaucracy. This ended when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani consolidated them all into a single agency by creating the DDC, which was the genesis of his “America’s Mayor” persona. The Port Authority was taken off the board after losing 84 employees, including 37 members of the Port Authority Police Department as well as 13 members of the WTC’s civilian staff who have been recognized as first responders for their work as rescuers during the attacks using their deep knowledge of the site.
“We were all the city had because the Port Authority lost everybody in that North Tower. All of their staff, all of their engineers, all of their technical people were killed, and so we were it. We had everybody in one place,” Vega said. “It was a great idea from Giuliani to create this super agency that was predominantly where all the sponsor agencies of the city would go to get their design and construction work done, and so we already had all the expertise. We had all the right connections and that’s what made us so powerful and so amazing. And that’s how we did what should have been a five-year project in nine months.”
In the middle of the mass of destruction, his DDC colleague Rebecca Clough discovered a Callery pear tree sticking out of the rubble near the base of the fallen towers one night in October 2021.
“Becky found it and told me about it during a shift change and I went to investigate,” Vega said. “What it was was the last remaining branch of an almost dead tree that was pushing out leaves in October, saying, ‘Save me! I want to live.’ And I made sure we got it off the site.”
They begged the city’s Parks Department to help but they considered the tree mortally wounded and had no money, so they weren’t going to invest any time and effort.
After becoming the design director at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, Vega spent two months searching for the tree he rescued from Ground Zero.Photo by Amy Dreher/NS11MM
“So we got our contractors together in the dead of night because we couldn’t let the public know that we were wasting any time on a tree when their loved ones were still missing,” Vega said. “We put it on the back of a flatbed, and they transported it to the Arthur Ross Nursery in Van Cortlandt Park, which is as far north as you could go and still stay in New York City.”
Vega went on to join the staff of the National September Memorial as senior director of design in 2007.
“I had an opportunity to analyze what would go on the memorial, and I remembered the tree and I went to find it,” Vega said. “It took me about two months because everybody who had any involvement with that tree had already retired or got transferred someplace else.”
He later found it in the same nursery in Van Cortland Park.
“And it was planted in the most ridiculous spot. They never expected it to survive. They put it right in front of these giant oak trees. It wasn’t going to get any sun, far away from all the water sources, they just put it there,” Vega said. “But when I saw her, she was the most ugliest, most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life, and I fell in love with her. And I said at that moment I’ve got to make sure you come home.”
He brought the Survivor Tree back to Ground Zero where it was replanted on the Memorial Glade.Photo by Amy Dreher/NS11MM
Vega used his old contacts to have the tree transported back to Lower Manhattan and had it replanted on the National September 11 Memorial Glade near the South Pool where it has come to be known as the Survivor Tree, symbolizing the resiliency of New Yorkers and the city became a popular destination for tourists and politicians after an event on May 5, 2011.
“When we got Osama bin Laden, President Obama placed a wreath in front of the Survivor Tree,” Vega said. On Thursday, Sept. 5, nearly half of the Queens delegation to the City Council joined Speaker Julie Menin for a photo op in front of the Survivor Tree after announcing $1 million in funding for the 9/11 Memorial & Museum to expand education and outreach to a new generation of New Yorkers. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates that more than 100 million Americans, 30% of the population, were born after 2001.
Members of the Queens delegation to the City Council joined Speaker Julie Menin in front of the Survivor Tree on Sept. 5 after announcing $1 million in funding for the 9/11 Museum.Photo by John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit
“I saw a little snippet of that on the news,” Vega, currently a program director at the DDC, said. “All the people I work with don’t know any damn thing about it. All these young people coming into DDC now, you know, graduates, they don’t know anything about it. They have no concept of Ground Zero, much less the fact that the agency they now work for managed the entire recovery and rescue recovery efforts.”
Today, Vega and 35 other city public servants who were part of the Ground Zero rescue recovery team— including engineers, auditors, architects, and project managers — are still active at DDC.