Inside the Megawatt Effort to Mount New York’s Annual 9/11 'Tribute in Light'

On that famously crisp September day twenty-five years ago, architects Gustavo Bonevardi and John Bennett stood side by side on the West Side Highway in New York City and watched the Twin Towers collapse. A dust cloud from the wreckage blew toward them as they looked on in horror.

Like many New Yorkers who witnessed the tragedy of 9/11, the architects felt an immediate compulsion to help. But they weren’t first responders or construction workers, who were already surging down the highway to the rescue site. They couldn’t pitch in at Ground Zero. Instead, the men just kept looking at the sky.

“All you could see was this glow and plume of smoke,” Bonevardi says. “It looked like a gaping wound on the New York skyline. It was a physical injury on the body of the city.”

Within 48 hours, the architects hatched a plan to acknowledge that wound by replacing the iconic buildings with two austere beams of light. They called it the “Project for the Immediate Reconstruction of the Manhattan Skyline.”

Today it is known by another name: Tribute in Light, the public art installation that runs each year from dusk to dawn on the night of September 11. This year for the 25^th anniversary of the attacks, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, which now oversees the installation, invited National Geographic photographer Christopher Payne to document it as it came together—and the many people whose painstaking work has kept it alive as a symbol of the city’s resilience for a quarter of a century. Many New Yorkers now wait for the light beams to reappear each year, marking the passing of time and the memory of the attacks—but in the beginning, they weren’t supposed to be permanent, Bennett says. The first Tribute in Light was conceived of as temporary, a one-time deal.  “It would never have gotten done if we were like, ‘This is the memorial,’” he says. “That was never in our minds. It was an ephemeral thing.”

As it turned out, other artists in the city had the same idea to rebuild the skyline through light. Within weeks, Bonevardi and Bennett joined forces with fellow creatives Richard Nash Gould, Julian LaVerdiere, and Paul Myoda to flesh out their plan.

“A few things concerned us,” Bonavardi says—most notably that they needed to be able to translate their creative vision into practical action. What kind of lights would they need? Renowned lighting consultant Paul Marantz joined the project to advise. How would they pay for it—and would the city allow it? Local arts organizations Municipal Art Society and Creative Time took the lead on fundraising and city politics. And who would keep them on track? Enter events producer Michael Ahern.

Another concern was that the installation could not detract in any way from ongoing rescue and recovery. “We never thought of putting them on Ground Zero. Never an option,” Bonevardi says. Instead, after running scenarios on a computer model of Manhattan, they settled on the roof of a parking garage nearby.

It was also decidedly not intended to be a permanent memorial. “We were firmly with our feet planted in denial,” Bonevardi says. Like their fellow New Yorkers, they were struggling to grapple with the mounting death toll and a city forever changed. Instead, the light installation would be “a sign of life, a declaration of New York’s chutzpah and resiliency.”

Tribute in Light switched on for the first time on March 11, 2002, six months after the attack. “I remember walking out on the street and feeling the sense of peace,” says Anita Contini, founder of the nonprofit arts organization Creative Time who would within months be tapped by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to oversee the creation of an official memorial to 9/11 victims. “Everybody just started smiling and hugging each other and feeling togetherness even if you didn’t know them. There was something of comfort and healing as one looked up.”

The simplicity and beauty of the idea is what helped it get off the ground in the first place, Contini says. But it’s also what gave Tribute in Light its staying power. During listening sessions that she held with community members about what they wanted to see from a permanent memorial, Contini recalls family members of the victims talking about how much the Tribute in Light meant to them. “They thought of it as a prayer, a ray of hope.”

One thing that most people still get wrong about the Tribute in Light is that it’s not actually two rays of light beaming into the night sky. The installation is made up of 88 individual 7,000-watt xenon compressed gas lightbulbs—44 for each tower, organized into two nested squares.

“That wasn’t a magical number, it was all the lights we could get in the world of this particular type,” Bennett says.

Bonevardi and Bennett had initially envisioned using laser lights, but Marantz knew they would never work for projecting a column of light onto air instead of a surface.

Only xenon headlights can do that because of their massive power, say Massimo and Matteo Moratti, the father-and-son lighting technicians of MaxVH Illumination in Italy who maintain and install the Tribute in Light each year. These lights use an electrical discharge to produce a bright white beam and are often used in show business for performances and movie premieres. Scott Campbell, who now produces the event for Michael Ahern Production Services, says the site could power roughly a hundred average homes at peak usage with its three 500-kilowatt generators.

Xenon lights were also the best choice for the project because they could be focused into an incredibly precise 0.2 percent angle without much dispersion of the light. But each bulb is made by hand—and incredibly delicate—meaning that the process of installing and focusing them requires great care and expertise. That’s why Massimo has flown in ever since the very first installation to ensure all goes well—and why he has trained his son to do the same for years to come. As a result of their dedication, the installation is still using the same lights that the city purchased in the late 2000s when it was clear it was no longer just a temporary thing.

Over the first couple days of setup—which typically begins about 10 days before the anniversary—the Italian technicians calibrate everything from the power output, amperes, and volts, and check every lamp to making sure each is the same size and brightness. From there, a team of lighting designers from Fisher Marantz fan out across the city to confirm from different vantage points that each beam is properly focused—while stagehands on the rooftop adjust the direction of the beam using wrenches with large bolts.

After a dress rehearsal on the evening of September 10, the lights switch on for good on the afternoon of September 11 so that the phantom limbs of the Twin Towers are fully illuminated as soon as the sun sets. A skeleton crew stays up on the rig, sweeping away bugs that land on the lights and monitoring for birds. (The technicians turn the lights off if too many birds get confused by the light.) If a light malfunctions, the Morattis are there waiting like a racecar pit crew to repair it. If a bulb burns out, which a handful might do each year, they're ready to replace them.

And then, after one night, the towers of light disappear. “One of its real strengths is that it’s ephemeral,” Bennett says. “It comes and goes, and people don’t know where it came from or why. But they get a sense of peace from it and then it goes away.”