Primary records first.
Where a surviving FDNY company operations report establishes an assignment, stairway, approximate floor or action, that record is the starting point.
The historical record
Remembering carefully.
This memorial separates contemporaneous operational records, official memorial records, family recollections and later reporting so visitors can see not only the story, but how the story is known.
Later memories are labeled.
Family and firefighter recollections can preserve details unavailable elsewhere. When they go beyond the contemporaneous record, the site identifies them as later testimony.
Silence where the record is silent.
The memorial does not invent precise floors, conversations, final moments or movements that surviving sources do not establish.
Company operations
Engine 22 & Ladder 13
FDNY Company Operations Reports
The central source for the North Tower reconstruction. The surviving Engine 22 report documents members assisting civilians while evacuating through Stairway C. The Ladder 13 report documents the six-member responding crew, the assignment toward the 44th floor, reaching approximately the 24th floor, evacuation through Stairway B, and Joseph Graziano assisting a civilian before exiting seconds before collapse.
Open current public reproduction ↗FDNY 9/11 archive
World Trade Center Task Force interviews.
FDNY World Trade Center Task Force Interviews · 2001–2002
FDNY conducted hundreds of interviews with firefighters and other responders in the months after September 11. The records were publicly released in 2005 after litigation and became an important near-contemporaneous oral-history archive.
Firehouse.com’s August 15, 2005 archival resource page still identifies the FDNY release and links to the New York Times collection of the oral histories. Because some individual archived transcript links are now fragile, this memorial treats the collection path and the original FDNY interview metadata as the authoritative provenance trail.
Firehouse 2005 archive index ↗New York Times archived oral-history collection ↗
William “Billy” Casey · Engine 21
Published historical citations identify a World Trade Center Task Force interview with Engine 21 firefighter William “Billy” Casey dated December 17, 2001. Casey is directly relevant to the memorial because his account is connected to Joseph Graziano and the civilian rescue during the North Tower evacuation.
Firehouse artifact
The riding boards.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art · 2002
The Met documented and conserved two chalkboards—known as riding boards—used by Engine 22 and Ladder 13. The boards still bore in chalk the names of firefighters who signed out on the morning of September 11, including the nine who were lost. Met conservators stabilized, preserved and framed them, displayed them publicly for one week in September 2002, and stated that they would then be returned permanently to Engine 22.
This artifact offers a direct physical connection between the men, the firehouse, and the morning of September 11.
Metropolitan Museum archival description ↗Biographical record
The nine men.
National Fallen Firefighters Foundation
The NFFF Roll of Honor biographies are the backbone for verified family relationships, service histories, interests and personal remembrances used throughout the nine individual pages.
National Fallen Firefighters Foundation ↗Portraits of Grief / Legacy
Contemporary and republished obituary material preserves family voices and personal details that help the site remember how the men lived, not only how they died.
VOICES Center for Resilience
Family photographs, memorabilia and memorial materials are used as corroborating sources, especially for Thomas Hetzel and Gregory Stajk.
VOICES Living Memorial ↗Civic legacy
Names carried into the city.
New York City street co-namings
New York City legislative records are used to verify civic co-namings, including Captain Walter G. Hynes Way, Firefighter Thomas A. Casoria Way and Firefighter Michael J. Elferis Street.
Yorkville memorial stones
Published neighborhood reporting documents nine memorial-stone locations established after 9/11. The site intentionally describes these as historically documented locations until each stone is physically re-verified for 2026.
Open neighborhood record ↗Dennis P. McHugh Piermont Public Library
The library’s own institutional history documents the McHugh Foundation’s major contribution and the 2007 opening of the library bearing Dennis McHugh’s name.
Open library history ↗Joseph Graziano Jr.
Later testimony.
Division 7 Training & Safety Newsletter · September 2018
The newsletter’s account of Engine 21 firefighter Billy Casey says he encountered a distressed civilian on the 26th floor, assisted the civilian to the 19th floor, met Ladder 13 there, and was assigned Joseph Graziano by Captain Walter Hynes to help with the civilian. It records Casey and Graziano bringing the civilian to the street and later places the three outside the tower as the North Tower began to collapse.
This is later FDNY-community testimony, used as corroborating context—not as a replacement for the contemporaneous Ladder 13 company report.
Open newsletter PDF ↗Wofford College and later profiles
Later family and media accounts provide additional context about Graziano’s survival and its continuing impact. Where those details exceed the company report, the memorial attributes them accordingly.
Open Wofford account ↗Publication standards
Accuracy before drama.
“Yorkville 9.” The site uses “the nine men who came to be known as the Yorkville 9,” recognizing the established historical/community name without presenting it as an FDNY administrative designation.
Joseph Graziano. The site describes him as the surviving member of Ladder 13’s six-member responding crew.
Historical detail. Where sources differ, the memorial uses the most strongly supported wording and avoids unnecessary specificity.
Memorial stones. The walk presents their historically documented neighborhood locations.