The 9/11 memorial park that John Feal helped build is not far off exit 59 on the Long Island Expressway, about 50 miles northeast of Ground Zero. It abuts a busy intersection in an unremarkable part of Nesconset, flanked by a gas station, a takeout joint, and a strip mall parking lot. The memorial itself sits on a cozy acre of grassy land nestled by pear trees, thoughtful flowered landscaping, and custom-built seating courtesy of a local Boy Scout troop. The park is especially nice in the evening, after the traffic dies down, the kind of space you might seek for a few moments of contemplation about irreparable loss.
The memorial’s design is three panels, 63 feet long and 6 feet high, faced with polished granite. The names of almost three thousand 9/11 responders are inscribed in tightly spaced rows from top to bottom on both sides, and it reads like a ledger recording debts to the dead. Not long ago, the panels ran out of room for new names, setting off a scramble among board members to find additional space in time for the 25th anniversary of the attacks this September 11th.
This story will be part of the Reveal episode, “Why More People Have Died From 9/11 than On 9/11” on Saturday, September 5. Subscribe to Reveal here or wherever you get your podcasts
The founders of the Nesconset memorial, whose official name is 9/11 Responders Remembered Park, claim it is the first space in the country honoring those whose lives were cut short from illnesses linked to their work at Ground Zero. These often fatal consequences continue, so the number of those honored keeps increasing.
“I don’t think any of us fathomed how many names were going to be on this wall,” Memorial Architect Mark Mancini said.
“I don’t think any of us fathomed how many names were going to be on this wall.”
Dedicated on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it has been maintained through private donations and local volunteers. Nesconset and the surrounding Long Island communities have many 9/11 responders, perhaps because of historically affordable housing, and, as longtime resident and Suffolk County Comptroller John Kennedy put it, “firefighters follow firefighters and cops follow cops.” Memorial construction was mostly done by volunteers, including the pro bono work of a nearby architectural firm. It is a project born from the simple desire of a local community to raise up the people lost and those still dying of 9/11 toxic dust.
The memorial board is composed of a firefighter’s widow, two 9/11 responders, and several community members. Along with police and firefighters, the board includes responders who have historically been overlooked for recognition in state and federal memorials. They include, for instance, already-retired firefighters who came to help during the rescue and recovery, and non-uniform volunteers, tradesmen, and professionals, such as sanitation, construction, plumbers, electricians, ironworkers, bricklayers, and medical personnel. And those who died from PTSD-related suicides.
For Feal, the Nesconset memorial has become a touchstone for his advocacy work in protecting responder health care. “After a traumatic event, two things usually happen: advocacy or conspiracy,” he told me. “I choose advocacy.” The park represents more than a list of individuals; it is a historical document for posterity of the people who have been harmed by the toxic dust cloud in a way that, according to Feal, “history can’t distort.”
I first met Feal, himself a severely injured 9/11 responder, in person in the fall of 2025. He has devoted most of his adult life to protecting the health care program for 9/11 responders and survivors that had been set into federal law in 2011. I had followed him to DC, where he and his band of aging 9/11 responders were hell-bent on securing additional legislation to fix the funding formula for the World Trade Center Health Program. The program brings together medical care and research designed for responders and the local community exposed to the toxic dust cloud in the aftermath of the Twin Towers’ collapse.
The adjustments they lobbied for included accounting for medical inflation and serving a new wave of sick responders. Without it, the program would have reportedly had to stop taking new patients in 2028. For the rest of us, the program serves as a national learning laboratory about the health impacts of urban environmental disasters.
At the time, I was reporting a story about the bodily impacts on 9/11 responders after breathing in or swallowing “World Trade Center Dust”—a cakey and caustic amalgam that burned its way into the nose and throat, and deep into the tissues. I learned that when cement is pulverized, as it was that day, it reverts to its elemental components, transforming into a poisonous swill with the pH of Drano or lye. Some who were in the environs of the dust cloud now live with chronic inflammation of the lungs or digestion: smoldering in the pipes and tissues, never quieting, capable of turning a cold into a life-threatening illness. Some suffer repeated infections from burnt-out sinuses, or perpetual heartburn.
For others, microparticles of dust were absorbed into the bloodstream from the lungs, taking root in the bone marrow and other organs, and sometimes kicking off a cascade of health problems. Even now, the people who worked in the rescue and recovery, along with those who lived and worked in the vicinity of Ground Zero, are getting sick. Some are being diagnosed with lung, thyroid, or skin cancer, others with blood cancers like lymphoma or multiple myeloma. And the rates of these cancers are higher than what might be expected to occur without ground zero dust exposure. As of June 2026, just over 57,000 responders and survivors are certified by the World Trade Center Health program with cancers related to 9/11. More people have now died related to exposures to toxic dust at Ground Zero than died in the attacks themselves.
Feal is fifty-nine. He is wiry and compact, with broad shoulders and arms sleeved with tattoos. Feal usually wears t-shirts, jeans, work boots, and headgear, most often a baseball cap, that he favors even inside, with sunglasses forever perched at the rim. He walks with a slight swagger, purposeful and a little defiant, like the high school wrestling champion he once was, and speaks with the unmistakable cadence of a Long Island drawl—flattened vowels and clipped consonants, fast, edgy, and laced with expletives— “fuck” being his favorite when his words are directed at hypocrites and government officials. Feal is known for sending politicians diving for cover—sometimes on camera—with his audacious potty mouth. You can never be sure if he is about to hug you or bring you down in a half nelson.
Feal’s injuries at Ground Zero changed his life. For five days immediately after the attacks, he worked there as a demolition foreman. “I would drive my excavator or payload too close to the pile, and the windshields would melt, that’s how hot it was,” he said. “And that smell, it engulfed you; it became a part of you.” His work became more of a forensic deconstruction than demolition—untangling a grayscape of twisted steel from pulverized concrete, insulation, plastics, metals, glass, and human remains. When a several-ton steel beam crushed his foot, the firefighters around him saved him from bleeding to death.
The following months were spent in a haze of hospitals, multiple surgeries, and the partial amputation of his left foot. Then followed the black hole of PTSD. He said that the experience of working the pile haunts him today as a phantom smell—both unmistakable and incomprehensible.
In 2002, he joined a support group for sick and injured responders. It was there he realized he was not alone. He met people, mostly from the trades, who helped at Ground Zero, but were now too sick to work. Some had lost their jobs and medical insurance. Others who had been in his group just vanished. “Whether it was six people or 15 people in the group, I’d be like, ‘Yo, where’s what’s-his-name?’ ‘Oh, he died,’” Feal said. “‘Hey, where’s what’s-his-name?’ ‘Oh, he’s in the hospital with stage four cancer.’”
“Whether it was six people or 15 people in the group, I’d be like, ‘Yo, where’s what’s-his-name?’ ‘Oh, he died,.’ ‘Hey, where’s what’s-his-name?’ ‘Oh, he’s in the hospital with stage four cancer.’”
In 2005, he started a nonprofit, the Feal Good Foundation, both to lobby elected officials for responders’ health needs and to offer practical help for responders to get back on their feet: Financial assistance, for instance, for everyday expenses like medication or prescriptions, or perhaps transportation to and from medical appointments.
Feal tells me he has made countless trips to Washington through the years to battle legislators who are skittish about the cost: $955 million for the upcoming fiscal year administered by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The program is set to end in 2090, when most responders and survivors have likely died. Like a B-52 bomber, he’s deployed first by fellow health program advocates to soften the field before the ground troops go in. His strategy is to show up over and over again, moving from congressional office to office, sometimes pushing a sick responder’s wheelchair, refusing to let urgent issues, like continuing the funding for research, disappear behind a wall of lip service.
One wall of Feal’s office in New York City is a clutter of photos, awards, and 9/11-related memorabilia: his personal history as a 9/11 activist in tchotchkes. His notoriety in the 9/11 community grew over the years as he brought attention to responders through extensive media appearances, such as, say, with Jon Stewart. The advocacy work on Capitol Hill also made him a celebrity in the local Long Island 9/11 community.
In 2008, local officials and a small group of determined 9/11 widows began to discuss turning a small piece of land in Nesconset into a memorial. Feal was asked to join the project to help raise funds. He did, but also brought to the table a broader vision for the project, using his firebrand style to help move it forward as an embodied metaphor for those lost to illness, but also for those who were still suffering with 9/11 related illnesses.
While Feal is the first to recognize the initiative as one built from a local collective, for him, the memorial is meant to enshrine the advocacy work itself, his and others’.
“Everybody wants to leave a legacy,” Feal said. “I left that park for the 9/11 community in the town of Nesconset.”
Displayed on a clock tower placed in the grassy part of the memorial is a plaque. On it are the words: “I can tell you that I did not want to be anywhere else but Ground Zero when I was there.” That’s part of the testimony of 9/11 responder Detective Luis G. Alvarez before the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. Alvarez died of cancer in 2019, within a month after delivering this testimony. He had gone to Congress to advocate for financial compensation for sick 9/11 responders.
I recently spoke with Marita Sturken, a historian and New York University professor, on a Zoom call. Her 2007 book, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero, examines the way Americans engage with traumatic historical events—how we use memorials to process our grief and direct our mourning using memorials.
On a shared screen, we studied an architectural drawing and a few photos of the Nesconset Memorial. Sturken noted the memorial’s similarity to the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, where there also are layers of names engraved on the granite slabs, with a clutter of small objects left by families and friends at the memorial’s base.
“The Vietnam memorial was a grassroots project begun by veterans, not government-led,” Sturken said, and was the first one at which people began leaving things. “No other memorial in Washington has been conducive to that.” It was embraced immediately by veterans themselves as a place where they felt recognized and seen. She considers the Nesconset memorial to be similar to others built from advocacy, such as Alabama’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, dedicated to those who were lynched or victims of racial terror, or the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
Sturken notes that timeframes are, in general, “an ingredient” to the memorial’s form. Usually, built memorials are tied to historical moments, coded with the viewpoints of their makers and of the times/specific moment in time when they were created—literally chiseling our memories into a singular object of contemplation. In the final form, who or what is embodied in bronze, or marble, or granite can tell us as much about who is not depicted as who is. Sturken explained that the best memorials represent an array of voices, honoring and naming individuals, as with the Nesconset memorial. “It creates a very different kind of interaction for visitors,” she said.
In her book, Sturken points out that memorial culture in the United States is seen as a therapeutic way to make peace with difficult memories. “American mythology clings tenaciously to the belief that one can always heal,” she wrote, “move on and place the past in its proper context.” The Nesconset memorial points to the dissonance in this pursuit. Momentous events rarely have simple endings, especially when there are casualties.
Usually, built memorials are tied to historical moments, coded with the viewpoints of their makers and of the times/specific moment in time when they were created—literally chiseling our memories into a singular object of contemplation.
The New York City 9/11 Memorial and Museum built on the site of Ground Zero has been slow to recognize those who died because of that day, and only formally did so in 2019 with the dedication of an appendage to the main memorial known as the Glade. Set in an arboretum placed adjacent to the main memorial—the one that honors the people killed on 9/11 and in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center—the Glade is a series of granite monoliths infused with steel salvaged from the Twin Towers. It sits just west of the Survivor Tree, which was recultivated after being the only green thing found alive amid the debris.
Unlike the Nesconset Memorial, the designers of the Glade chose not to inscribe the names of individuals who died from 9/11-related illnesses. Ben Chevat, Executive Director of 9/11 Health Watch, was heavily involved with the push to build the Glade. The decision not to inscribe the ever-expanding number of names of the dead was simply too resource-heavy and time-consuming for a government-run entity, he told me.
For Feal, the New York City 9/11 museum, which in recent years added a special exhibit dedicated to those impacted by the toxins, “was a gut punch,” he said. “To me it’s a clean, organized crime scene.” He insisted that he is not downplaying “the significance of what happened that day, innocent lives lost—and the violence,” but believes the city memorial and museum should grow and evolve as more is learned, through research, about the long-term health impacts of the dust.
One broiling morning in July, I toured the Nesconset memorial with its architect, Mark Mancini. He remembered going to community meetings about the design and being shocked at the number of sick responders. “One year at an event there are a couple of guys in a wheelchair,” he said, “and the next year they’re gone.”
“One year at an event there are a couple of guys in a wheelchair, and the next year they’re gone.”
The granite wall, he explained, divides the space into two distinct areas: an open grassy area facing the front side of the structure where the public can congregate for ceremonies, and a partially enclosed space around the back for those who want to sit and reflect, which Mancini referred to as “the sanctuary space.” Thinking that they would be able to accommodate all the names, the original design left the front blank with only the words: “Courage, Honor, Sacrifice,” and the other side inscribed with the names of responders. Mancini has resisted requests to encircle the site with additional panels for them. Instead, they faced the cement back of the cantilever bench with granite in the sanctuary, making more room without losing the integrity of the space.
“I’ve come here with nobody around and run into families just sitting here,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion as he pointed to “little things that keep popping up.”
We looked at a small statue of a fireman and a rescue dog placed under a tree. He added, “The space has taken on a life of its own.”
As for Feal, he’s focusing these days on screening which responders’ names are candidates for inscription. In his office in New York City, I looked over his shoulder as he leaned into his laptop, demonstrating his approach. On any given weekday, he can spend a few hours scouring union and other databases and social media sites, as if on a search and rescue mission, identifying recently deceased responders whose names he can bring forward. For a responder to make the cut, they must have died from a 9/11-related illness, as certified by the WTCHP. “It’s uncomfortable all the time to keep track of fatalities,” he said. “It’s kind of morbid.”
Ask Feal about the park, as I did on another visit, and he uses words of endearment, as if it were part of his family. “That park is my baby,” he said. “Now it’s being run by mothers, uncles, and aunts.”
