Twenty-five years after Sept. 11, 2001, New York City firefighters are still changing the riding lists at a firehouse on East 85th Street, keeping the names of colleagues who never came home in plain view. The board that once marked who was on duty that day now stands as one of the last working memorials to nine firefighters who were unaccounted for after the World Trade Center towers collapsed.
Captain Douglas Mitchell has been on the job for 27 years, and he still talks about the station as the place that made him. “This is my home,” he said. That feeling is part of why the preservation matters now, as fewer firefighters remain who were working on 9/11. About 840 firefighters on the job today were there then, a shrinking group carrying memory forward inside a profession that has already changed around them.
Mitchell, Stephen Saucedo and Juan Rivera all started their careers at that firehouse on Sept. 11, 2001, and all three are still on the job today. Saucedo said he is “blessed” to still be there, while Rivera joked that 25 years later, he is the old man now. Their words land because the riding lists are not ceremonial plaques; they are the daily operational boards used in firehouses across the country, updated every morning and every evening to show who is on duty. At this station, the names that mattered most stayed on the board after the attacks, because nobody wanted to touch anything about the missing firefighters.
That is also the strain running through the memorial. Mitchell said looking at the board gave the firefighters some hope, but he also knows the preservation has a limit. The names are written in chalk, and chalk does not last forever. The firefighters want the memory held in place, yet the very board carrying it is fragile, which means the work is not just about remembrance today but about how long a simple firehouse board can keep carrying nine names before time erases them.
For now, the answer is in the routine. The lists are still changed every morning and every evening, and in that repetition the station keeps the men who were lost woven into the life of the house. Mitchell put it plainly: “These are our people.”
