Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Speaks At National September 11 Memorial and Museum Dedication Ceremony

May 15, 2014

Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVqPk4YIZJM

Mayor Bill de Blasio: A simple pair of shoes - what could they possibly tell us about 9/11?

About the choices and close calls, about the quarter mile climb down a staircase filled with falling ceilings, crowded with colleagues and confusion; about making it out, or not.

Ordinary, everyday objects that we find here in the museum - a wallet, a ring, an ID card, a telephone - are unlikely, but powerful keepsakes, which help us understand the events of that day in human terms. Each piece carries with it another story, one that might have been our own. For don't we all own a pair of shoes we wear to work, that could have been the ones we wore that day?

For some, the last 38 steps they walked to freedom and to life were down a narrow outdoor staircase that led to Vesey Street. The stairs were also the last above ground remnant found at the World Trade Center site. They became both a symbol of that terrible day, and the months of painstaking recovery. Workers removed the 56-ton staircase from its concrete base as carefully as one would a sacred object from an archaeological site, so that it could be placed in its new home, inside the museum.

Today, when you walk down the museum's last set of stairs that lead to bedrock, whether you walk slowly down the wide elegant staircase, or stand comfortably on the moving escalator, you will travel right beside the Vesey Street staircase.

And as you do, imagine for a moment that these hard concrete stairs were once, for hundreds of people, the last and long-sought path to survival.