Morgan Stanley September 11 Memorial
Town/Village of Harrison, Westchester County, New York
Marker Inscription
We will never forget those we lost on September 11, 2001 Titus Davidson Jennifer De Jesus Joseph DiPilato Godwin Forde Lindsay C. Herkness III Albert Joseph Charles Laurencin Wesley Mercer Richard C. Rescorla Nolbert Salomon Steven R. Strauss Thomas F. Salomon Steven R. Strauss Thomas F. Swift Jorge Velazquez Morgan Stanley
The Story
This memorial honors the people connected to Morgan Stanley who were killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. Among them was Rick Rescorla, the company's security director, whose calm, insistent evacuation of thousands of employees before the towers fell became one of the day's defining acts of courage.
Why it matters
The attacks of September 11 reshaped American life, and memorials like this keep faith with the nearly three thousand lives lost.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the closing decades of the twentieth century, lower Manhattan's World Trade Center had become a small vertical city, its twin towers home to tens of thousands of workers who poured in each morning from across the region. Many of them commuted from the leafy suburbs of Westchester County and nearby Connecticut, riding the trains south at dawn and back north at dusk. A community like Harrison, where this memorial stands, was exactly the kind of place from which the financial district drew its daily workforce.
The morning of September 11, 2001 began as an ordinary late-summer workday under a famously clear blue sky. What followed reshaped the nation in a matter of hours. The attacks on the towers killed nearly three thousand people from many countries and walks of life, and they touched the suburbs around New York with particular weight, because so many of the dead had boarded a commuter train that morning and simply never came home.
Memorials like this one belong to that geography of grief. They rose not only at Ground Zero but in the towns whose residents were lost — reminders that a national tragedy was also, everywhere, an intensely local one.
People & events
This memorial gathers the names of colleagues connected to Morgan Stanley who were killed that day. The firm was one of the largest tenants in the complex, and its people were scattered across many floors when the attacks came. To read the list is to see an ordinary cross-section of working life — a reminder that those lost were coworkers, neighbors, and family members before they were names on a plaque.
One name on the memorial carries a story that has become one of the day's most enduring. Rick Rescorla served as the company's director of security, and he had long worried that the towers were a target. He drilled employees relentlessly on how to evacuate, over the objections of some who found the exercises a nuisance. When the emergency came, that preparation saved lives on a scale few could have imagined.
Accounts of his final hours describe a man moving with deliberate calm, guiding colleagues down the stairwells and steadying nerves — reportedly even singing to keep spirits up as people descended. He is remembered for going back up into the tower to make sure others had gotten out. He did not survive. His example turned a security director's quiet diligence into a lasting emblem of courage under fire.
Its place in the American story
September 11 is one of the hinge points of modern American history. It reordered the nation's sense of security, launched changes that touched everything from air travel to foreign policy, and marked the opening of an era that the marker's own framing places in the post-9/11 world. Understanding that day is essential to understanding the decades that followed.
What a memorial like this preserves, though, is not policy but memory — the insistence that the enormous total of the lost never dissolves into an abstraction. By naming specific people from one company and one community, it keeps the tragedy human-scaled. The national story is told, in the end, one name at a time.
The example of the firm's security director also became part of the country's shared understanding of that morning: proof that ordinary preparation and personal steadiness could stand against chaos, and that many of the day's heroes were people simply doing their jobs with uncommon devotion.
If you visit
This is a place for quiet, not spectacle. Give yourself a moment to read the names slowly rather than taking them in all at once — that unhurried reading is really the point of a memorial like this. Each name represents a life, a family, a seat left empty on a morning commuter train.
If you're traveling through Westchester, the memorial pairs naturally with a broader reflection on how the September 11 attacks reached far beyond Manhattan into the surrounding suburbs. Many towns in the region carry their own markers and remembrances, and visiting one after another gives you a sense of how widely the loss was felt.
Come as you would to any place of remembrance: unhurried, respectful, and willing to let the silence do some of the work. There is nothing to buy and nothing to rush toward here — only names, and the quiet obligation to remember them.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Richard C. Rescorla
Related events
- · September 11, 2001 attacks
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Western Waterfront 9/11 Memorial
Town of Oyster Bay, NY
On the morning of September 11, 2001, hijacked airliners struck the World Trade Center, and Long Island — within sight of the Manhattan skyline — lost scores of commuters and first responders. This waterfront memorial in the Town of Oyster Bay marks the exact minute of the first impact, fixing a shared moment of shock in stone. Communities all along the North Shore built such places so neighbors would have somewhere to gather and grieve.
Oyster Bay 9/11 Memorial
Town of Oyster Bay, NY
After September 11, 2001, salvaged steel from the fallen Twin Towers was distributed to communities across the country to anchor their memorials. Oyster Bay set one such relic here as the centerpiece of its tribute, letting a scarred fragment of the World Trade Center stand for both loss and endurance. The inscription binds the memory of the rescuers and the innocent to a piece of the building itself.
Stewart Manor Village Hall 9/11 Memorial
Village of Stewart Manor, NY
This twisted length of steel was recovered from the World Trade Center, destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 people were killed. The village of Stewart Manor placed it outside its village hall and dedicated the memorial on the seventeenth anniversary of the attacks in 2018. Salvaged WTC steel was distributed to communities nationwide so each could keep the vow to 'never forget.'
Daniel D. Tompkins Birthplace
Village of Scarsdale, NY
In 1774, near this spot in the countryside that would become Scarsdale, Daniel D. Tompkins was born into a New York on the eve of revolution. He rose to serve as the state's governor from 1807 to 1817 — the demanding War of 1812 years, when he pledged his own credit to keep New York's troops supplied — and then two terms as Vice President of the United States under James Monroe. The Westchester County Historical Society placed this marker, funded by Charles Butler, to fix the memory of where his life began.