The "last column" from the Twin Towers lies under fluorescent lights behind a padlocked door in what amounts to a private, climate-controlled mausoleum in a hangar at Kennedy Airport.
The 45-foot-tall, 62-ton piece of steel was draped with a huge American flag and carried out of Ground Zero on a flatbed truck in the May ceremony that marked the end of the arduous, months-long excavation and recovery effort.
Now it has taken its place as item D-1101 - the most recognizable single piece in an extraordinary physical archive of everything that remains of the towers.
Hundreds of items - mostly twisted, blasted hunks of metal - are now being meticulously decontaminated, cataloged and stored at JFK's Hangar 17, the former home of the failed Tower Air.
"This is all that's left, literally. The rest is all gone," said architect Bart Voorsanger, who has been working for the Port Authority to save something of the Twin Towers for posterity.
"This has become a second graveyard."
Voorsanger and his colleague, Mark Wagner, scoured Ground Zero during the recovery effort, tagging items that might someday testify to the history of the place and its destruction.
While much of the rubble was taken to the Staten Island landfill or sold for recycling, hundreds of pieces were collected at Hangar 17. Some day, they will be used in museum exhibits and possibly in a permanent memorial to the World Trade Center victims.
It was with an eye to future memorials that the Port Authority preserved an entire six-story section of the north tower's outer wall.
This tilted skeleton of the building's facade, with its familiar Gothic arches, loomed over the smoking debris for weeks after the attack - emblematic of the frightening destruction of Sept. 11 and also of the resolve of New Yorkers to stay, however precariously, on their feet.
When the wall was finally pulled down in mid-December, ironworkers cut it into 31 sections and spray-painted each one with a number. Some day, the wall could be pieced back together.
At Hangar 17, mute steel talks. And no piece talks more eloquently than the last column inside a newly built plywood vault with black plastic, like mourning crape, lining the walls to keep out moisture.
The steel is alive with the graffiti of construction workers, cops and firefighters and the photographs of the dead.
"My brothers, you ran into hell, now you walk with angels," says one inscription to the Emergency Service Unit of the PA Police. "Till we meet again. God Speed. Love you all, Murf."
A large photograph of firefighter Jonathan Ielpi is tied to the column with baling wire. Other photos are taped or glued in place - giving the steel column the delicacy of ephemera, which almost certainly will preclude it from being included in an outdoor memorial.
Before it was cut down, the last column was anchored in bedrock, six stories deep in the south tower's basement.
At the opposite extreme, the antenna on top of the north tower stood 1,728 feet above the ground - the highest point in New York City.
When the tower fell, the antenna was smashed to pieces, and many found their way to Hangar 17.
There are twisted poles and cracked mounting brackets and the antenna's 10-foot-thick core - the most kinetic ruin of all, bleeding twisted tubing and wires. Having fallen so far, it still seems to be in motion.
The Port Authority has dedicated $5 million to the work of cleaning, cataloging and storing the archive and will soon appoint a task force of curators to weigh the many requests that have come in to borrow pieces.
