New Yorkers Volunteer to Commemorate 9/11 -With Ed Welter

26:35And that was 2014. And another momentous thing that happened is I met my future partner in the Woolworth building named Bob Gelber. Awesome guy too. Expert and then a longtime tour guide and all around great friend. So the two of us worked for Helen and her brother Chuck for six years till 2020. And then COVID hit and the tour company was shut down. Well, the tour company was still open, but the building didn't allow tours. Correct, yeah. So, and it stayed that way for six years. And Bob and I always, we got us, we snuck a few tours in for free. I did 9-11 Memorial Volunteers Families. He did Guys Association of New York.

27:20Right. You guys brought me in there, and I'm grateful for that. Yeah, and we, you know, so we kept a good relationship with the building. And then, unbelievably, about a year and a half, two years ago, We got a phone call from Helen and her and her brother Chuck were retiring. And they decided if the company was to ever operate again, they wanted Bob and I to have it. And they gave it to us. Wow. Yeah, it was our company now. Yeah. But it had no customers. Right. It had no building. Right. Six months later, the building is now under new, not new management, but there's some additional additional management brought in that really has a different view.

28:01Instead of the Woolworths building being famous for two things. It's beautiful and you can't go in. They want it to be welcoming. They're doing a lot of things in there. Stores are opening, a restaurant, a coffee bar. Oh, wow, I didn't know this. Ice cream parlor. Where, downstairs? Yeah, yeah. Today they're doing a fashion shoot there. For Fashion Week? Yeah, very, very different. and they said we want the building to have a bigger presence on social media and one of the ways we thought of doing that is to bring tours in again right smart so they asked us would you guys be interested yeah it took bob and i about i don't know three seconds i was gonna say two seconds to say yes we obviously had to make a new company uh we have the exclusive um and i always When all the people I work with at 9-11, when they hear all these things, because they've all been on the tour.

28:58I say everything, all these good things lead right back to the day of volunteering. You do something good, something comes back to you. Right. I'd never volunteered. And then also through, you know, through my time at 9-11 Memorial, I met people from the Tunnel to Tower. Oh, wow. And got involved with them. Can you just say what the Tunnels of Towers is for people? Sure, the Tunnels of Towers is the foundation in the memory of firefighter Stephen Siller. And they build, well, they do a lot of things, but what they're really famous for is building smart homes for catastrophically injured servicemen and women.

29:42Iraq, Afghanistan. They've since expanded it to paying off mortgages for thousands of soldiers who died in those two words, over 7 ,000. And I think today it's incredible. They're buying up older hotels around the country, completely renovating them from top to bottom and making them efficiency apartments for veterans who are homeless. They've housed thousands of them already. Their goal is to end veterans homelessness. It's amazing. So when I got involved with them, they really weren't great at doing, of constructing a house. They are now. And we laugh about it. And I asked them if I could help.

30:26And I told them I wouldn't charge. So I was able to, you know, work on their plans. Me, I kind of straightened out some mistakes on the plans and, but also did all the material. This is what you need. These are the quantities you need and any expertise that I could offer. and I thought it was going to be, you know, one or two houses. Well, we just finished house number 90. Wow. And then we also, when I say we, we're talking about we have a team that raises money for the run that's coming up every, the last Sunday in September. This is the 25th year. And the run is from where to where? So the run is from Brooklyn, through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, and you end up basically at the trade.

31:10At the trade. It's a 5K. You run through the tunnel, which is no joke. It's 1.8 miles long. And you don't realize how far, when you're driving, how far down it goes. Right. And then how far up it goes. So by the time you get out of that tunnel, you're sweaty. Right. There's also 40 ,000 of your best friends down there with you. Aren't there, you know, people in fire men's gear? 100%. And that is so emotional. You see London, Berlin, Paris, Sao Paulo, from everywhere. And I'm thinking I'm sweaty and I'm walking because I have a bum knee. And these guys are running the whole thing and it's 100 degrees in there.

31:54The most amazing was I heard cheering a couple of years ago up ahead of me. And I'm like, why is everybody cheering? And then we finally catch up to this. And there was a young man who was on a respirator. Oh my gosh. A portable respirator that was being, we had a team with him. Right. And he was missing an arm and like he had a prosthetic leg, he had traumatic brain injury, but he was determined to do this. It's making me emotional. It made everybody emotional. Yeah. And he was walking slow, but he was, he was doing it. So, you know, when you see that, um, and you know, Stephen Siller's story was basically, he was off duty.

32:36He ran, he got to the firehouse to attend and to, you know, show up at the towers to help. And he missed his fire company. They had already left. And that's where the, the, the genesis of the story comes from. He put on his, his bunker gear, tried to drive to the tunnel. They wouldn't let him in because they wouldn't let anybody but first responders. He parks his car somewhere, his truck, and ran three and a half miles. through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, up West Street, turned into the, made a right turn on Liberty and went right down to panel. If you're ever at the memorial, and we did this with you a little bit.

33:18Right. You go down to panel S28, all the name panels are numbered. That's where the doors were for the South Tower. He turned in there and disappeared and was never seen again. And he never found anything. And now that foundation, which started just with the family, they're still the ones that run it. that foundation today is doing billions of dollars of work. I mean, they're on TV every five minutes. Right. And it's an honor to have been, you know, started with them so many years ago when they were really, really small. This whole thing has been an incredible journey for me. That just started.

33:55Right. Getting back to New York. Mm-hmm. I have a lot of family that still lives on Long Island and don't come here or very infrequently. right and i try to explain i said you know if you come to this city and you have ambition you you're either going to feel that energy or you're not right i said i feel it the minute right used to come through the brook the the queensman town tunnel or over the bridge i felt it immediately yeah i i completely understand you know just real quick i want to talk about the woolworth building again real quick um it is wasn't it the it the first skyscraper the tallest tell us about that yeah willworth building it wasn't the first skyscraper there were others but it was the tallest it was completed in 1913 and it remained the tallest building in the world for 17 years amazing yeah yeah the only one that i know of that had a longer stretch was empire state building in 1931 until World Trade Center in 1973.

34:59Now it's switching every other day. Yeah, every day. Yeah, every other day. The Jeddah Tower is being built in Saudi Arabia, and that's going to be, if you want to just get this in your mind, it's three Empire State buildings. Oh, I've seen that. Yeah, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai is two Empire State buildings. Right, right. When I do the tours of the Woolworths building, because, you know, I think it's really important to know that what Bob and I have cultivated there is not just, you know, the building is this tall or it's, you know, this is, it's a story. It's a story of how one man grew a company from nothing, from zero.

35:34Today, he would have been a multi, multi-billionaire. I've said, had his Woolworth counter and had french fries and ketchup as a little kid. Would have been a billionaire. And we call it the hub and spoke. The hub is the building and the spokes are always different. You know, we talk about the lunch counter. Yeah, that's what I, yeah. Yeah, the lunch counter, the good and the bad. We talk about City Hall Park, the newspaper row. All these things are connected. So no two Woolworth tours are the same. So I'm assuming the good and the bad, the bad meaning the times, the decades that we've been in and what's happened and things like that.

36:10Well, the bad for Woolworth really was Woolworth in the South. Everybody remembers the Woolworth counters and they love it here. but then we we talk about uh you know the the flip side of that is the the the the Woolworth counters down south where they were segregated correct sadly unfortunately you could work at the Woolworth building but you couldn't eat a meal there I went to that museum where that took place it's in that store is in Greensboro North Carolina as part of the research for the doing our Woolworth I went to that place, a museum, and they show you exactly where it is, and you learn one of those guys was actually in the service, and they still wouldn't let him sit and eat.

36:53And it spread from four people to 70 ,000 until they forced Woolworth's hand. So those stores are basically independent because up here in the north, there was no issue. Anybody could eat at the county. This was a southern store. um and it's obviously things have changed um you know for the better um but it's just one of the topics that we we cover um and now we're branching out so we're going to be doing i went i did a little bit with you we're going to be doing 9-11 memorial well real quick how do people take your woolworth tour so we have a website do you mind if i that's what i want you to tell people yeah So it's worldwartoursnyc.com.

37:36It's a really good, I love it because it opens with drone footage. And we had to get a license for that. And people very rarely have ever seen the top of the building. It's very difficult to see it. Especially now that there are buildings being built all around it, which are covered it. So it starts at that. But it also shows our other tours. And tomorrow is the first Gangs of New York. Oh, wow. Five Points, Gangs of New York, Immigration. Amazing. That's one big tour tomorrow. And we're also doing, to commemorate 9-11, we're doing a Woolworth tour. Same price, didn't increase it at all. Woolworth tour.

38:15And then we're walking over to the 9-11 memorial. And there is a connection. Right. Walking over there. And then, last but not least, there's another subject you know about, and that is the sphere. Yes. If you'd like, I could mention that. Of course. Please do. So the spear is called a Koenig Spear, originally sat between the North and the South Tower on the plaza and was virtually destroyed. But you could still see it. It was barely damaged, but you could still see what it was. It wasn't buried. Let's put it that way. So it was salvaged. It was brought to Battery Park. and it was never reassembled because it was in pieces, but you could still see all the damage.

39:02They never tried to make it look as if it had never been damaged. And they had an eternal flame for a while. Long and the short of it is, they bring it back to Liberty Park, which was completed in 2017, where St. Nicholas Church is now up on the elevated park overlooking the two pools. Right. And they put it up there and did a great job, except for one thing. What's that? They never lit it. Oh, correct. They never lit it. Now, I have an office at this point in 2023 looking right down on the Trade Center. And I lived right across the street. I lived at Gateway. Right. So I used to walk my dog, especially during COVID when no one was around, I'd walk my dog on Liberty Park.

39:48And I would sit there and say the most important and the only above ground artifact we have as New Yorkers from that day sits here in the dark that no one can see it. That would be beautiful to see that lit up. Well, you have prestige. I got it lit. What? When? I got it lit. So there's a story coming out on Tuesday from the Tribeca Tribune. Oh, yes. Yeah. That story is going to tell the story of how this got lit. And basically it was, it was me. Um, I'm not gonna say versus the Port Authority because I would never win that battle. Well, it sounds like you did. Well, I guess I did. Yeah. Um, but I mean, at the end of the day, they had to be helpful, but it was a struggle and I just wrote them an email.

40:39I, first of all, it took me forever to find out who to email, but I finally, uh, I did a, I did a talk in the museum with somebody that worked on the pile during 9-11, an engineer, Peter Rinaldi. And I asked him that question. I said, I want to light this thing. He said, contact this person. Oh, thank you, Peter. I've been going around in circles for months. Wrote to one person, not going to mention their names. Wrote to one person, thought it was a great idea. Yeah. And said, I kept saying, why is it, why hasn't this been done? And long and the short of it, she moves on. A new person takes over.

41:15And we had a meeting at World Trade 4 summer of 2025. Right. And our CEO of the museum came. She loved the idea. And they agreed to do it. And from July 2025, it took until January 2026. And it's beautifully lit. It's lit now? It's lit now. I have never seen it lit. Yeah, it's lit now. Lit every day? Every night. 24-7? No, it's lit at night, obviously. But we were there last night. I'll send you a picture. I had a great picture of it being lit with the two beams, the tribute and light coming up behind it. So we finally got it done. It took three years. It took three years. One person who was a little thick-headed, I guess that's me.

42:01Good. Yeah, and it got done. And now a lot of the neighborhood doesn't realize it either because they don't always walk over there at night. but the whole area come Tuesday is going to know the gentleman who is the editor of the Tribeca Tribune. And he actually helped them move the reassemble the sphere in battery park in 2002. Yeah. He didn't know it was lit. He said it's lit. I was just there a couple of nights ago, like September 9th or 8th. Yeah. It's been lit since January. It's, it's ironically when it's set, At the World Trade Center in its original spot, it was never lit. It was the entire area, the plaza, as we called it, that whole plaza was lit.

42:52But it was never directly lit. This is the first time since it was installed in 73 that it actually has its own lighting. And I'm proud of it. I'm proud of it. Yeah. My grandson is seven. I want to say thank you, too. I mean, that's a big, what you're doing for New York City. That's an amazing thing right there. Yeah, people should go and see it. It's beautiful. And it's going to be part of my tour tomorrow. We're doing Wilworth Building. We're going to walk over to the memorial. It's going to go extra, and I don't care. I'm not charging anything extra. I say the same thing in my tours. We're going to go over, sorry.

43:27And I'm going to do a little bit about the panels I did with you. Which I want to talk about in just a second, too. Go ahead. And then we're going to go up to the sphere and, you know, explain that to them as well. Well, I want to say thank you real quick because of you, I got to see the Knicks from the Woolworths building. So I want to give you a, I haven't thanked you in person. Okay. And thanks to you, I was able to see the Knicks and their celebratory. And you had a good view. Your pictures were great. Ticker tape parade. It was awesome. So thank you. Third floor, right? Yeah, it was incredible.

43:59So thank you. This is the new management of the Woolworths building. If I had called them seven years ago, they would have hung up. yeah now they said what can i do for you yeah everybody was so kind and yeah it's been great for us as it was wonderful thank you it was an amazing day i couldn't be there but it was living through you once again as as hundreds of thousands of other people do well thank you it was it was amazing it's all because of you okay um so everybody the footage i got of the knicks thank you ed um okay so we got to tie it up um in just a moment but you know we could talk forever you know talking about new york city and 9-11 and everything um you told me an amazing story about a birdhouse oh can you tell the story sure um a few months ago i have a a family friend named theresa and uh she had never been to the memorials in city island It's almost like this oasis.

45:02Right. People that live there, it's like, oh, I don't go. In the Bronx. You're like, what is this? Yeah, I don't go into the city. I have a little community right here. Yeah. But we spent a day, and we didn't go in the museum. We didn't have time, but so we went to the memorial, and I didn't know. I asked her, did she know anyone here? And she said, my uncle passed here, the South Tower. And I said, well, you know, I'm here all the time. Tell me his name. I'll look it up on the phone, and we'll go find his name. And we did. I'll just say Paul. Paul was his first. And we found his name and she became a little bit emotional.

45:38And then we went to everybody's favorite bar, our version of Cheers. We went to O 'Hara's. Oh, nice. We met a bunch of my friends because that's the 9-11 community. Right. Lives at O 'Hara's pretty much. Correct. Yeah. It's an amazing place. And she met them. And I haven't seen her since. But we did talk. And I spoke to her before 9-11 and I said, I said does does uh Paul have other family besides this is her uncle and she's not his his wife has passed and you know his kids live in I think she said Maryland or something like that so I said well I'll make sure we'll put a flower I said it's always sad when you see all the tributes that are there but you see a name or names that have nothing and I didn't want his name to have nothing So that was the original idea.

46:28I'll just put a flower. But that's not the way my mind worked. So when I hung up, literally hung up with her, I Googled him. And I found some article written by the New York Times. They were writing articles about all the victims in 2002. And I found him. And one of the things we found, the main thing I found, you know, he had a very successful career. He was only there for a meeting that day. There wasn't even a full-time employee at the Trade Center. Just bad timing. uh and you know good family man but his passion his hobby was uh making birdhouses and right i don't know i honestly i mean i didn't know the man this is 25 years ago uh i don't know whether he sold them or he gave them away but he loved doing it and he was a really a good craftsman and um as soon as i read that i said that's what we have to do because he was in the middle of making one that he wanted to present of all things to Martha Stewart.

47:26That's really funny. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. He wanted, he was a big fan of Martha Stewart living. And I don't know whether he had connected with her or not. I don't know that part. I tried to write to her recently, tell her this story and I haven't heard back. Maybe I will. Yeah. So my son, Chris, has a really nice wood shop, and we made a beautiful little birdhouse. And I was there last night with a bunch of very good friends and told them the story, but they didn't know what I had. And I had a tiny little shopping bag, and then I took it out and put it in. We had a little spoke on the bottom so it would sit right in his name, wouldn't move.

48:11And we actually cut the bottom of the birdhouse on an angle because the name panels are angled. So it would keep it straight. It's right there on the north tower. He's on the south tower. He's on S63. Oh, on the south tower. Yeah, S63. Ah. And so many people who were just, there were thousands of people there last night. Literally crowding around, taking pictures and wanting to know why is there a little tiny birdhouse. So Teresa, I sent her the images, and now members of her family have been, I don't know who they are. They were writing, thank you, thank you. You know, Paulie is smiling down.

48:52I wish they would have seen it. Yeah, it was a great moment. You know, everybody leaves tributes, but I don't think anybody's ever left the birdhouse. And I was going through security, I had it in the bag. I went through security eight times yesterday. Every time you walked out, you had it. Right, oh. And every time I'd come back, I'd come back in with this little bag. What's in there? Believe me or not, of all the things you've checked today, this is your first birdhouse. right right right they'll laugh you know that's so it's really amazing i love that you did that it's just i wish i would have seen it too but this picture you showed me was incredible yeah and feel free to use the picture if you'd like i'll i'll um maybe we'll add it hopefully we can add it to the podcast so people can see and see it you know i was going to ask you too about the security this year at 9-11 was that because of the 25th anniversary or is that how it's going to be moving forward because it was pretty intense.

49:39Yeah. I think it, I mean, I don't know, they don't share those things. Right. However, you had multiple layers of security. First of all, they had a security fence. Right. Constructed around the entire site, which I've never seen either. I've seen barricades, which they also had. Right. I've never seen a fence that you could not scale. And the security was intense because they had, you know, they had MIPD, they had Port Authority. they also had secret service. Because don't forget, you had, what, four presidents, five presidents? Everybody was there but Trump. And J.D. Vance was there. And then Mayers, we saw Giuliani.

50:19Mondami. Mondami was there, and he was out front the whole time. Who was? Mondami. What do you mean by out front? Well, they were all kind of together. Oh, yeah. Including Obama. And he stood, like, the closest. he stood out of the out of the group by himself and never moved most of them left which they always do you know they're not going to stay the whole time you got it the secret service has to get them all out of there but he was he was right out there the whole the whole what is that reading of the whole of all the names oh he stood in like a separate area security area and he stood at the very front of that the whole time so oh i didn't realize i know there's a lot of you know good and bad, whatever opinions I'm talking about.

51:02I know what you meant. But I was, I thought I was very proud of him standing out front. Nice. You know, whether you like him, you don't. And we're not here to discuss that. Correct. But I just, I thought it was a good thing that he did. He's like, here I am, you know, right out front. I stayed the whole time. I heard he stayed the whole time. He did. And virtually no one else did. Right. They were all gone, but he was there. Yeah. I think that's a great way to do it too. I've seen a lot about that on, but throughout New York City, the people that live here talking about it. But it was wonderful that he did that.

51:33But we have to wrap it up, Ed. Okay. I wish we could keep talking. Is there anything else you want to finish up with that you think's, you know, really important to tie up our talk today? I guess just for me is just to continue to do good work. The birdhouse is the tiniest little thing. Love it. It's minuscule as compared to putting in two and a half thousand hours of volunteer time at the memorial or raising all that money. But to me, it really focuses on just doing something good for one person that you never met. Right. And to me, that's all about New York. There's so many amazing people here.

52:18And I've met so many of them like yourself. Well, thank you. You know, you're an amazing New Yorker. You are the epitome. And that's what I love about the guests on the podcast. you're all the epitome of what loving New York City is all about and that's what our audience is all about too because I always say you don't have to live in New York City to feel like a New Yorker you know New Yorkers are born everywhere all over the world every day and you get to tell them all about being a New Yorker and I do and and and I hope our our tour company continues to grow and I'm sure it will yeah and I know the first time that you came and you did a little shoot.

52:58Yeah. Our bookings exploded. Oh, did they really? They did. I didn't even know that. Yeah. Bob should have told you that. Well, Ed and Bob are amazing. And book a tour with them, the Woolworth Building, or any tour that they do. Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah. It really is. It is a pleasure to have you on the couch today. Thank you. Thanks, Ed. This is the last stop on this train. Everyone, please leave the train. Thank you for riding with MTA New York City Transit. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place.

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