Mayor: This is last year that families can visit WTC pit on 9/11

NEW YORK — This year’s Sept. 11 anniversary commemoration will be the final time victims’ families will be able to descend into the ground zero pit to touch bedrock at the site where their loved ones were slain, the mayor said. “It is the last year they’ll be able to go down into the bathtub because the construction of the memorial will take over all this area,” Bloomberg said on his Friday weekly radio show last week. “There’s not going to be a pit to walk down to. I tried to make that as clear as I could to the families,” he said. The sprawling crater, one of the lasting images of the attack, is the closest thing many victims’ relatives have to a grave site. A number of families never received any of their loved ones’ remains, and they’ve come to consider the bedrock hallowed ground. Bloomberg’s comments came a day after he reached an agreement with victims’ families upset by plans to bar them from the site this year for safety reasons. The mayor ultimately approved the families’ proposal that they descend single file into the pit on this year’s anniversary, stopping only briefly to touch bedrock. Lawyer Norman Siegel, who represented those relatives in their disagreement with the city, said some family members were holding out hope that they would be able to walk on the land in future years. He said the families would wait until after this year’s ceremony to decide on a course of action. Every year on previous anniversaries, thousands who lost loved ones have gone to the site for the reading of the victims’ names, laying flowers in the pit and touching the bare bedrock. This year, the main memorial ceremony will be held, as originally planned by the city, at a plaza off the southeast corner of the site.