By Kirsten Scharnberg
Tribune staff reporter
Published July 22, 2002

NEW YORK -- As near as anyone can remember, the idea was born in a tiny and obsessively tidy construction trailer on the eastern edge of what used to be the World Trade Center.

Four day laborers were there, along with their foreman from Laborers Local 79, and they were debating what could be done to commemorate their nearly 10 months of service at the epicenter of the worst terrorist attack in American history. It didn't have to be dramatic--they didn't want to skywrite some heartfelt message over lower Manhattan or anything--but they wanted to acknowledge somehow to the world how profoundly and permanently all those hours of picking through the rubble of ground zero had changed them.

"How about a tattoo?" asked the foreman, Vinnie LaTerra, and everyone agreed.

But LaTerra's suggestion raised another question: A tattoo of what?

A picture of the twin towers seemed too morbid to these guys who had seen so vividly what those once-dominant buildings had been reduced to. The American flag felt overdone. A soaring eagle just didn't capture it.

What these men wanted was an image--an image as powerful as that of New York's firefighters raising Old Glory on the afternoon of Sept. 11, but one that specifically represented the nearly 3,000 union construction workers who, with little fanfare or public acknowledgment, had run the cranes and excavators and backhoes that cleaned up the almost 1.8 million tons of debris at the horrific site.

The tattoo they settled on seems obvious now that they look back on it. The giant steel cross--once a massive crossbeam that had been part of the World Trade Center's Building 6--had not only become one of the most well-known images of ground zero but had been discovered, pulled from the rubble and erected by a group of construction workers.

Even today, with cleanup complete and LaTerra's half-dozen day laborers becoming the final recovery workers to leave the site for good last week, that hulking cross still stands near the public viewing platform, one of the few unchanging symbols from a place that has changed in less than a year from the world-famous twin towers to the shocking and gruesome ground zero to an empty, huge crater known simply as "The Hole."

Over the course of a couple of weeks earlier this summer, LaTerra and his laborers visited a little shop in Greenwich Village where an artist rumored to have worked on Ozzy Osbourne's arms designed a tattoo that looked exactly like the ground zero cross--complete with jagged edges and the mangled scrap of steel that had melted onto it in the heat of the initial collapse and inferno.

Word spread quickly through New York union and construction circles. Soon dozens of workers had gotten the tattoo and dozens more had booked appointments. Some got crosses big enough to cover their entire backs; some put smaller ones on their forearms or muscular thighs; one middle-aged father who already was covered with tattoos said his cross was as significant as the tattoo he had gotten to mark the death of an infant son.

A badge of honor

In blue-collar bars and little diners where New York construction workers gather for lunch and coffee breaks, the tattoo became a badge of honor, a mark of heartache, an emblem that communicated at a glance how these men's service at ground zero had affected them in ways and places that couldn't otherwise be seen or explained as they returned to their long-interrupted regular lives.

"The stories we hear as these guys sit here getting this tattoo just blow your mind," said Pete Dutro, 26, the owner of MacDougal Street Tattoo Co., the shop where the construction workers have been flocking in recent weeks.

"It's like we're their bartenders or their counselors or something. They tell us how they were changed and what the experience was like. It can get pretty emotional. Everyone's got a story that has led them here to get this cross put on them forever."

One for WTC, one for his son

About a block from ground zero, just outside the tavern where construction workers routinely went for beers and impromptu peer counseling after their 12-hour, seven-day-a-week shifts, Michael Fossati lifts his shirt in the middle of a crowded street to show a friend his fresh tattoo. The skin is still flaking and peeling around the cross, which covers his entire beefy back.

"Just did it Monday," he says.

Fossati begins to tell the story of what led him to the ruins of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. He had been working at a construction site about two blocks away when he saw a plane flying low as he gazed up at the boom of the crane he was operating. He watched the first plane hit, jumped from his machine and rushed to the flaming buildings.

Within days, Fossati was named one of the top maintenance foremen for ground zero. As a man intimately familiar with every piece of equipment on the site, he stayed there until early July, long after work officially had ended and the May 30 closing ceremony had been broadcast live to the nation. The cross tattoo, which Fossati got a couple of weeks ago during his final week at ground zero, marks the end of an experience that leaves the 44-year-old father of two at a loss for words.

"Unless you were there, you can't understand it," said Fossati, who has more than 20 tattoos, including one that says "Alexander" for a son who died the day he was born.

"None of us could really explain what we saw down there to our wives or our parents or our kids, and that was hard on a lot of marriages and families. So this tattoo, I guess, is the way we can mark ourselves to each other, to show we're part of the brotherhood and to show the other construction workers who were there that we were there ourselves and that we can help them through the emotional recovery if they need us."

Enduring symbols

Like the tattoo, symbols of ground zero can be seen everywhere among the construction workers who devoted so much of their lives to the place and who now are returning to job sites all across Manhattan and the other boroughs.

These men and women--many of whom chafe when they talk about all the publicity police officers and firefighters received for their service while most Americans knew little of the more than 3 million hours logged at ground zero by construction workers--distinguish themselves from the other construction workers they now labor with in a dozen little ways.

They wear banged-up hard hats with peeling stickers that read "Welcome to Hell," the two L's in "hell" designed to look like the twin towers. They still have their ground zero photo security badges in their wallets or draped over their cars' rearview mirrors.

They even stand out because of their deep, dry coughs, a proof of extended ground zero service that doctors say likely is the result of breathing in so much smoke and toxins.

"I suppose it's a lot like career military men who got tattoos marking their day at Pearl Harbor or the fact that they survived Normandy," LaTerra said. "Construction guys aren't the only ones who have gotten tattoos. Some cops are getting the NYPD shield and some firefighters are getting the names of their fallen comrades, but for us it's been the cross.

"I think what's different with us is that we're all unified in what we're getting," he continued. "That cross represents a kind of full circle to us because it was some union laborer who worked on putting those crossbeams into Building 6 when it was first being built, and now it's a bunch of union laborers who cleaned it all up after it was reduced to a big, smoking pile."

Large numbers of construction workers still are making appointments to get the cross tattoo at MacDougal's.

Bobby Gray--a veteran New York crane operator who within a week of the terrorist attacks was named ground zero's master mechanic, responsible for overseeing all the heavy-equipment operators, is planning to get one on his shoulder.

`I found God down there'

Someone asks Gray, who also carries a paper clip-size, custom-made replica of the cross in his pocket, what it is about the cross that moves him to imprint it on his skin. Gray suddenly gets serious.

"I guess you could say I found God down there," he said.

Gray recounts the night, just a two days after the attacks, when several laborers found the cross as they searched under the portable floodlights for potential survivors.

"The cross was just there, poking up through the rubble, illuminated in those beams of light," he said. "It was hard not to think that it was some kind of sign of hope in the middle of all that hell."

Gray started attending a weekly mass held under the cross. On those Sunday mornings he found peace in an otherwise horrific week and started believing that a higher power had been leading him to take this job, to clean up this mess in his hometown.

"But a tattoo is forever," someone reminds the clean-cut Gray. "Are you sure you'll always want it?"

Gray doesn't hesitate.

"I'm a construction worker, and that cross became our symbol," he said. "Tattoo or not, I'm going to carry what I saw down there with me forever anyway."

Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune