9-11 Memorial to be Expanded

Hopatcong hopes to expand its 9-11 memorial before the tragedy's 10-year anniversary.

Borough engineer John Ruschke presented the latest plans to update the Modick Park statue at Wednesday's Mayor and Council meeting at borough hall.

The new memorial would feature a steel beam from the World Trade Center atop a pentagon-shaped marble slab, which would be surrounded by a 4-foot concrete walkway displaying six pavers marking different events and times during 9-11. The walkway would be enclosed by another band of pavers hosting four benches.

Mayor Sylvia Petillo said the project would be mostly funded by donations.

"This is really the nicest [draft] we've seen and having that piece of marble in the shape of the Pentagon really…looks like a sculpture," she said.

Outside the paver band would be three yoshing cherry trees, representing the three hijacked planes. Finally, 11 burning bushes would surround the entire monument.

Despite working from donations, the town expects the Department of Public Works to complete most of the landscaping and for a local contractor to install the pavers.

Ruschke said the original planners had difficulty deciding where to put the monument. Then he sat down with a Hatch Mott MacDonald landscape architect and figured it out.

Ruschke expects the monument to be complete around next summer.

"It's not something that's going to be finished right away," he said. "But time flies."

The 9-11 monument isn't the borough's only project in the works.

The town wants to use a New Jersey Department of Transportation discretionary aid grant to renovate the front of borough hall.

At the heart of the renovation will be a Hopatcong Fire Department tribute. Petillo, in an interview in her office last week, wanted to make it clear that it won't be a memorial.

"We just want to pay tribute to our firemen," she said. "You don't realize how much you need them until an emergency."

A fireman statue currently sits in a case with a glass window inside borough hall's lobby. It would replace the gazebo, which Petillo said would be moved to another part of borough hall.

The statue would be surrounded by various flora, six benches, and, perhaps most importantly, a circle of inscribed pavers dedicated to the town's current and past firemen, according to a Hatch Mott MacDonald draft.

The monument would stand between a concrete walkway extending from borough hall to the River Styx Road sidewalk.