Construction Project
Working from scraps, local steel company builds monument to the World Trade Center
by Angela Wibking
Twin Towers
Limor Steel
7009 Westbelt Dr.
For information or directions, call 350-7843
In the hours following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, grieving Americans across the country began displaying flags and creating other patriotic tributes and memorials to the fallen. At Limor Steel, owner Alex Limor and three employees began creating art.
The results of that heartfelt collaboration—a to-scale interpretation of the World Trade Center in shards of rusted steel—now rises 13 feet in the air outside the steel fabricating facility in an industrial section of West Nashville.
Limor, whose company makes structural and ornamental steel for commercial and residential projects, had been on the road to Atlanta when he heard of the attacks. “I called the office as soon as I could and just told everyone there to call it a day and go home,” he recalls. Upon his return a few days later, he and employee Vance Cummings were standing outside the Limor building studying the small steel sculpture they had created in their spare time weeks before the attacks—a 4-foot monolith of scrap iron they had ironically titled “The Black Hole.”
“As we were looking at it, it struck us that the materials we’d used were similar to those used to build the World Trade Center,” says Limor. “Vance and I thought it would be interesting to construct a monument to the towers as if the video of the collapsing towers we all watched on television were running in reverse.” Limor got on the Internet to research construction details on the World Trade Center and settled on a size for the new sculpture that converts the fallen towers’ 1,350-foot height to 13 feet and each tower’s width from 200 feet to 2 feet. Over the next three months, Limor, Cummings and employees Martin Small and Thoren Freeman spent their spare moments working on the steel sculpture, welding chunks of steel from the company’s scrap bin into two tall rectangles.
Once the towers were finished, Limor set about designing a base for the sculpture that would not only provide a secure anchor for the piece but also visually reinforce its message of renewal. “My solution was to have the towers rising from a debris field,” he says, referring to the welded mass of scrap iron that surrounds and supports the towers. The sculpture, which weighs almost 2,000 pounds, is constructed in three parts and can be disassembled.
Limor is no stranger to art in general and sculpture in particular. His father Irvin Limor, who died in 1995, was a well-known Nashville sculptor in the 1960s and 1970s and the owner of Artistic Ironworks, which specialized in ornamental metal work. A metal sculpture of a phoenix rising from the ashes by Irvin Limor is installed on the Belmont University campus. Coincidentally, it commemorates the rebuilding of a campus structure that was leveled by fire. “Unfortunately, someone at the university decided to paint the sculpture at some point,” Alex notes.
After Limor graduated with a degree in architecture from the University of Tennessee, he worked for a time as an architect before joining his father in the family business in Nashville. Over the years Limor has created such commissioned works as the stacked books and cross sculpture in front of the LifeWay (formerly Southern Baptist Sunday School Board) building on Ninth Avenue near Broadway, and the 8-foot-long galvanized steel menorah installed outside the Jewish Community Center on Percy Warner Boulevard.
Menorahs of all sizes are something of a specialty for Limor, whose parents met in a Polish concentration camp and survived to immigrate to Palestine (now Israel). Alex was born in Palestine and was 9 years old when he and his family came to Nashville in 1957. His mother Elizabeth frequently talks to Nashville school groups about her experiences in Poland during the Holocaust and has written a self-published memoir. Alex’s menorahs, which are designed to burn the traditional olive oil, are available at Prestige Art Gallery on Thompson Lane near 100 Oaks Mall.
Unlike Limor’s commissioned sculptures and menorahs, the Twin Towers sculpture is not for sale. “We didn’t build this to sell it,” says Limor. “It’s a memorial that represents the idea that we can rebuild—that it’s very hard for democracy to fall.” Limor, Cummings, Small and Freeman would like to donate the sculpture so it can be placed in a public space where more Nashvillians can see it and reflect on its message. “Right now, we get a lot of people coming over from the Metro emissions testing center across the street, asking if this is art and can they take a picture,” Limor says.
The answer to both questions, of course, is yes.
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