Posters of missing people from the World Trade Center attacks paper a wall on Lexington Avenue.

The Mourning Edition

After 9/11, The New York Times’s Portraits of Grief became a defining memorial to those killed at the World Trade Center—but not every family welcomed what the paper chose to remember

By Wendell Jamieson

Christine Kay, an assistant Metro editor, came running up to my desk. This was on Sept. 13, 2001, and we were in the newsroom of the old New York Times building on West 43rd Street. Two days before, the World Trade Center had been hit by two hijacked planes and destroyed. We were all still in shock; the city still smelled like smoke. She said she needed someone to edit victim profiles.

That someone was me. So began what remains, 25 years later, the assignment of a lifetime. For more than a year, as a rookie staff editor, I ran Portraits of Grief, the paper’s effort to create biographical sketches of each and every person who died at the World Trade Center.