Thursday, October 1, 2026
Nearly every city, town and village across Long Island has its own display to ensure that the events of Sept. 11 are never forgotten. Long Beach has commemorative artwork spread across the city, with a series of plaques in a permanent showcase at City Hall.
Nassau County honors those who died in the attacks with a pair of towering sculptures in East Meadow’s Eisenhower Park, beside steel beams salvaged from the World Trade Center. And Suffolk County remembers its residents who died with an outdoor installation in Hauppauge designed by Barry Silberstang, of Long Beach.
Silberstang, 82, moved to Long Beach in 2017 with his wife, Long Beach native Beverly Hansel Silberstang, 81. The Silberstangs had lived in Manhattan and visited Long Beach regularly since 1977. Silberstang graduated from Cooper Union in 1967, and, after more than 20 years working in several architecture firms, founded his own, a successful design business that he managed for over three decades before semi-retiring in 2022. His work was included in a Museum of Modern Art exhibition, “Education of an Architect: A Point of View,” in 1971.
In early 2002, Suffolk County opened a design competition to create the county’s first 9/11 memorial. Silberstang’s firm won the bid, with a unique and heartfelt perspective on the memorial’s focus. “To me, it was not about the building,” Silberstang explained. “It was about all these victims, many of whom had no remains, and no remains means there’s no burial. There’s no headstone. I wanted to create the equivalent of a sacred place, and I came up with this idea of an inaccessible garden.”
Silberstang’s plans for the open-air monument utilized nature and space to give visitors the chance to fully recognize the moment. The memorial, known as the Garden of Remembrance, sits on an acre of land in Hauppauge’s Armed Forces Plaza near, the H. Lee Dennison building, the hub of Suffolk County government. The display consists of a series of four rows of Lexan — a transparent, highly durable material — arranged in a nearly 90-foot-square footprint, just under half the size of the World Trade Center towers’ 200-foot-square footprints.
Each Lexan panel represents one of the 178 Suffolk County residents who died. The markers are arranged alphabetically, and are etched with names, ages, occupations and hometowns. The garden is surrounded by low shrubs, where many visitors place flags and personal effects to connect with their loved ones.
“From the most simplistic memorial, we can truly believe the 178 innocent lives lost from our county on Sept. 11 are not just etched in glass here today, but etched in our hearts and our souls as we continue to move forward,” then County Executive Steve Levy said at the unveiling ceremony on Sept. 10, 2009. Construction of the monument took roughly six months, but was delayed for several years due to political turmoil from the time the bid was awarded in 2003 to its eventual completion.
Adhering to Silberstang’s initial plan for an “inaccessible garden,” the four sides of the Lexan perimeter surround a free-growing plot filled with native flowers. The garden was deliberately made to be unreachable by visitors, creating a contrast between the well-manicured lawn outside the memorial and the uninterrupted cycle of life within it.
Silberstang said it was important to provide a singular place for families who otherwise wouldn’t have a local, tangible connection their loved ones. “It’s closure,” he said. “That’s the only place some of these people have to go. And it was so … moving.”
