An artist's rendering of the World Trade Center Memorial
Long Island Compost has been chosen as the soil supplier for the National World Trade Center Memorial at Ground Zero.
The memorial, created by architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker, is scheduled for completion in 2011. It will consist of 400 Swamp White Oak trees surrounding two memorial pools where the towers once stood. The names of the nearly 3,000 people who died in the attacks of Feb. 26, 1993 and Sept. 11, 2001 will be inscribed around the pools’ edges.
The Yaphank-based compost company was asked to create a soil mix that would allow the trees to grow in an urban environment.
“In order to grow healthy trees in this context, the trees on the Memorial quadrant are being installed in a suspended paving system,” Long Island Compost President and CEO Charles Vigliotti said. “The paving of the plaza will rest on a series of pre-cast concrete tables that ‘suspend’ the Plaza over troughs of Long Island Compost planting soil that run the full width of the Plaza.”
This paving system will allow the trees’ roots to extend through the soil in order to gather water and nutrients.
The Memorial is expected to draw 6 to 8 million visitors annually, and will be one of the most sustainable, green plazas ever built.
