The breathtaking drone memorial gave shape to an absence New Yorkers have carried for 25 years.
By Michele Evans
NYWeeklyRecord.com
9/11/2026
For a few minutes, New York’s missing towers were back.
NEW YORK CITY, NY – Not in steel and concrete, but in 2,977 small points of white light suspended above New York Harbor. As the lights joined to form the familiar outlines of the Twin Towers, the sight was both beautiful and difficult to absorb.
The towers appeared almost ghostlike against the darkness, rising beyond the Brooklyn Bridge and beside the modern Lower Manhattan skyline. They looked close enough to recognize, yet impossible to reach.
The installation, titled “2,977 Lights Over New York Harbor,” took flight on September 9, two days before the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Each drone represented one of the 2,977 people killed that day.
The lights first rose from the harbor in a glowing helix. They then moved into position, slowly forming the two towers at what organizers described as their original architectural scale and proportions.
Video of the display was shown again during ABC’s anniversary coverage Friday night, allowing people far beyond New York Harbor to experience the memorial. Even through a screen, the image was chilling.
This was not simply a technology company showing what thousands of drones could do. The design was reviewed directly with members of the 9/11 community, including victims’ relatives, survivors and first responders.
Among those who helped shape the memorial were FDNY first responder and artist Brenda Berkman; retired firefighter Tim Brown; Terry Strada, whose husband, Tom, was killed in the North Tower; Jim Smith, whose wife, NYPD Officer Moira Smith, died while rescuing others; and Genevieve Siller, daughter of fallen firefighter Stephen Siller. ABC7 New York reported that the installation grew from their collective voices.
That involvement matters. A memorial this personal could not be designed solely from blueprints or computer models. It had to carry the memories of people who knew the victims, survived the attacks or ran toward danger while others fled.
“This was their vision,” Sky Elements, the company that produced the display, said of the families who reviewed the design.
The company described the project as a gift to New York City, created for the families first and also for young people who were not alive on September 11, 2001. According to its account of the memorial, the production was funded entirely through private philanthropy and donated work. There was no admission charge, commercial message or corporate advertisement written across the sky.
Pulling it off required months of coordination with federal, state and local agencies. Special airspace authorization, altitude waivers, a temporary flight restriction, communication with nearby helipads and air-traffic controllers, and a ground safety perimeter were all needed to place nearly 3,000 drones above one of the most closely monitored areas in the country.
But the machinery disappeared once the lights took their places.
What remained was the shape of something New York lost.
The display also offered an emotional bridge between generations. For those who remember the towers, they were once an ordinary part of the city: visible during a commute, through an office window or from across the river. Their absence became part of the skyline after their destruction.
For younger people, the World Trade Center often exists only in photographs, classroom lessons and stories told by adults. The drone memorial allowed them to see the towers in relation to the city around them, not simply as two buildings isolated in an old image.
The installation preceded the annual Tribute in Light, whose twin beams rose from Lower Manhattan on Friday evening. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum dedicated this year’s observances to the victims, their families, survivors and the rescue and recovery workers who continue to live with the consequences of that day.
Twenty-five years have passed, but time has not made September 11 distant for everyone. Families still live with an empty chair, a missing voice and the life events their loved ones never came home to see. Survivors and first responders continue to face illnesses and memories that did not disappear when the smoke cleared.
No light show can return the people who were lost. It cannot restore the futures taken from them or erase what their families have endured.
What it can do is stop a busy city for a moment and ask people to look up.
Each of the 2,977 lights was small on its own. Together, they formed something unmistakable.
Perhaps that is why the sight caused so many people to catch their breath. The drones did not pretend the towers had returned. They gave visible form to an absence that has never entirely left New York—and reminded the world that the people represented by those lights have not been forgotten.
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