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Harry Rowland, who spent most of his life on the sidewalks near the former World Trade Center site after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, singing to pedestrians about the irreparable damage that had been caused, died at his home in Upper Manhattan on May 23. He was 70 years old.
His son, Kajuan Devon Rowland, said the cause of death was a heart attack.
In the months after 9/11, Mr. Rowland, who described himself as a former tour guide and security guard at the World Trade Center, appeared in the streets surrounding the ruins. He wasn’t a doomsday street preacher, but something more unusual: a speaker who urged passersby to confront the tragedies of the past.
Initially, Rowland was filling an unmet need.
The attack turned the World Trade Center into a deep crevice in the earth known as Ground Zero. Cleanup and construction dragged on as officials argued over plans for the site. Visitors from around the world found no memorial, just construction barricades blocking heavy machinery.
But amidst the noise, a voice was heard.
“Don’t leave history a mystery!” cried Rowland. “How many buildings were there before they were gone? Make no mistake! Don’t say two, that’s not true!”
The correct answer was seven buildings in the World Trade Center, all of which collapsed.
He detailed the destructive power of the attack, said the Twin Towers were as big as four Statues of Liberty stacked on top of each other, and exclaimed that the World Trade Center should be given the zip code 10048 – a “city within a city.”
Profiles in NPR, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and others have portrayed Rowland as a symbol of “what all New Yorkers struggle with: finding a way to come to terms with the impact of the September 11th terrorist attacks,” as the Orlando Sentinel put it in 2002.
The Sentinel writes that visitors flock to Rowland because “there is nothing else to know – no tour guides, no literature, no signs to say what lies beyond the giant square hole in the ground several stories deep.”
At first, the neighborhood had its regulars, including the Rev. William Minson, a pastor who organized memorial walks, and Philip Belpasso, a street flutist who played “Amazing Grace” on repeat. After the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, commemoration of 9/11 took on new meaning. “Warmongers!” a pedestrian once shouted at Mr. Rowland.
By 2006, he was wearing a plastic container around his neck to hold tips. The following year, he told The Associated Press he often made $35 to $40 a day. “They call me the World Trade Center man,” he began telling people on the street.
Eventually, the site was cleaned up and the 9/11 Memorial and Museum opened, and Rowland set up shop a block away on Greenwich Avenue, where a long bronze plaque commemorates all 343 firefighters who died in the disaster. In between chatting with passersby, Rowland polishes the plaque with a cloth.
His monologues became more and more puzzling, his rhymes more and more hypnotic.
7 days a week,
Seven Letters from New York,
The seven vertices of the Statue of Liberty’s crown,
There are seven continents,
The seven red stripes of the American flag
The World Trade Center had seven buildings.
He made unsubstantiated claims to pedestrians, such as that the death toll at the World Trade Center was undercounted by hundreds.
“What about the homeless?” he cried. “What about the undocumented workers?”
Rowland said that a nephew who worked in the South Tower was among 14 people he knew who died in the attack, but a Los Angeles Times reporter was unable to confirm whether Rowland had a nephew.
In 2008, Rowland gave an interview to We Are Change, a group that claims there has been a cover-up about what really happened on September 11. Rowland was familiar with the group’s claims and appeared to support them.
He was still a young man when he first arrived at Ground Zero, but by 2022 he was worn down by life on the streets. He repeated the same words over and over, sometimes stammering out his most famous catchphrase: “History, let us not remain a mystery.”
But he continued to capture the interest and confidence of those who stopped to listen to him.
“He doesn’t seem to have any political agenda,” Robert Maxwell, a North Carolina resident who met and befriended Rowland outside Ground Zero, told the Los Angeles Times. “He just knows everything about the building.”
Harry John Rowland was born in Harlem on May 14, 1954. He never met his father, also named Harry, and his mother, Marie Bowen, was a seamstress and bartender who raised her son with the help of his brother, Bill Davis, a military veteran.
Before Sept. 11, Mr. Rowland worked a variety of jobs, his daughter, Lashanieque Key, said in an interview: He was an auto mechanic, a bouncer at the popular Bronx club Disco Fever, a cab driver, a chauffeur, a stagehand and photographer at the Apollo Theater and a deckhand and photographer for the Spirit Cruise Line.
Rowland said he survived the Sept. 11 attacks because he had been taking his son to his first day of school that morning and returned to the World Trade Center after hearing false claims that only the Twin Towers had collapsed.
Key said he didn’t know the details of his father’s work at the World Trade Center but it was unlikely he worked there for long, adding that the Spirit cruise ship on which his father worked was docked nearby.
Rowland loved the Twin Towers, his daughter said. He collected photos of them and would pose his children in front of them for photos. She recalled that he saw the smoke and flames from his New Jersey home on 9/11, got on a boat and went to ground zero to try to help, only to be confronted by a horrific scene.
He’d left New Jersey in recent years and spent most of his time living in New York with friends or in “temporary housing provided by the city,” Key said, relying mainly on Social Security payments to cover his living expenses, allowing him to focus on what he saw as his true calling.
In addition to his two children, he is survived by one granddaughter.
Sal Argano, a firefighter who has worked since 1999 at 10 House, the famed fire station next to the World Trade Center, said Rowland could help him and his colleagues, especially by distracting tourists.
“I can’t remember a week without him,” Argano said.
Today, the World Trade Center is a neat memorial and a grand new tower, and as far as Argano can tell, there’s nothing left of the style of spontaneous, uncontrollable grief that defined the place when it was called Ground Zero after Rowland’s death.
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