Staten Island's World Trade Center Memorial, Postcards, was defaced yesterday. The memorial has plaques of Staten Island's 1993 and 2001 attacks victims' names; the plaques also has victims' profiles water-jet-cut on them. The plaques of Cantor Fitzgerald employee Jason DeFazio and firefighter Jeremy Olsen were destroyed. Olsen's family had been planning on visiting the memorial today, because it would have been Jeremy's 37th birthday.
The memorial is located on the St. George Esplanade, near the SI Ferry Terminal and Richmond County Bank Ballpark, and was designed by Masayuki Sono. It's called Postcards because the two wing-like sculptures represent large postcards to loved ones; the sculptures look out onto the harbor at the the World Trade Center site. The memorial, which has 267 plaques and profiles on it, was unveiled on September 11, 2004, and cost $2.77 million.

You can see a description of the concept at Sono's website and photographs of the memorial at Bridge and Tunnel Club.
Photograph of damaged memorial from the Staten Island Advance; lower photographs from City of New York





a senseless piece of vandalism to a surprizingly effective memorial.
Wow, somebody got some serious karma payback time coming to them. What's the point of vandalizing this?
yeah, i don't understand.
Shock value, and to make a fuss big enough to get on the news.
It was probably some punk teenagers who did it.
Ahem, that's "Street Art", not vandalism. Have some respect.
wow, were they burnouts, stoners, or plain ole bored SI white trash?
This happened sometime over the weekend, not yesterday as the Post says. I saw this on Sunday afternoon after the SI Yankees game. I didn't realize it was so fresh.
I find it interesting that the broken pieces were left neatly stacked. I suppose someone else might have picked them up, but it would be somewhat odd if the vandals had done so.
Big deal. This whole 9/11 thing will be forgotten soon enough. Go to Prospect Park Brooklyn and look at the WWI memorial. It's been vandalized far worse than this and many more people died for our freedom in WWI than 9/11. So unless all memorials are going to be kept pristine, I say stop wasting money on these things and vandalize away!
Reality Czech = Clueless.
[2] What's the point of vandalizing anything? There never is one. Nothing except someone being drunk and/or an asshole.