A seventh silence is added as New York marks 25 years since 11 September

Family members of the dead began reading names on the National September 11 Memorial plaza at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, 11 September 2026. The first of seven moments of silence fell at 8:46 a.m., the minute American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower 25 years earlier.

The seventh pause is new. Until this year the ceremony marked six times: the two impacts, the two collapses, the strike on the Pentagon, and the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Organisers added a seventh silence for people who have died since 2001 of illnesses and injuries linked to the dust and the recovery work. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum says about 9,000 people have died that way. The original death toll on the day, not counting the 19 hijackers, remains 2,977.

Access to the plaza opened at 7 a.m. for families only. The lottery for readers closed on 2 August. There are no political speeches. A bell marks each of the timed silences. The names of those killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing are read with the 2001 list, as they have been for years.

President Donald Trump is not in New York. He is attending the Pentagon ceremony in Virginia. Four living former presidents, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, are expected at Ground Zero with Vice President JD Vance. Bush was in office on the morning of the attacks.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is also present. He is the first Muslim mayor of New York. A petition circulated this week, promoted by the New York Post and former mayor Rudy Giuliani, asked him to stay away. It gathered more than 100,000 signatures and accused him of associating with people described as dismissive of American institutions. Mamdani has not withdrawn. On Wednesday he stood with Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch at One Police Plaza to unveil a department memorial for officers killed on the day and in the years that followed.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick visited the pools on Thursday. He ran Cantor Fitzgerald, which occupied the upper floors of the North Tower and lost 658 employees. He met Kaitlyn Strada Wallace, who was four when her father, Thomas Strada, a senior vice president at the firm, died on the 104th floor. A group from the Allied Pilots Association laid a wreath at the South Pool for the crew of Flight 11.

The Most Reverend Ronald A. Hicks, Archbishop of New York, and Bishop Robert J. Brennan of Brooklyn invited families to a 5 p.m. Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral. Separate ceremonies are under way at the Pentagon and in Shanksville. In Gander, Newfoundland, residents mark the 25th year since 38 diverted airliners landed there; the U.S. ambassador's invitation has drawn local protest, which Almanaque covered separately.

New York City this week released more than 170,000 pages of files on air quality at Ground Zero. The documents record benzene readings in November 2001 and asbestos at 15 John Street ten months after the attacks. Mayor Mamdani stood with Jon Stewart when the city posted them. First responders have pressed for coverage of dementia as a 9/11-related condition. The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and the federal World Trade Center Health Program both report that civilian survivor applications now outnumber those from first responders by nearly two to one.

The Memorial plaza is built as two waterfall pools in the footprints of the towers, designed by Michael Arad and Peter Walker. Bronze parapets carry the names. The South Pool lists people killed at the South Tower, on Flights 175, 77 and 93, and many first responders. Flowers and flags sit in the cut letters, as they have every year since the plaza opened in 2011.

The day remains the deadliest foreign attack on U.S. soil. What has changed at 25 years is the register of the dead. The seventh silence treats the later illnesses as part of the same event, not a footnote. How many more names will be added before the 30th anniversary is an open administrative question for the Fund and the Health Program, not a ceremonial one.