Finishing the Sky
Interdisciplinary designer, Jessica Jamroz, continues to fight for New Jersey's 9/11 families.
Standing as New Jersey’s only state-sanctioned 9/11 memorial, the Empty Sky memorial at Liberty Park honors all of New Jersey’s victims of the September 11 attacks. Something that many people overlook is the fact that New Jersey lost more people on 9/11 than any state except New York, more than one quarter of all who died on that day.
That grief lives on in many places: Middletown, Hoboken, Jersey City, as well as smaller towns where family trees remain notched by loss. In some cases, entire neighborhoods remember the day through absence.
Jessica Jamroz, the project’s lead designer, has family roots in New Jersey, but isn’t a New Jerseyan by birth. Still, she talks about the 9/11 losses as if they occurred inside her own bloodline.
“I love New Jersey and its 9/11 community,” she says. “I fight for New Jersey.” Her relationship working with the state may have started with the memorial, but it carries forward via responsibility.
The Empty Sky memorial made its way into the world on the tailwinds of multiple executive orders as different governors attempted to affirm the state’s intention to honor its victims. From the start, the state’s effort existed in the shadow of the National September 11 Memorial across the river.
“New Jersey has always been treated like the little brother to New York,” Jamroz says. In many ways, that sense of being overshadowed while bearing such an enormous share of the grief fuels her tenacity.
When she and Frederic Schwartz Architects won the competition in 2004, even the exact number of New Jerseyans to be memorialized was unclear. The attorney general’s office was still determining who qualified. People born in the state? People who lived or worked there? Those with strong ties? The count kept rising. It still rises today, as people continue to die from 9/11-related illnesses.
“Dying years later from 9/11 illness is a different type of sacrifice,” she says, “but no less visceral, painful, and meaningful.”
From the beginning, she understood the memorial site as symbolic terrain: It would indeed mark a wound within New Jersey’s heart. She took inspiration from many places, including the “wound of Christ” from the Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg. It wasn’t in a religious sense but an emotional one: the idea of pain made visible, reinforced, and purified.
“When 9/11 happened, we all felt a wound in our hearts,” she recalls. In the days that followed, she bore witness like many of us to what appeared to be true bipartisan unity. The memorial as she conceived it came with a similar energy of common purpose. Sadly, the political reality that followed was something else entirely.
“For the past few years, I have been independently organizing the annual ceremonies at the memorial with much support from 9/11 family members, police, fire, EMS unions, and the Port Authority of NYNJ,” Jamroz says. “I’ve encountered more needless pushback rather than a can-do cooperative spirit from Liberty State Park administrators with whom we must coordinate,” she adds. “It’s very sad to think about it, and many people in the mix feel like the state has forgotten them.”
Still, when she and Fred Schwartz won the design competition, she didn’t fully grasp how much emotional labor lay ahead. She thought she would be bringing form, symbolism, and site orientation to the work. She did, but she also became a custodian of thousands of private sorrows. Not just families and survivors but police, firefighters, construction workers, even intelligence veterans found themselves sharing with her. She never tried to fight it. She invited it, figuring it was easier for them to speak to her than to a therapist or even a trusted family member or friend.
“I’ve tried my best to capture their 9/11 memories,” she says. “They fuel my ability to authentically deliver on and hopefully fulfill the vision I promised more than twenty years ago.”
That promise keeps her going more than twenty years after the memorial’s earliest renderings. It’s part of what gives Jamroz hope that the memorial can reach completion in time for the twenty-fifth observance.
“It would be a great success story for the whole state,” she says.
The article is excerpted from the forthcoming book, Keeping Our Nation’s Promise: 9/11 and the Stories That Still Shape Us ©2026, Amplify Publishing Group. The Empty Sky memorial to be was officially dedicated on September 10, 2011, just ahead of the 10th observance of the attacks.