News

N.Y. Photographer`s 9/11 Museum Called a `Disgrace`

05/02/2013

A photographer who got rare access to Ground Zero after 9/11 is now selling $27.50 tickets to his Meatpacking District museum, but has given a pittance to charities he promised would benefit.

Gary Suson was allowed to take poignant photos of firefighters carrying fallen comrades from the Pit and other intimate shots.

For months, he roamed the disaster site, also taking many remnants. He displays a Path station clock frozen in time, a twisted piece of fuselage from American Airlines Flight 11, rare chunks of World Trade Center window glass, eyeglass frames in a case, a doll, a woman's dusty shoe, and a "golf ball that sat on the desk of a stockbroker at Cantor Fitzgerald," he tells visitors in an audio tour.

"Its just appalling that people think they can make money off the pain and suffering of the surviving family members," said Al Santoro, a retired deputy chief who lost Firefighter son Christopher, 23, of Engine 54. "It's just deplorable."

Former Deputy Chief Jim Riches, whose son Jimmy, 29, of Engine 29, was killed, called the admission fees "a disgrace."

"He wasn't given special permission to remove what he wanted from the site," Riches said of Suson. "No one was."

The price of tickets to Suson's "Ground Zero Museum Workshop," in a one-room loft on West 14th Street, has risen from $15 to $25 for adults, plus a $2.50 processing fee. Admission for kids 4-12: $21.50.

One charity touted on his website, the Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation, said it never got a dime from Suson or the museum. A sign at the museum's entrance last Thursday listed "recent" donations, but two charities it named said they had not gotten anything since 2011.

Suson did not return calls.

Suson has previously claimed he retrieved items from a Dumpster at the edge of Ground Zero. In his taped tour, he says "artifacts were being thrown away . . . I asked permission of fire officers if I could salvage them. Luckily, they said yes."

Law-enforcement sources said no one had permission to take anything, even from Dumpsters, because Ground Zero was a "crime scene."