“I mean, people were standing around shell-shocked,” Rowan, 75, said in a phone interview. “It wasn’t just the crash. It was the aftermath of realizing that there were people from the community that were working and that were killed. … And then the whole economy of the neighborhood suffered greatly.”
Since then, East Boston has rebounded, and residents and elected officials have worked together to accomplish much, Rowan said: creating the East Boston Greenway, bringing the ZUMIX music program to new headquarters in a renovated firehouse, and building a new YMCA, among other accomplishments.
On Sept. 11, 2011, residents will commemorate that loss and celebrate the community’s resilience and the ongoing cycle of life, as Piers Park hosts a 10th anniversary Community Memorial Service for the Victims of Sept. 11, 2001, followed by ZUMIX’s annual Harvest Festival.
Rowan said the memorial grew out of those dark days in 2001. She had helped organize a fundraiser for the renovation of Meridian House, the drug treatment center operated by the North Suffolk Mental Health Association that now bears her name.
The event was set for Sept. 20, 2001, at the Hilton Boston Logan Airport Hotel, but after the attacks that hotel became a center for grief counseling, and many felt the event could not possibly go on.
Rowan was determined not to cancel. She felt North Suffolk’s work had to continue and that it should honor its contracts with vendors and provide the much-needed revenue to the community. The association’s chief executive officer said the event could go forward if Rowan persuaded the board of directors it was the right thing to do. One by one, she convinced a dozen board members.
But the most important approval was that of fellow Meridian House supporter Edie DeAngelis, whose beloved nephew had died on American Airlines Flight 11.
