Twenty-five years after two airplanes struck the Twin Towers, a single pane of glass sits in the 9/11 Memorial & Museum at Ground Zero. While tens of thousands of others shattered, that single window from one of the upper floors survived intact.
As the nation prepares to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the attacks, that window, or the “survivor glass,” is just one among more than 82,000 artifacts that Stephanie Schmeling Johnson ’09 thinks about often. As the head of cataloging and archives at the 9/11 Museum, she works behind the scenes to ensure nothing is forgotten.
“A big part of what we do with our objects is storytelling,” Schmeling said. “Objects tell the story of a person’s experience.”
Schmeling has worked at the Museum for 15 years and has seen the collection continue to grow as people donate items and share memories of their loved ones as part of the official 9/11 history. From the shoes someone wore to escape the North Tower to children’s art created after the attacks, Schmeling documents it all.
“I’m responsible for all the cataloging of new content and managing all of the previous acquisitions into the museum’s permanent collection,” Schmeling said. “So that means I'm doing mostly database work—describing and documenting all of the objects and digital content that is accessioned into the museum’s collection. That ranges from large pieces of recovered steel all the way to personal artifacts donated by family members of the victims, rescue and recovery workers' hard hats, oral histories, everything.”
Schmeling also often works with photographs depicting the recovery work, which can be challenging. As part of her cataloging, she needs to describe the photo in a way that makes it accessible to future researchers and historians. She uploads all of the information onto a public website she manages.
“When I get a photograph collection to catalog, I have to figure out the mystery of what angle it is and what street we’re looking at, because the pile is just a mass of rubble,” she said. “I like that mystery-solving research aspect of my job, to be able to make those images most accessible.”
Finding her way to New York
Schmeling fell in love with history at Cornell College, where she majored in history and worked in the college’s archives. She also spent a block in Chicago doing research and working with a collection at the Newberry Library. After graduation, she went on to New York University to get her master’s in archives and public history.
It wasn’t, however, the first time the Colorado native had been to New York. She became acquainted with the city after her mentors, Professor of History Catherine Stewart and Professor of History Phil Lucas, encouraged her to apply for the Gilder Lehrman History Scholars program the summer before her senior year at Cornell.
She was named a scholar in the prestigious program, spending five weeks in New York City engaging in historical research, seminars with historians, and behind-the-scenes tours of archives. It was then and there that she realized how much she loved the city and wanted to make it her future home, and she has Cornell to thank for leading her down this path.
“I think a real pivotal moment for me was when I decided to major in history,” Schmeling said. “I didn’t really know what a career in history would be, and Professor Stewart and Lucas both encouraged me to apply to that Gilder Lehrman program. Prior to that, I never really saw myself as having the potential to do those types of things. I was never brave enough to think that I could move to New York or anything like that, but they really helped me to see I could do it.”
Professor Stewart says it’s always exciting to see the arc of a former student’s career. She remembers Schmeling’s dedicated use of empathy and understanding while investigating and interpreting the past.
“The documentary film she made by conducting oral history interviews with World War II veterans and their families, for my course on the Documentary Imagination, demonstrated her keen awareness of the complex dynamics involved in helping to tell someone else’s story, and her skillful sensitivity to approaching witnesses to history with compassion as well as objectivity,” Stewart said. “These are the same skills that make her uniquely qualified for the special challenges posed by the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. Stephanie has to help convey this painful history through the perspectives and experiences of many different people by preserving artifacts that are both ordinary and deeply personal.”
Stewart reconnected with Schmeling during her Second-Year Seminar course on Public Memory and Public History in 2023, which fell during the week of Sept. 11. Schmeling discussed the preservation of ordinary items with the class. Charley Coleman ’26 reflected on that experience, saying:
“Once upon a time, simple items, such as a sweatshirt or a pair of shoes, were regular items until the event or trauma tied to them morphed those ordinary items into something more. Stephanie described the pair of shoes that Kerry Kelly was wearing at the time of the 9/11 attack, showing that ordinary items such as a pair of shoes could become something much more with the memories that may be haunting them.”
And while Schmeling stays connected to the Hilltop, she also admits that her One Course At A Time mindset isn’t long gone. It comes in handy for many big projects.
“I have so many things that I’m working on at one time, but whenever I feel overwhelmed, I just say, ‘okay, pick one thing, focus on this one thing.’”
Honoring 25 years
Schmeling, along with the rest of the team at the 9/11 Museum & Memorial, is planning for the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. She says it’s an especially important milestone because they couldn’t commemorate the 20th anniversary as much as they would have liked, due to the COVID pandemic.
The commemorative events will involve a new exhibit at the museum, “In Their Honor: 25 Years of 9/11-Inspired Service,” which opens on Sept. 12 and details the work of those who transformed pain into action. The Museum & Memorial will also hold several events, and Schmeling is finalizing a website redesign featuring new content.
“When the 9/11 Memorial was being designed, it was an open competition, worldwide,” Schmeling said. “ There were 5,000 submissions, and we have digitized all of those competition boards, and they will be made accessible to the public on our website. That’s a big multi-year project to get the funding, digitize everything, catalog 5,000 competition boards, and get them up on the website. So that’s one specific project that I’m very much involved in that is happening as a part of the 25th anniversary.”
Looking back on that day 25 years ago, Schmeling was only 14. Still, she remembers it, but she and the team at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum know that many others don’t have that lived experience. Their work is focused on documenting history and informing the next generation.
“People perceive it as something that happened in the past, and it doesn't impact their life the same way it does for someone who experienced it themselves,” Schmeling said. “So, making sure that the next generation, my kids even, understand why it happened, how we can treat others who are different or have different beliefs than us, and try to make a better world where an event like this doesn’t happen again.”