In 2001, Erik Greenawalt was 23 and working as a page designer at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11, his mother-in-law called his Pitcairn house and told him to turn on the TV, and he watched, horrified, as a second airline crashed into the burning World Trade Center. Soon thereafter a PG editor called him to hurry in to help with a special section, and it was on the drive Downtown that he heard the news that an airliner had crashed in Somerset County.
He and his family visited that crash site near Shanksville shortly thereafter when it was a makeshift memorial to the United Flight 93’s 40 passengers and crew members who’d thwarted terrorists by crashing the plane. The Greenawalts visited later, too, when the Flight 93 National Memorial opened there.
This summer of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, they stopped again while driving back from a July 4 trip to Gettysburg National Military Park. That’s one of the places that Mr. Greenawalt, now living in North Huntingdon and working as a vice president of financial planning and analysis for Giant Eagle, has performed his hobby: chalk drawing. One of the Civil War heroes he depicted at that National Park Service site, while park-goers watched, was Abraham Lincoln.
When Mr. Greenawalt stopped this time at the Flight 93 National Memorial, in this special year, to see the Tower of Voices, he noticed the long concrete of the flightpath walkway, and it struck him what a great canvas that would be for chalking portraits of the lost passengers and crew. He contacted the park with his idea and his chalk art resume. And soon he was contacting other chalk artists to join him in creating an epic art installation, live, for people visiting the memorial this week.
A group of 10 artists will chalk the portraits, from NPS photos, on the walk approaching the visitors center during open hours — sunrise to sunset — on Wednesday and Thursday, Sept. 8 and 9. Giant Eagle donated through the Friends of Flight 93 group to help the distant artists get here, and Somerset Inc. is helping with accommodations.
Mr. Greenawalt, aka The Chalking Dad on Facebook and Instagram, who usually chalks celebrities and fun pop art subjects, is going to do portraits of Capt. Jason Dahl and passengers Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick and Toshiya Kuge, who was from Tokyo. Mr. Greenawalt thought that portrait would be a different kind of story to tell.
He let his colleagues pick some of their subjects, but he also guided one young woman artist who’s particularly talented at chalking young women to do four young women, and he has a married couple chalking a married couple, and a Minnesota artist chalking a passenger from there.
He advised the artists to know their subjects’ stories because, “You’re going to have people asking you.”
The idea of chalk art is that the artists work while people watch. The elaborate three-dimensional artwork materializes gradually and only lasts until the first rain washes it away.
For this project, Mr. Greenawalt says, the artists will be chalking on 3-by-5-feet concrete boards that they can move under cover at the visitors center if need be and that perhaps can be preserved at least through the 9/11 anniversary activities. But the idea is to have all 40 portraits together over a roughly 150-feet-long stretch of walkway.
“They acted as one,” he says of those this presentation is honoring, on this hallowed ground. “For a moment, these people will come to life in the form of these chalk portraits.”
For that reason, “I think this one is going to be particularly meaningful,” he says. “Everyone I asked leapt at the opportunity to be a part of it.”
Joining him from Pennsylvania will be Graham Curtis from Petersburg, near State College, and Jesse Lubera from Galeton in Potter County (@jesslubera on Instagram). The other artists and their Instagram feeds where you can see some of their work are: Nathan Baranowski of Chicago (@nate.baranowski), Shawn McCann of Crystal, Minn. (@shawn.arts), Naomi Haverland of Apopka, Fla. (@naomihaverland), Jessi Queen of Atlanta (@jessiqueenart), Dave Brenner of Chelsea, Mich. (@apigmentchalkart) and his wife, Shelly Brenner, and Chris Carlson of Denver (@chriscarlsonart).
For more information about the Flight 93 National Memorial and activities there this coming week, visit https://www.nps.gov/flni/index.htm.
Bob Batz Jr.: bbatz@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1930 and on Twitter @bobbatzjr.
First Published: September 4, 2021, 5:38 p.m.
Updated: September 4, 2021, 5:39 p.m.
