Double Check: The Survivor – Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton Township, Trenton, New Jersey

In 1982, Seward Johnson completed work on what would become one of his most renowned sculptures. Double Check is the life-size bronze of a businessman sitting on a bench as he sifts through his briefcase, seeming to make final preparations for an upcoming business meeting in a nearby office building. Shortly after it was completed, the work was installed in Liberty Plaza Park, in lower Manhattan. The sculpture soon became a fixture in the downtown landscape and, for nearly twenty years, a symbol in honor of the thousands of people who worked every day in New York City’s financial district.

On September 11, 2001, the associations that millions of people made with Double Check day after day changed dramatically when a terrorist attack on the United States destroyed both towers of the World Trade Center. As The New York Times wrote in 2004 about Double Check in the aftermath of the catastrophe.

"With everything in ruins, one figure remained in Liberty [Plaza] aross the street from the World Trade Center. He was sitting hunched over staring in his briefcase, a businessman who seemed to be in shock and despair. Rescue workers it was reported, approached him in the chaos to offer assistance, only to discover that he was not a man at all, but a sculpture.

Afterward, this sculpture became an icon, as newspaper and magazine photos showed it covered erect in ash and, later, by flowers, notes, and candles left there by mourners and rescue workers. Double Check was a memorial to all those who perished. It was also a fitting metaphor for the city: though the sculpture had been knocked loose from its moorings, it had endured."

Moved by the tributes, Johnson recalled the copy which had been on display in Germany on 9/11, and had it returned to the U.S. via Rome where it was briefly turned into a memorial for Italians to leave notes of support for New Yorkers. He collected a number of the post 9/11 tributes added to Double Check, cast them in bronze and welded them to the piece exactly as he had found them. Dubbed the Makeshift Memorial, it was installed along the Hudson River in Jersey City.

Johnson left visible on the original Double Check sculpture all of the damage that the piece had sustained in the attacks as a permanent reminder of what happened that day. In 2006 it was reinstalled on a granite bench in the plaza it had occupied before the attacks of September 11, which has been renamed Zuccotti Park. It remains there today.