A former FDNY battalion chief who worked for weeks on the smoldering Pile is now spending his retirement constructing touching handmade tributes to honor 9/11 Bravest.
Retired Fire Department honcho John Ricketts has spent the past five years making 78 to-scale models of the Twin Towers that encase rusted steel recovered from Ground Zero.
Much of the artwork is being gifted to the FDNY heroes who rushed to the World Trade Center during the terror attacks 25 years agoand survived, as well as to the loved ones of those who perished.
“There was one chief I worked with who had, on his locker, left a note: ‘Tell my wife I love her and tell my family’ ” before heading to the WTC to help with rescue efforts after the attack, Ricketts said.
“He didn’t know if he was coming back. And he didn’t.
“It’s a special group of people in the Fire Department,” Ricketts told The Post from his Plainview, LI, workshop, where he has spent countless hours sanding, cutting, measuring, gluing and crafting the dozens of pieces of his emotional art.
The idea to honor the heroes began to take shapejust ahead of Ricketts’ December 2021 retirement, when then-FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro accepted his handwritten request for steel recovered from Ground Zero to make a few keepsakes for his family.
Ricketts expected a small slab but was gifted a rusted 0.5-inch-thick plate the size of 1.5 manhole covers.
He then spent months sanding the steel down and slicing it into sticks that he perfectly wedged into the 8.25-inch-tall wooden towers, which he planted on a stand that slants to replicate West Street in Lower Manhattan.
All the towers appear exactly the same in size and stature, but each has its own unique steel size and wood type.
Ricketts sourced the timber from personal, well-loved sources across the Big Apple, including his family’s furniture, discarded blocks scavenged from Steinway & Sons and even branches from the Sycamore tree that graced his childhood home in Bayside, Queens.
The steel also holds extra special meaning for Ricketts. His father was an iron worker and helped build the World Trade Center. Ricketts signed his father’s name, alongside his own and his fellow probation firefighters, on an exposed beam during a training visit to the buildings in the 1980s.
Ricketts returned to the site on 9/11 as one of the more than 15,000 first responders who rushed into action.
He had been on vacation and at a PTA meeting in Nassau County when the news broke.
Ricketts has given away 65 of his Twin Towers so far and hopes to give away the remaining 13 before Christmas.
Some of the structures sit on the mantles of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, the Office of the Fire Commissioner and several firehouses, but Ricketts has reserved most for those who were at Ground Zero, as well as the families of those who were killed that day and others who have since died from 9/11-related illnesses.
The craftsman said nearly all of the recipients have sent pictures of where they put the art.
“Sometimes they come down, and we do a woodworking project,” he said. “I say, ‘Come on over, we’ll make some sawdust, and we’ll have some laughs and see what we can do!’
“We have fun, instead of … [think about] that terrible, terrible day.”
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