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For today’s St. Olaf College students, September 11, 2001, is intangible history. 

Most were born in the years after the terrorist attacks that transformed the United States and the greater world. They know the images, the political and societal aftermath, and perhaps recollected accounts of the tragedy passed down by parents and grandparents — but they have no active memory of the event itself. 

Brenda Berkman ‘73 does. 

One of New York City’s first female firefighters and a 9/11 first responder, Berkman arrived at the World Trade Center site just after the North Tower fell. She remained there throughout the day, witnessing the collapse of the 7 World Trade Center, and returned to the site each day for weeks to assist in recovery and remediation efforts amid the rubble. 

Now, on the 25th anniversary of the event, Berkman is returning to the Hill to share her own account of its history: 36 stone lithographs documenting the construction of the One World Trade Center and the evolution of the NYC skyline in the decades following 9/11. 

36 Views of One World Trade Center, on display this fall in St. Olaf’s Flaten Art Museum, traces the building’s construction chronologically. The tower appears from different vantage points throughout the city and New Jersey, sometimes dominating the composition and sometimes emerging in the distance. The series concludes with its only image in color, looking upward into the night sky at the completed tower.

For Berkman, the series is both a record of a changing city and a testament to what followed tremendous loss. 

“It is a historical document, because in a lot of these images, New York doesn’t even look like this anymore, but more than that, I think that it is a testament to not only the resiliency of the people of New York, but also the people of the United States — that after great loss and destruction, things can be rebuilt,” she says. 

Berkman retired from the New York City Fire Department in 2006, five years after the attacks. Soon afterward, she began volunteering with Tribute, leading walking tours at Ground Zero — at the time, there was little to show visitors beyond the empty space left on the 16-acre site, but over the years of sharing her experience as she walked the perimeter, she watched One World Trade Center begin to rise. 

“It was quite inspiring to me that after this tremendous devastation and loss, that people were committed to putting something there,” Berkman says. “New Yorkers really grappled with what that memorial should look like and how the site should be rebuilt, so it was great when it finally started to happen.”

By this point Berkman had been experimenting with printmaking, and watching the transformation reminded her of artists who had documented changing urban landscapes in the century past. She drew inspiration from Japanese printmakers as well as French lithographer Henri Riviere’s Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower, which chronicled the erection of the iconic landmark during a period of dramatic industrialization in Paris. 

Berkman began creating her own 36 views. 

She worked in stone lithography, drawing each image with a greasy pencil on a slab of limestone before processing, inking, and printing the stone. Once one image was complete, she ground it away and began again. 

“ My intention was to finish it before the new One World Trade Center opened in 2015,” Berkman says, “So basically I had three years, and it was barely enough time — even though I was printing five days a week, four hours a day. I was really zooming.”

A complete edition of the series is now part of the Flaten Art Museum’s collection, donated to St. Olaf after supporters purchased the works on the museum’s behalf. 

As the nation marks the quarter century anniversary of September 11, Flaten Art Museum Director Jane Becker Nelson ‘04 has been working with campus partners to consider how the exhibition can help students understand an event that occurred before their birth. 

“We’re cognizant of the fact that students today were born after 9/11 happened, so we’re now in the first generation of college students who don’t have any living memory or even understanding of this event,” she says. “We want to be really intentional about how we engage them with that history, and share the impact of this sea-change moment — it was such a critical global event that continues to shape the world today.”

Berkman sees the prints as one way to bridge the gap.

“The college students of today don’t know what the old normal was because they weren’t alive,” she says. “What we have today is what younger people think of as normal, but for many of us, we never got back to normal. Our reality radically changed as a result of 9/11, for both good and bad. The prints document those changes.”

Understanding that shift, she says, is essential to understanding the world students have inherited and will shape. 

“Unless you know your own history — by your own, I mean this country’s and the world’s history — you can’t understand why things are the way that they are today.”

When Berkman returns to St. Olaf on September 17 for a series of events, she will share not only her account of 9/11’s history, but also that story of her groundbreaking strides for equal rights in the workplace. 

Berkman graduated from St. Olaf with a history degree, and initially planned to become a college professor. She attended graduate school before pivoting and earning a law degree. Then she made a choice that would transform both her life and the New York City Fire Department. 

After successfully challenging the FDNY’s discriminatory physical test for women in federal court, Berkman became one of the first women to join its ranks. She served on the force for 25 years — yet, she says, she never really left history. Throughout her career, Berkman worked to preserve the history of women firefighters and women in nontraditional professions. Since retiring, she has continued that work while pursuing printmaking and volunteering with women’s history organizations. 

“ One of the the themes of the talk I will give in the gallery is going to be how nothing goes to waste,” Berkman says. “You can learn many different things over the course of your lifetime, and be involved in many different things. I think it’s very important to always stay curious, to always want to be learning new things, and to make use of what you already know to do things differently.”

For Becker Nelson, that winding path is part of what makes Berkman and her work particularly meaningful to bring before St. Olaf students. 

“[Berkman’s] story is one of so many twists and turns in her path, and so many moments of things not going as she expected,” Becker Nelson says. “Through it all, she has carried her deep sense of calling toward service to others and her reverence for history and the liberal arts education that she got here.”

During her time on campus, Berkman will meet students for a luncheon focused on vocation and a 3:30 p.m. conversation in Groot Gallery with St. Olaf Visiting Assistant Professor of History Patrick Wilz. The conversation will explore the larger ramifications of September 11 as well as what it means to unexpectedly find oneself participating in a historic moment. 

For Berkman, the message she hopes students take from both the 36 prints and her visit isn’t limited to remembering tragedy. It is also about understanding change — and finding reason for optimism in what comes afterword.