Harry Roland, who after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, spent most days for the rest of his life on the sidewalks near the World Trade Center site, calling out to pedestrians in singsong rhymes about damage that could never be undone, died on May 23 at his home in Upper Manhattan. He was 70.
The cause was a heart attack, his son, Kajuane Devon Roland, said.
Within months of Sept. 11, Mr. Roland, a self-described former tour guide and security guard at the World Trade Center, haunted the streets surrounding the ruins. He was not a street preacher of the End Times to come, but something more unusual: an orator who insisted that passers-by reckon with a tragedy of the past.
At first, Mr. Roland filled an unmet demand.
The attack reduced the World Trade Center to a deep gash in the earth called ground zero. Cleanup and construction dragged on while officials argued over plans for the site. Tourists from around the globe visited and found nothing, not even a memorial sign — just construction barriers blocking off heavy machinery that clanged and whined.
But a voice made itself heard above the din.
“History, don’t let it be a mystery!” Mr. Roland would shout. “How many buildings were there before they were gone? Don’t get it wrong! Don’t say two, ’cuz that’s not true!”
The right answer was seven buildings in the World Trade Center complex, all of which were leveled.
His spiel recounted the destructiveness of the attack. He spoke of the immensity of each Twin Tower — about four Statue of Liberties stacked atop one another. He hollered that the World Trade Center had merited its own ZIP code, 10048 — “a city within a city,” he said.
Profiles on NPR and in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and elsewhere depicted Mr. Roland as a symbol of “what every New Yorker has struggled to do: finding a way to come to grips with the losses of Sept. 11,” as The Orlando Sentinel put it in 2002.
The Sentinel described visitors crowding around Mr. Roland “because there is simply no other information here — no tour guides, no literature, no signs to tell them what they are looking at beyond the huge, square-sided hole in the ground several stories deep.”
Early on, there were other regular characters in the neighborhood, such as the Rev. William Minson, a chaplain who organized remembrance walks, and Philip Belpasso, a street flutist who played “Amazing Grace” on repeat. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, memorializing Sept. 11 took on a new meaning. “Warmonger!” a pedestrian once shouted at Mr. Roland.
By 2006, he was carrying a plastic jug around his neck for tips. The next year, he told The Associated Press that he usually made $35 to $40 a day. “They call me the World Trade Center Man,” he started telling people on the street.
Eventually, cleanup of the site was finished and the 9/11 Memorial & Museum opened. Mr. Roland set up shop a block away on Greenwich Street, where a long bronze plaque commemorates all 343 firefighters who died in the calamity. When Mr. Roland took breaks from speaking to passers-by, he burnished the plaque with a cloth.
His monologue grew more arcane and his rhymes more hypnotic:
Seven days in a week,
Seven letters in New York,
Seven points in Statue of Liberty’s crown,
Seven continents can be found,
Seven red stripes in American flag,
Seven buildings the World Trade Center had.
He made claims to pedestrians that lacked evidence, asserting, for example, that deaths at the World Trade Center had been undercounted by hundreds.
“What about the homeless?” he cried. “What about the undocumented workers?”
He said a nephew of his, who had worked in the South Tower, was among 14 people he knew who died in the attack, but a reporter for The Los Angeles Times could not confirm that Mr. Rowland ever had such a nephew.
In 2008, he gave an interview to the organization We Are Change, which argues that there has been a cover-up of what really happened on Sept. 11. Mr. Roland seemed knowledgeable and approving of the group’s allegations.
He first arrived at ground zero looking like a young man, but by 2022, life on the streets had weathered him. Repeating the same words again and again, he sometimes slurred his best-known catchphrase: “History, don’t let mystery.”
Yet he continued to draw interest and trust from people who stopped to listen to him.
“He doesn’t seem to have a political agenda,” Robert Maxwell, a North Carolina resident who met Mr. Roland outside ground zero and befriended him, told The Los Angeles Times. “He just knows everything about the towers.”
Harry John Roland was born on May 14, 1954, in Harlem. He never met his father, also named Harry. His mother, Marie Bowen, a seamstress and bartender, raised her son with help from her brother, Bill Davis, a military veteran.
Before Sept. 11, Mr. Roland held an assortment of jobs, his daughter, Lashanique Keye, said in an interview: He was a car mechanic, bouncer at the beloved Bronx club Disco Fever, taxi driver, chauffeur, stagehand and photographer at the Apollo Theater, and deckhand and photographer for the Spirit cruise line.
Mr. Roland said he survived Sept. 11 because he had spent that morning taking his son to his first day of school and that he returned to the World Trade Center after hearing people wrongly suggest that only the Twin Towers had been knocked down.
Ms. Keye said that she did not know details of her father’s employment at the World Trade Center, but that it was unlikely that he had worked there long. She added that the Spirit cruise ships her father had worked on had docked nearby.
Mr. Roland had always loved the Twin Towers, his daughter said; he would collect pictures of them and pose his children in front of them for photographs. She recalled him on Sept. 11 seeing the smoke and fire from his home at the time in New Jersey, getting on a boat to take him to ground zero in the hope of helping out, and encountering a horrific scene.
In recent years he moved out of New Jersey and often lived with friends in New York or in “transitional housing offered by the city,” Ms. Keye said. He relied largely on Social Security benefits to support himself. It was a life that enabled him to focus on what he saw as his calling.
In addition to his two children, he is survived by a granddaughter.
Sal Argano, a firefighter who, since 1999, has worked at 10 House, the storied fire station right next to the World Trade Center, said Mr. Roland would help him and his colleagues, particularly by diverting the attention of tourists.
“I can’t remember a week without him being around,” Mr. Argano said.
The World Trade Center now consists of tidy memorials and grand new towers. As far as Mr. Argano knows, after Mr. Roland’s death, nothing remains of the spontaneous, unruly style of grieving that defined the place when it was known as ground zero.
