The official death toll from the World Trade Center attack currently stands at 2,753 people, including 343 members of the Fire Department. Brookfield said it was honored to “participate in preserving history by donating the panels as a tribute to those lost.”

When the panels are taken down this spring, however, the trade center site will lose one more strand connecting it to the events of 2001.

Michael Burke, who has tried for years to persuade officials to move the damaged “Sphere” sculpture back to the trade center from the Battery, said he wished the damaged panels could be kept where they are. When he learned they would be salvaged instead, he said: “A shame. But at least they’re being saved.”

Most visitors to the trade center and Brookfield Place do not know about the signs of damage to the bridge.

Image Lower Manhattan on Sept. 12, 2001. Credit... Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Those who do have a feeling of attachment. “I always loved looking at those holes,” said Christopher Gray, an architectural historian whose Streetscapes column ran in The New York Times until 2014. He noted appreciatively that these historical artifacts had apparently been preserved only by “poetry or sloth.”