Warner Bros. Store

Amid Ruin, an Incongruous Rabbit

Early in the recovery effort, a team of workers set out on the extremely hazardous job of exploring what remained of the shopping concourse.

"There was an opening in the ground," said Mark Schaming, the director of the New York State Museum in Albany. Within it was a startlingly familiar figure. "They saw this Bugs Bunny coming out of the wreckage of the World Trade Center."

The museum, which has amassed a substantial collection of artifacts related to the terrorist attack, decided to acquire the Bugs and Tweety Bird figures that were displayed in the Warner Bros. store.

"We thought they had resonance," Mr. Schaming said. "People relate to them as animated, popular-culture objects. It offers another touchstone."

