Luke Nee, a native Bronxite who died in the Sept. 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks, symbolically returned home to North Fordham two weeks ago, his name memorialized on a street sign at the corner of Minerva Place and the Grand Concourse.

On Saturday morning, May 19, in a warm ceremony presided over by Council Member Joel Rivera and attended by family and friends, the intersection, between 198th and 199th streets, officially became known as Luke Nee 9-11-01, a reference to the day he tragically died.

Nee, a bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower of the Trade Center, grew up in a house just three blocks from the intersection that now bears his name. His parents, John and Mary Nee, Irish immigrants from Galway, still live there.

As adolescents in this predominantly Irish neighborhood in the 1970s, Nee and his buddies hung out around Minerva Place so often that they became known as the “Minerva Boys,” according to news reports.

A graduate of St. Philip Neri Academy and Cardinal Hayes High School with a knack for mathematics, Nee applied for a job at Drexel Burnham and Lambert, a Wall Street investment banking firm. A handful of the Minerva Boys followed him downtown.

It was at Drexel that Nee met Irene Lavelle. They were married on Sept. 11, 1982 and they later had a son, Patrick, now 16.

By all accounts a man who took pleasure in simple things, Nee was a Yankee fan who loved meatball heroes and videos on Saturday night. He took his family on weekend jaunts to Jones Beach and tore through novels on his commute from Stony Point, where he settled with Irene and Patrick.

“It’s a small world,” Nee liked to say, “but I wouldn’t want to paint it.”

On his 19th wedding anniversary, Nee, who was 44 when he died, made a final call to Irene from the North Tower to tell her how much he loved her and that he wanted Patrick to know the same.

For the past few years, Nee’s family has been trying to get the city to create a memorial street sign in his honor, said Nee’s brother-in-law, John O’Keefe. When the family approached Rivera about the sign, he told them they had to go through Community Board 7 first, which they did. The board approved their application in September 2005, putting the onus back on Rivera to push it through the City Council.

It took him some time, but “Luke Nee 9-11-01” finally was placed in a local law in 2006 establishing the renaming of the intersection at Minerva Place and the Grand Concourse.

And then on May 19, Luke Nee made his way home.