at week's end

"Please don't bomb us." Written on a mural made by third graders in Eureka, CA

"I kept thinking about all the guys who weren't taking showers this morning." Walter Pilipiak, who made it from the 89th Floor last Tuesday.

Monday, September 17, 2001

It was the day to go see it all first hand.

Finally, six days later. Days that weren't really days at all, just a haze of smoke and dust and sadness in the city, there were nights, but they were long and sleep was short, there were beautiful days that seemed so wholly out of context for the mourning that was taking place.

Perhaps it was because today was Monday, the day everything was supposed to be normal, but I could wait no longer.

I dressed up in my best Wall Street clothes and took the 5 train three stops from my house to Bowling Green, the station at the tip of Manhattan, one I've passed through hundreds of times, and yet today, it as if I am visiting a new city.

NYPD and National Guard and private security people are everywhere, the friendliest of all are the Guardsmen, young men from everywhere, many who have perhaps never been to New York City, and their first visit consists of them standing, breathing the thick and acrid air with all of us, arms crossed and somehow, offering their condolences through their silence.

New Street is still dusty, it smells like burning leaves, which is just about perfect for this mid-September day, except it is not leaves at all.

It is plastic, cables, wires, computers, paper, and bodies.

Behind the Stock Exchange the delivery boys are lined up with coffees and sandwiches like always, at the corner of Wall and Broad I see the gigantic flag on the Exchange building, the armed security surrounding it. Inside, the Dow is diving harder than ever, but out in the street, people are hugging - many seem to be seeing each other for the first time since Tuesday. At the corner of Broadway and Wall, Trinity Church is standing tall.

Falling in line along the Nassau Street Mall, which has become the new Broadway, as Broadway itself is a giant parking lot and staging area for the rescue efforts, I am amazed by the silence, which is then punctuated, as one of the banks has put speakers above its entrance way - on continuous loop, Stars and Stripes Forever plays, as if we are at some party at the White House, or a homecoming parade back in high school days.

The crowds are larger than ever, as we have been forced into the narrow street and are used to breathing free among the warren of crooked paths that is Downtown. Tourists are everywhere, but the mood is not festive.

I've never seen a greater crowd so subdued, and suddenly it seems as if we are attending a wake, filing past this gigantic coffin, mourning not only for the 5,000 people buried in the smoky pit, but for these gargantuan symbols of all that is New York.

At Liberty Street, the traffic comes to a dead halt, and we stand. We see it - the jagged shell of the towers rising out of the pit. It is strange, but at the same time, we have seen this in so many pictures and on TV. But this is not some foreign place, this is a place where so many of us spent so much of our lives.

Cortlandt, Dey, and then Fulton - each intersection reveals a new piece of the horrific puzzle - the Borders Book Store now a bombed out shell, where I spent so many lunch breaks and bought so very many books when I was rich and made money over there, just two blocks away.

And I am thinking of the inside that is no more - Fine and Schapiro where the egg on a bagel with cheese was one of the best in the city, Duane Reade where I bought far too many packs of cigarettes, the coffee bar which couldn't make coffee to save its life - America's Coffee, it was called - the PATH station eight or nine stories below ground, where I and a friend had just been, days before it became a repository for 100 plus stories x 2 worth of rubble.

The airport bus that left from the West Street entrance, the bus I had to run for so many times across the concourse, that concourse where you could see the world gathering every morning. Two years ago, I was inspired enough by the endless streams of diverse peoples pouring from the mouth of the PATH station, that I wrote something about it, something that I really wish I could find today.

But it is all gone. The plaza where they would plant so many flowers every spring, the fountain where we sat in the sun after sitting in front of computer terminals for hours on end, and the big metal block letters, Peace On Earth, every Christmas, words that seem so very far away today. The Orchid Show in the now collapsed North Bridge. The Asian wedding parties every Saturday and Sunday sitting on the pink marble grand steps of the shattered Winter Garden.

The endless strings of christmas lights draped on the walls of the Tower lobbies, the soft carpet of the floors and the night my friend Bobby and I could not get up to the Windows on the World bar because I was wearing birkenstocks.

It is now smoldering, and it is sad, and it is gone. On Park Row, I get a birds eye view of the tiny church, the tiny cemetery that dates from centuries ago that faced Church Street, which has now become a mass burial ground.

The sun was shining, and I was desperate for exercise - discovering that from Broadway north of Chambers Street one could get into TriBeCa, I decided to try making it to the corner of Greenwich and Duane, where the media was encamped next to the park and the elementary school where children won't be playing on the climbing frame any time soon.

Many TriBeCa stores were opening for the first time, many residents were leaving their homes with gymbags, some were returning. and at Greenwich, I am suddenly stunned.

If you know the landscape of lower Manhattan, you will remember well walking from Church on Vesey, toward Battery Park City, past the dismal, faceless grey wall, the walls of the Trade Center Fortress. Suddenly, from Greenwich, you see the true magnitude of the loss. 7 World Trade Center has collapsed to the left, right onto the Greenwich-Vesey T junction, and above it, so much horror.

Transfixed, I'm standing with the rest of the people who have made it down here, a neighbor is bearing a pot of coffee and a carafe of orange juice with cups and glasses, on a tray decorated with a lovely cloth, she is darting in and out of the melee of rescue workers eating free McDonalds, and harried cable carriers from the networks.

Coffee? Juice? She is smiling, she is happy, everyone is almost apologizing for not wanting any of either. She continues, south toward Chambers, the final frontier, five short blocks from the wreckage, where perhaps a kindly Guardsman will take pity on her and try some of what she's offering.

West Street is silent, suddenly, I wonder if I'm even supposed to be there - the usually treacherous highway is filled with parked cars from everywhere, TV stations I've never heard of have their trucks parked, it is beautiful, the silence, but then I look once again to the mess that has spilled out to the base of the World Financial towers, their own windows and corners severely damaged.

Emerging from the subway and into daylight at 50th Street, I have traveled through worlds in a few short minutes. Here, things are as they should be - the streets are filled with media and financial workers, restaurants jammed with the lunch bunch, the beautiful plazas built onto the western side of Sixth Avenue are filled with nap takers, bike messengers and lovers, hot-dog eaters, smokers and coffee drinkers, and inside Del Frisco's restaurant, people are drinking white wine and eating quiche.

Tonight, after work is done and day becomes night, the morning's experiences come back to me, and it is much harder to cope with, now that the brilliant blue sky no longer makes everything seem so much better than it actually is. I'm thinking about the people in the newsroom who are beginning to break under the stress, and I'm poring over the gripping first person accounts that fill this week's New York magazine.

Over the Manhattan Bridge once more, and the sight of the block of blackened buildings and the never-ending smoke lit by spotlights is now almost as normal as seeing the towers themselves.

On Fifth Avenue, I fumble for my keys, almost home. There is a man singing, behind me. It is a young man with dreadlocks on a bike, his voice, beautiful and accented, and the line he is singing as he passes by is "my whole life has changed."

The day is over, and in just a few hours it will be Tuesday, and we will sit, all of us, at 8:45AM, and remember exactly what we were doing. I do not even remember what I was doing last Monday, off hand, but each moment of this past week is etched in my heart and mind.

Forever.

 

Email: davidr@lifeingotham.com

Next Update: 20 September

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