Dear All
It’s early morning on Monday. With the exception of Thursday’s rain, the weather since Tuesday has been perfect. Clear blue skies, brilliantly sunny and warm during the day, comfortable at night — a classic New York City autumn.
New York goes back to work today. The NY Stock Exchange will reopen at 9:30 am, hugely symbolic to our business community. Much of the financial district is lined with pedestrian corridors made of concrete barriers. The Holland Tunnel and Brooklyn Bridge are still closed.
4,957 are still missing. 190 are dead, 115 of them identified. Rescuers have now reached the subterranean PATH station deep in the base of the World Trade Center. It was empty.
Huge progress has been made in getting back to business. And no longer can ordinary New Yorkers pitch in to help with the rescue; it’s now staffed entirely by firefighters, construction workers and trained urban rescue squads. At Eziba, we’re hoping that our CEO — stuck in Turkey since the attack — will be back early this week.
Saturday I walked down to Canal Street, the closest spot civilians can reach. Scanning the altered skyline, all of us had search our memories and try to figure out where the World Trade Center used to be. Looking down West Street, the ranked facades gave way to a single block with gently rising smoke. That’s it.
Canal Street itself, where Chinatown meets the Lower East Side, was alive and bustling with street vendors, tourists, residents of Chinatown out shopping, and the odd emergency worker. Postcards of the twin towers are utterly sold out (but displayed all over town, from phone booths to shop windows).
Looking down Church Street, even from half a mile away, the fragments of facade that landed at an angle are visible at the end of the view corridor. Many compare them to photos of Dresden after the bombing. And everyone wants that facade preserved for whatever memorial is created.
The Empire State Building is again the tallest building in Manhattan. How strange.
Union Square Park has become a huge open-air ecumenical chapel. Dozens of memorials and postings expand each day. The largest is probably 60 feet long, around a 10-foot high statue of a candle. It is surrounded 24 hours a day by people staring silently at the flames, reading the memorials, kneeling, praying, crying.
Last night, a few hundred Tibetan Buddhists gathered around a bright sea of candles to chant. A group of Cambodians — small, silent, solemn — walked slowly with candles and incense, signs proclaiming their solidarity, from a people who have suffered more than most. And someone created a bier in the shape of the twin towers, made entirely of flowers: red roses, white roses and lilies. It too was quickly surrounded by candles, missing-person fliers, handwritten notes and gifts.
I chuckled at an American flag anchored in a blueberry muffin. Some of the shrines included Bart Simpson dolls. And one donor brought many copies of a brochure from the World Trade Center observation deck, which unfolded to a 360-degree view of the city — taken from a vantage point that no longer exists. Sketches of the two towers were everywhere. One flier said simply, “Missing: Two handsome twins, aged 28.”
Singing is common. The Big Apple Chorus has been there every day, repeating a short set that includes the new standards: “God Bless America,” “New York, New York,” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” After dark, the singalongs give way to acoustic guitars and drum circles. The entire park is a mix of Sixties culture, open patriotism and deep sorrow — a mix inconceivable before the events of the past week.
A Gramercy Park note: You may have noticed a Fifties-style clock, on a wall with Sixties tile, behind Mayor Guiliani when he spoke to the press early on. That was in the city’s backup Emergency Command Center, the main one in 7 WTC having been destroyed. That backup center is in the police academy, a hundred feet across the street from my apartment. That block of East 20th Street has been barricaded off by police trucks, with police cadets and barriers on all four corners.
The cadets, on the job just two months, are friendly, and fairly considerate — an opening in the barricades gives access to the 24-hour newsstand — but they’re taking security seriously. The NYPD seal on the Academy roof, visible from my living room, has been covered with tarps. (The city replicated their new Command Center at a pier in just four days and the mayor has now moved there … indicated by the departure of the satellite trucks outside my window.)
Police action is not confined to NYC. A friend reports that the Ashokan Reservoir near Woodstock — the largest of 15 reservoirs holding NYC’s water supply — is now guarded by armed officers, the access roads cut off (requiring a 30-mile trip to reach communities 5 miles apart).
Personally, this weekend I cleaned up, did dishes, opened mail, sorted laundry and tried to resume the routines of normal life. I also washed my living room windows, to try to bring in more light and remove the dirty haze covering the view.
In taking some mis-delivered mail to a neighbor, I discovered she’s been making the calls for her firm to relatives of the missing. Saturday night, she’d just gotten off the phone with the aunt of a temp worker who’d fallen through the cracks. The HR department of the firm he’d worked for had been vaporized, all its staff missing. Because her firm had once used this temp, she’d taken on his case — and spent four days getting the necessary permissions to confirm to his anguished relatives that he had been at the other firm. Everyone is one degree away from a missing person, but she has to deliver some of the bad news.
My father suggests I’m writing these letters as much to record and make sense of what I’m experiencing as to communicate. This is likely true. It’s still incomprehensible half the time, but at least I can describe what happened and know that it DID actually happen.
Reading the flood of e-mails responding to these letters — thank you all, please keep them coming — I’m struck by the deep connections to New York City that Americans now express. I’m struck by comments from Americans saying that while they’d never visited, and never wanted to, they now felt compelled to come and see the place and the people who endured such an attack. This can only be good.
love, jv