To: johnvoelcker@yahoo.com
Subject: enough, Sep 11
September 11 is not going to be a clear, bright, crisp autumn morning, as it was a year ago. Perhaps that would be too much poetic symmetry. Early this morning, the humidity is 100% and it’ll be intermittently cloudy and windy today.
More than 2,000 memorial services are scheduled for the NYC area. Vigils will be held, trees will be planted, religious services will take place. The NY Stock Exchange will open at 11 am, 90 minutes late. Marches from the outskirts of all five boroughs, started in the wee hours this morning behind bagpipe corps, will arrive at Ground Zero around 7:30 am. The names of the 2,801 confirmed dead will be read, started by former mayor Giuliani after a minute of silence at 8:46 am.
And I really don’t want any part of it all.
In re-reading them, a constant theme of my letters from the eight months after 9/11 was the struggle to return to normal. In New York City, that generally means work. This is the city of all-nighters, of single people married to their jobs, of new arrivals with the burn, the drive, the hunger to make it. So despite the loss of 83,000 jobs — some predestined by the recession gathering steam before 9/11 — New York is back at work.
Commentators note that city economies usually recover quickly from natural disasters and acts of war or terrorism. London, Jerusalem, Dresden, Hiroshima, Kobe, San Francisco are all still with us and prosperous. Apartment prices adjacent to Ground Zero are higher now than a year ago, even as office vacancy rates rise despite reduced downtown supply: 13.4 million square feet in six buildings were destroyed, with another 21.1 million square feet in 23 buildings damaged.
The financial cost of the attacks in New York is estimated at $83 to $95 billion. This includes $21.8 billion in destroyed or damaged buildings, $5.2 billion in lost tenant assets, $1.1 billion in private costs of cleanup and victim assistance, $900 million in subway damage and $365 million in overtime by police officers, firefighters, sanitation and other city employees.
Despite war talk and metaphors, in New York the events of 9/11 can be viewed as a natural disaster. In wars, the talk is not of loss and recovery, but of common goals and shared sacrifice. While this city pays far less attention to national politics than Washington would like, I find myself angry that little sacrifice was asked of the nation in the crucial weeks after 9/11.
A different president might have said to a shocked nation, “We will embark on a national crusade to reduce our use of imported petroleum by 25% in five years, and 40% in ten years. We will free ourselves from the shackles of dependence on other nations’ consumable natural resources. We will again seek our independence as a nation.”
Of course, that didn’t happen. No “cross of oil” speech resounded throughout the country. If anything, it seemed we were asked only to continue shopping and using our credit cards as per usual.
But in a city that erects skyscrapers at the rate of 2 floors a day, much infrastructural recovery from the disaster has been swift. The 1/9 subway line will reopen next week, rebuilt as before except for a bare station shell where Cortlandt Street had been. The barrel-vaulted Winter Garden will reopen to the public next week, its former entrance from the WTC redesigned as a two-story sheer glass wall overlooking Ground Zero.
And the process of deciding what will be built — or not — at and around Ground Zero is a full-fledged industry for hundreds of people, a mission for thousands more. An early round of six proposals that packed 11 million square feet of office space onto the site was roundly booed, and it may be that this is the largest site in New York ever designed largely by public consensus. It promises to be entertaining. In my optimistic moments, I feel it will produce a far better neighborhood than existed before.
The U.S. Congress came to New York last Friday, though very few people actually noticed. Only the second time it had met outside Washington, DC, since it moved there in the early 1800s — on the site in New York where George Washington was inaugurated in 1789 — the gesture was grand but mostly ignored. United Nations officials could have told the Congressmen how that works.
We are changed in countless small and large ways. The city seems to me quieter, more sedate, more reflective. While we all work just as hard — or close — there is a much greater understanding of the essential difference between work and “real life.” Many people focus on little joys, on taking care of themselves physically and psychically, on valuing their family, friends, coworkers. Residents and visitors are friendlier to strangers and those in need.
But we should be, and are, moving on. The sad, predictable separation has opened up between those most closely affected — the families, the survivors, the wounded, the police, firefighters and EMTs — and those of us less so.
I first noticed this passing through Grand Central in July. The terminal’s two massive waiting rooms had been turned into an art installation called “Seen From Above — A Place for Contemplation.” Artist Daniel Kohn provided two huge paintings that recreated the view from high in Tower One, where he was artist in residence three years ago. Music was commissioned for the installation, “inspired by themes of hope, solitude and possibility … meant to provide a subtly shifting background that transforms this public space into a place for introspection.”
It didn’t work.
A couple of dozen people sat in each room, talking or reading. Every single one of them had their backs to the paintings, utterly unaware of the soft background music. Many or most New Yorkers I’ve talked to want to be over 9/11.
Everyone I know is repulsed by the media’s recent week of “all 9/11 all the time.” Can anything new be said? The losses were tremendous. Families and survivors are in pain. Our lives have changed. New York is a great place. America is a good country. We will endure and survive and take care of each other.
We know this.
People want to commemorate, quietly, in their own way, at their own time.
So on this morning one year after our lives changed, I will go to work a little early. I may buy coffee at the Starbucks that evacuated me a year ago. On my way, I will look down Sixth Avenue toward the changed skyline. I will join my coworkers, as we were a year ago, to be with them. We may listen to the radio. Many people will knock off a little early to spend the evening with friends and loved ones.
But life, and history, moves inexorably onward. A new year’s worth of arrivals to NYC have no experience of what it was like before 9/11. They don’t remember the sun glinting off the huge silver twins. They haven’t experienced a city so self-absorbed that it was briefly rocked to its emotional core, and found that we were in fact a giant neighborhood of 8 million people who could help, support and care for each other. To them, 9/11 is something that happened in the past, with little direct connection to them.
These people too will become New Yorkers. They may be marked indirectly, but they will carry on the life of this great city, changing it as have 300 years’ worth of their predecessors.
And that is as it should be.
love, jv.