One month after 9/11, New York City is back in business. The city and its people are older, perhaps wiser, certainly sadder. While activity is restored, the tone is different: quieter, slower, kinder, more tentative. The city feels rather like it’s had the wind knocked out of it. New York is back on its feet, but dazed and uncertain.
St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway at Barclay Street is Manhattan’s oldest surviving church. It was built in 1794 of Manhattan schist, the mica-flecked granite that forms the bedrock of the island. Photos of its spire framed by the massive silver facades of the Twin Towers have been published far and wide.
Like its London namesake in the Blitz, St. Paul’s in Manhattan survived. The collapse of the twin towers just two blocks away filled its graveyard with ash, so much of it that the ash may be sodded over rather than shoveled up. But from its slender steeple to the Waterford crystal chandeliers inside, the church is unharmed.
It has served for a month as a rescue workers’ center. A neat row of dozens of porta-Johns barricades its entire facade. Workers slept in its pews; a 24-hour kitchen fed them. Its wrought-iron fence is covered in thank-you signs from around the country.
Visiting the borders of the controlled zone around Ground Zero last weekend, I joined a steady stream of pilgrims. Blue sky and warm sunshine ushered in the kind of brilliant, crisp day that makes autumn in New York a joy. We walked slowly down the west side of lower Broadway, thronging at every cross-street to gaze down the vistas to where the World Trade Center used to be. People were mostly silent, or talked among themselves. Some took photos or video, but most just looked.
The inevitable street vendors sold only three items: small metal flag pins, red-white-and-blue lapel ribbons, and postcards of the gleaming skyline that included the World Trade Center towers.
The spire of St. Paul’s is now framed by nothing but clear blue sky. It stands alone in a sea of blue, this 200-year-old bell tower, the tallest structure in a couple of blocks.
Now and then a water truck would roll down the street, spraying to keep down the pervasive dust. The smell has been much commented on; it’s acrid, sharp, pervasive. Smoke still rises from portions of Ground Zero, mixed with diesel exhaust from dozens of pieces of heavy equipment.
Ground Zero is still a disaster site, but the professionals have taken over. There are no more stories of volunteers; ironworkers and construction trades man the site now. Politicians have stepped in to calculate the damages. The sums — for lost tax revenue ($1 billion), NYC budget deficits ($4 billion), property damage ($34 billion), lost business ($60 billion) — seem unimaginable to mere citizens.
A steady stream of funerals offers a backbeat to all local news reporting. The Fire Department, unable to muster adequate numbers at more than 300 services, has asked the general public of New York to fill out the crowds.
And yet, recovery is all around. A discount watch shop across from a guardpost at Ground Zero, its display cases filled with ash, is doing some business behind a “Our Loss Is Your Gain!” banner. Neatly built and painted wooden barricades with “Danger” signs now cover high-voltage cables laid curbside to replace destroyed underground lines. Window washers’ cradles crawl down the facade of 140 Broadway, a huge black building with a perfect vista down to the surviving 10-story facade of the southern WTC tower.
The ecosystem of NYC is actually pretty good at absorbing shock. Scar tissue has already formed and, a month after the attack, a sense of order has returned. So what is the new normal?
Priorities are different. High-end restaurants have been decimated. Neighborhood eateries, and delis, and my friends, report a run on comfort food. Diets have been discarded and exercise routines traded for CNN or video nights with friends. Almost everyone is drinking more. A lot more.
The primary election two weeks ago, rescheduled after voting was halted on the 11th, drew an unprecedented 31% of registered voters — twice the average for an off-year primary.
Everyone wants to be with friends, or just with people. Coupled friends nod as singles observe how hard it is to be single at a time like this; most don’t mention their own battles, the disagreements, the difficulties of living with someone else in stress.
The little details of quotidian New York life are back. Alternate side-of-the-street parking has resumed after a month, to the great sorrow of Manhattan car owners. The redrawn subway map is now fully functioning. Taxis honk, drivers curse.
And yet the differences are jaw-dropping. Only cars with 2 or more people may enter Manhattan between 6 am and noon, something any transit planner would have wagered could never happen in his lifetime just a month ago. Trucks can be searched at random before entering bridges or tunnels.
A surprising number of friends and colleagues refuse to take trains, anywhere, for any reason. People who fly report passenger unity, widely varied waits at airports, and wildly inconsistent screening policies.
If New York City suffers more in this new kind of “war” — CNN now reports that new attacks may be expected — I am confident its residents will pull together as they did in the past month. For some because they had to, but for most, because they wanted to do the right thing.
Of the many stirring words I’ve heard in the last month, to me some of the saddest come from “Architects On Architecture”. They are a quotation from the designer of the World Trade Center, Minoru Yamasaki:
“The World Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a living representation of man’s belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity,his belief in the co-operation of men, and through this co-operation his ability to find greatness.”
Perhaps in the fullness of time, we will find that we have honored Mr. Yamasaki’s wish.
love, jv.
Author’s note: I have been honored and humbled by the reaction to the five letters I wrote in the week following 9/11. They were redistributed multiple times; I’ve received dozens of responses from around the world, including Cuba. Each e-mail helped connect me to caring people and friends, and I thank you all. As always, feel free to pass this along to anyone you think might want to read it — especially outside NYC.