I seem to have been out of New York a lot on September 11. Five years ago, in 2006, I was in San Francisco, as I had been the year before that.
This morning, I’m in Frankfurt, drinking tea and staring out my 26th-floor hotel window into a gray afternoon. Right now, relatives of the dead are reading their names aloud, in New York, at the Pentagon, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. I don’t need to hear them.
Tomorrow I’ll attend an Audi seminar on its Urban Future Initiative—what will a “car” be like in the cities of 30 or 50 years hence?—and Tuesday I’ll attend the international Motor Show here. For more than two years, I’ve worked full-time covering the auto industry. I have the great good fortune to be doing what I love, though like many of my cohorts these days, I do far too much of it.
But this year, I’m grateful to be out of town. Ten years ago today, the events we now call “9/11” happened. For months, it was inescapable in our conversation, and it was the central fact of my life. I wrote about it a great deal—trying, as my father said, to make sense of what was happening.
This weekend, almost everyone I know in New York has enforced a personal media blackout. Almost no one wants to encounter the endless essays, looks backward, TV specials, stories, summations, and ponderings about the meaning of it all.
Though I was surprised at first by the vehemence of these feelings, I understand them completely. I just don’t want to think about 9/11 all that much either.
It’s been three years since I wrote the last 9/11 letter. I followed it with one called “-777.68” on the stock-market crash, just three weeks later. By 2008, remembrances were muted and largely local. This year, they’re anything but.
So where are we?
The rebuilding process of the area formerly known as Ground Zero is well underway. One World Trade (nee Liberty Tower) is roughly half-complete, and already almost as tall as any building downtown. When completed, it will be the signature element on the skyline of Lower Manhattan.
It may also be the most fortified office building in the city. NYPD concerns over its vulnerability to truck bombs demanded extensive design changes, resulting in a base with few windows and entries through small openings in what is otherwise a reinforced concrete bunker for its first 80 feet.
The signature tenant for this problematic address, this potential target for terrorism, will be Conde Nast—the publishing empire that produces Vogue, Bon Appetit, and other glossy, high-end titles. It’s a company that knows how to drive a real-estate bargain; its deal to occupy 4 Times Square in 2000 helped legitimize Times Square as a location for top-tier firms still leery of its seedy past.
The rest of the former World Trade Center site is rising too. Another office tower is half-built, as is the Calatrava-designed transit center and PATH station. The cursed Deutsche Bank building is finally gone, dismantled piece by piece after several halts and the death of two firefighters in a 2007 fire that broke out while it was being taken down.
And, amazingly, the 9/11 Memorial has been completed—more or less. It’s sufficiently “done” that memorial ceremonies can be held there, though the associated displays and museum aren’t yet fully open.
The design is fairly close to the plan that won the competition so many years ago: Water pours into the footprint of the each tower from around the four edges, then into a smaller void at the center of each basin. The names of the dead are inscribed in metal panels around the outlines. To get a better sense of the memorial and its construction, see this animation.
The rest of the quadrant that held the twin towers is a park of sorts, at ground level, dotted with freshly planted White Swamp Oak trees that will grow into a peaceful grove over time. One of the trees is different from all the rest: It is “the survivor tree,” a pear tree rescued from the devastation of the ruined World Trade Center with all its branches broken off. It was restored to health in a Bronx nursery, uprooted during a huge storm last year, replanted once more, and then transplanted to the site last December.
The ceremonies around the anniversary sound low-key, from what I’ve read. I was amused to read that Evangelical Christians have complained that the memorial service had no clergy as speakers. This was immediately followed by comments from both Roman Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan and Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, that translated to, “Yeah, we know, we’re OK with that.”
As The New York Times noted, “Richard D. Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, said in an interview that the planned ceremony only proved that New York was the ‘epicenter of secularism,’ out of step with the rest of America.” Yep. That’s us.
Or as I explain patiently to folks elsewhere in these United States, “I don’t actually live in America. I live in New York City.” It’s a punchline, of course. But it highlights the difference between my city and the rest of a country that both loves and loathes New York at the same time.
That difference seems magnified by the anniversary events. (I almost typed “commemorations,” but that doesn’t feel like the right word, does it?) Over the last few years, I’ve observed that 9/11 and its site now seem to induce more emotional resonance in those from outside the city. Few New Yorkers these days make pilgrimages to Ground Zero to gaze, to reflect, to remember, to experience the enormity of it all. But the crowds are there, mostly tourists. It’s now a mandatory stop on the New York tour, apparently, with the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and so forth. They read the explanatory panels, they take photos and videos, and they stare into what has been for many years a very, very large construction site.
Or perhaps New Yorkers have simply internalized the old adage, “Denial is a good coping mechanism.”
(If you want to read one of those where-are-we-now summaries, by the way, I recommend the special online report published by The New York Times: The Reckoning: America and the World A Decade After 9/11.)
Elsewhere, St. Vincent’s Hospital—where three years ago I saw candles and other memorials—collapsed in bankruptcy last year and closed forever after 160 years of serving the sick of the West Village. Its site will become expensive apartments, though there may be a small community clinic on part of it.
In June, we went to see “WTC View,” my friend Brian Sloan’s play about his experiences trying to find a roommate for the downtown apartment he’d put on Craigslist the day before 9/11. A telling note: When it was first performed in 2003, six of the seven actors had been in New York on the day. They were acting from knowledge. The cast for this revival, eight years later, included only a single actor who was here ten years ago.
The play happens to be about a young gay guy—Brian, a decade ago—which, even in 2003, could have been construed as edgy. Gay characters, hmmmmm. But we’ve come a long way, a sometimes unimaginably long way, on that front in very few years.
In June, the Republican-controlled New York State Senate made same-sex marriage legal. Many couples of long standing are now, finally, legally married. It was a remarkable act of political evolution, and it followed a huge and concerted effort that included behind-the-scenes politicking, pledges of support from the LGBTQ community for those Republicans who will be targeted for their votes, and concentrated lobbying by the individuals denied the right to marry their loved ones.
I’m proud that New York States became the seventh U.S. jurisdiction to allow full same-sex marriage, more than doubling the total number of Americans who live in areas where it’s now legal. It’ll always gall me a little bit that Iowa preceded us (Iowa?!?!?), but we have the distinction of having enacted it in the legislature rather than through the courts.
We joined thousands of New Yorkers and others that night taking part in the revelry on Christopher Street; it certainly kept us up past our bedtimes. It made the marches and the protest training I’ve done for marriage advocates over the years even more worthwhile. And 9/11 simply wasn’t in my mind that day, though undoubtedly Bin Laden was spinning in his grave at the idea of legal same-sex marriage. Good.
Ah, yes, worth noting: Osama Bin Laden is dead, finally, killed by a raid watched live by the most senior members of the Administration. What would Gil Scott-Heron have said about that, I wonder?
Ten years on, I still have trouble sorting out what I think about the events of that day, and the upheavals that followed. Somehow, it seems too long ago for nitty-gritty detail reporting, but too soon to understand the implications of all that happened and how it changed us as a nation.
But I come back again and again to two convictions.
The first one has resonated throughout the series of 9/11 letters: The attack hurt us, and it changed some things, but it didn’t fundamentally transform the pace and tenor of everyday American life. Our politicians still fight like cats and dogs; we still drive to work; we shop, we take vacations, and we put our pants on one leg at a time.
That’s reassuring, but it’s also a mixed blessing. It’s good, because if the mission of the mad terrorists was to obliterate “our way of life,” they have utterly failed. But it’s also bad, because we let a crisis go to waste—and, worse, used it for some of the wrong ends. Once more I have to echo what I first wrote just a year after the attack:
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.
The second thought is one that took time for me to absorb. It concerns the moral compromises we made, though our leaders, following 9/11. Over the years, much information has emerged about our rendition of captured enemy suspects to third countries where they could be tortured far from public view, the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques”—aka torture—at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and many of the provisions of the so-called Patriot Act. They make me sick to my stomach.
Torture is a grossly ineffective way to get reliable information out of enemies, and interrogators know that. Hurt a man severely in creative ways for long enough and, 99 times out of 100, he will tell you whatever you want to hear. Senator John McCain, among others, knows that first hand. But far more importantly, torture is immoral. Using it debases us as a nation, as a people, and makes a mockery of our hallowed claims of exceptionalism.
And the so-called Patriot Act. What to say about a bill, regularly renewed by our elected officials, that includes provisions for National Security Letters that can be issued without probable cause, with no judicial oversight, and containing a gag order that forbids the subject from disclosing that the letter existed? (That latter clause was, thankfully, later deemed unconstitutional by the courts.)
When I first read about National Security Letters, I literally didn’t believe such a thing could be true in America. I was wrong. George Orwell was right, if almost 20 years too early. The U.S. government has issued almost 200,000 such letters, by the way.
So here I sit, far away from my city, trying to make sense of it all and wrap it up neatly. The conclusion? I’m not sure that I can, but I also don’t have to.
In the words of the pledge that was so common in the weeks and months after 9/11, we will never forget.
But we each remember in our own way, and many of us really don’t want to remember too much right now.
love, jv.
John Voelcker
+1 917 774-0589
P.S. A friend, Chris Barrett of Alberta, Canada, has posted my complete series of 9/11 letters on his blog. I’m honored, and it’s always thought-provoking to see the complete series evolve over time. If you want to revisit, they’re at http://www.gnusworld.com/9-11/jv-911.htm . As always, feel free to circulate this if you know people who might be interested.
Finally, please share with me any thoughts or reactions to this series of letters. New media embodies the evolution from one-way publishing to two-way interaction. I write these letters alone, staring out a window, listening to voices and reliving events inside my own head. If those of you who read them acquire faces, points of view, identities, it will give my words additional value.