Notes from the City: 21 September 2001

I got on my bicycle around 6.00 in the afternoon and rode across the Brooklyn Bridge to lower Manhattan. I try to turn my memory back to before construction of the World Trade Center began, to understand the skyline now.

The skyline is still grand, but the memory trick doesn't work. Smoke still rises from the site of the World Trade Center, even after steady rain yesterday. A combined total of almost 300 floors from several buildings of synthetic materials and other inflammables will surely smolder for a long time.

From the Brooklyn Bridge, I turned left on Park Row, in front of City Hall, and then rode down Broadway to Bowling Green. Pedestrians were kept behind barricades on the east side of Broadway. To my amazement, I was able to ride right down the middle of the street without hindrance, the only other vehicles being official and rescue vehicles.  This brought me to within one block of the World Trade Center. I had previously seen it from two blocks away. From Broadway, the Canyon of Heroes, the site of ticker-tape parades, the sight is horrible beyond description. The building most standing, 5 World Trade Center was a low building at the northeast corner of the site, housing, among other things, one of the main entrances to the World Trade Center concourse and a very popular branch of Borders Books. It is now a gutted half-shell.

At the southern end of Broadway are Bowling Green and, behind it, the old U.S. Customs House. I turned left into the narrow streets of the oldest part of the city, riding up to Wall Street, then down to Water Street, near the East River. The area around the South Street Seaport normally would be chock-a-block with tourists and day-trippers. It is nearly deserted now, a perverse pleasure for natives.

I continued up Water Street, past the Brooklyn Bridge, to Chatham Square, in the heart of Chinatown. In Chatham Square is a memorial to the Chinese American veterans of World War II, and a candlelight vigil was going   on that night, led by members of the local American Legion post. A large American flag, made entirely of flowers, was put up. Many expressions of regret and defiance, in English and Chinese, were posted on two large bulletin boards.

I made my way up to Union Square, which was a collection point for supplies for the relict effort and is now full of makeshift memorials and posters describing those missing, now presumed dead. The crowd in Union Square gave the appearance of nothing as much as a late-1960s “be-in.” In one corner, a group of people   who appeared to be of southern Asian descent sang the National Anthem. A ragtag rally was in formation for a march to Times Square; people carried placards calling for an end to war and racism, for an “alternate solution,” and for peace and love. I pointed out to one person my concern that those who destroyed the World Trade Center were unlikely to be moved by this appeal to non-violence. A blank stare was my answer. I talked with the minister of Calvary Church in Lancaster, Pa.; he and his wife drove up for the day to have a look at the city. He told me that he had asked someone to describe the proposed "alternate solution" and didn't get more of a reply than a mumble.  One young man, looking to be of college age, sat on a parapet strumming his guitar, and weakly singing “We Shall Overcome.”  Maybe I'm wrong, but nobody in that march looked as though they had lost anyone close in the wreckage about two miles to the south. The minister and I agreed that while these marchers seemed quite distant from reality, the fact that they could do this at all was one of this country's great strengths.

Further along in Union Square Park, I saw a fireman in full dress uniform, and supposed, correctly, that he had been at a fireman's funeral. He was looking upon the different crowds in the park, and at Union Square, and at Manhattan, without expression save one of lingering shock.  Until a year ago he was assigned to Squad 1 on Union Street, one block from my house, but someone else got selected to head up the house and he got assigned instead to a fire house out on Kings Highway.  He said that had he stayed at Squad 1, he might have been talking to me today; Squad 1 lost 12 of their 30 men. He told of a couple of fire houses whose entire crews were lost.  I gave him my thanks that his Maker wasn't finished with him yet, and he smiled.

I got on my bike and rode west on 14th Street, then left on 7th Avenue, down past St. Vincent's Hospital, past my favorite jazz club (the Village Vanguard) and left on Bleecker Street. Greenwich Village was crowded with the usual Friday night vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Restaurants were starting to fill up. People were enjoying a pleasant evening. The city was, and is, starting to get its bearings back, and not before time. I rode down through Little Italy and Chinatown, along a typically busy Mott Street and a weirdly empty Lafayette Street, then across the Brooklyn Bridge and back home.

The spire of the Empire State Building is floodlit once again. The GE Building in Rockefeller Center is floodlit once again. The spire of the Chrysler Building has its lights on.  We may well suffer more. This conflict will be fought, and won, at length, but this city, this country, this idea will prevail.

Notes from the City: 24 March 2002

Around midnight, I joined the line to get into Smalls, a joint for jazz diehards in Greenwich Village. The price is ten dollars at the door, no minimum, stay·as long as you want. The music goes from ten o’clock until eight the next morning, and the survivors get breakfast. It’s straight-up jazz, no big names and no tourists, at least not the sort who habituate the Blue Note.  A couple of generations ago Small’s Paradise was one of the great Harlem jazz clubs; I can’t decide if the name of this ace is an homage to Small’s Paradise or just an apt description of its size.  The owner is a guy in his mid-forties named Mitch Borden, who has mortgaged his house two or three times to keep Smalls afloat.  I met him for the first time eight or nine years ago when I was walking along West Tenth Street one afternoon and saw him putting up the announcement for that week’s gigs. He was an engaging promoter of his little jazz club. In those days he didn’t necessarily collect the cover charge. But times have changed; one of his hires collects the ten bucks. Not only that, when I saw him outside last night, he was giving out handbills for a place over on Christopher Street called Fat Cat, a combination pool hall and jazz venue. The deal is this: you can go to Fat Cat and pay their fifteen-dollar cover (one drink included), then go back to Smalls for free.  When he told me that the music was starting at Fat Cat in five minutes, I chose to get off the line and go to where I could listen to the music. The wait was about a half-hour rather than five minutes, but no matter. The crowd was mostly students who were quite into the music, sitting at tables and in comfortable chairs. Shortly before the music started Borden was walking around the room, checking things out. The quintet included Jim Rotondi on trumpet, Mike DiRubbo on saxophone, David Hazeltine at the piano, Paul Gill on bass, and Willie Jones Ill on percussion, and a fine group it is. They played for close to 90 minutes, with hints of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. They don’t yet have a guiding genius but they’re clearly on their way. This is the sort of music scene that interests me: a knowledgeable and committed audience listening to good music at a cheap price in a more-or-less unknown place. Talking to Rotondi afterwards, I found out they play on Thursdays at Smoke, a jazz place uptown near Columbia University, which used to be Augie’s, where one could play chess, drink beer, and listen to a jam session all at the same time.

Earlier this month a temporary memorial to the World Trade Center and its nearly three thousand dead began: twin shafts of light shining skywards. From the roof of my house the angle of view is such that they appear to be one, and when the sky is overcast, which has been often lately, the beams of light hit and diffuse against the clouds, seeming almost to be shining a pathway through them to something brilliant beyond. This memorial is certainly very beautiful and even poetic, but it is meant to be strictly ephemeral, lasting only until mid-April. And its lightness and absence of solidity seems an unfortunate metaphor for the inability of the various stakeholders down there - the leaseholder for the World Trade Center, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Port Authority, and, last but by no means least, the Lower Manhattan Development: Corporation - to get their act together. For example, the reconstruction of the destroyed subway tunnel that bisected the site is proceeding full speed ahead with no thought and no provision for much discussed infrastructure improvements such as a “transit corridor” along Fulton Street from Battery Park City to Broadway, meaning that once that project or something else is agreed, a lot of work now being done will have to be undone. The removal of the wreckage is almost complete, and construction on the site of 7 World Trade Center may start as early as June, so serious discussions and decisions need to start soon.

Riding my bike up Church Street today was interesting in two respects. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the layout of lower Manhattan, Church Street is a block west of Broadway and is the eastern boundary of the World Trade Center site.  The last time I had taken the bike up Church Street was two days before the incident, when we all took things like those towers for granted. Riding uptown on Church Street was one more indication of things coming round to normal, even given the fact of a large viewing platform at Liberty Street for all the tourists. The simple fact of a direct, fast route uptown from the Battery being restored is a good thing. Getting a look into the excavation as I went by, I was astounded by its sheer size. Looking down into the bottom of the pit, seven levels below the street, I could see the portals to the PATH subway tunnels to New Jersey. I could see the massive retaining wall around the site and where that wall had been partly destroyed by the collapsing south tower. Across Liberty Street from the site, the heavily damaged One Bankers Trust Plaza has netting covering the facade and a huge American flag. That building may yet be demolished.  Elsewhere, construction goes at quite a pace. Over at the World Financial Center, a huge sign facing the Hudson River reads, “The World Financial Center - Shops, Restaurants Now Open.” The Century 21 department store across Church Street from the World Trade Center has reopened and seems as busy as ever. These stirrings of new life are good and necessary, but the larger questions about the future of lower Manhattan, specifically whether businesses, displaced or not, will move back there, are yet to be answered. And the answers will not come from some sort ci providential revelation. We will have to make the answers ourselves. That requires a different political agenda than has prevailed in this city in the last forty years. Some tiny local agendas that have been given full operatic strength will have to be give way to a larger municipal interest. Nobody wants garbage incinerators, but we have no more room to store our own garbage, and the shipment of garbage to other states for disposal seems unlikely to remain an option. The redevelopment of the city has to include political accountability and not run roughshod as did the public works programs under the late Robert Moses between the 1920s and 1960s, but massive public works expenditures are necessary to build up the city in the long run and to provide a lot of jobs in the short run. The list goes on, and it is of staggering size, as big as that excavation on Church Street.

Notes from the City: 20 February 2002

Every day in this city affords occasions of rich human interaction that are ours for the picking as though a wagon loaded with fruits and vegetables were pushed directly into our path. Pick something from the wagon, and someone may be changed, or just enriched or even humored.  Walk around the wagon too purposefully and energy may be saved but opportunity will be lost. Around 6 PM I arrived at the Broadway-Nassau subway station to get the A train uptown to 42nd Street. I would get uptown in plenty of time for a meeting at 6:30. A boy, maybe eleven years old, came up to me and as ked haltingly, “Excuse me, is the monorail at Kennedy running?” I told him that the train at Kennedy Airport won’t be running until later this year. He and his brother, perhaps nine years old, were with their mother on a day trip from Long Island, and both of them pelted me with questions about monorails (they thought al1 airport trains were monorails), the “JFK Airtrain” at Kennedy, and subways. I explained in (I hope) terms comprehensible to a nine-year old what a monorail is and is not. They were fascinated, and their mother was grateful that they just happened to ask these questions of someone who works in the industry. I don’t think either of the boys had been on the subway before this day, and they were somewhat in awe of the speeding, crowded rush-hour train. For a few precious moments, until they left the subway at Penn Station, I could bask in the role of a font of wisdom. It was a sweet thing to see the boys wide-eyed at this tall stranger who parried all their questions, and perhaps instilled in one or both of them a bit of desire to work on such projects when they grow up.

Early last year a couple bought the house at the top of my block for a substantial sum of money and heaped more money into its restoration.  The house, truth be told, outshines its owners. It isn’t that they are ungracious neighbors, although they are; a lot of people are, even in a neighborly place such as my part of Brooklyn. But a recent event is truly distasteful. At present, a film is being shot on my block, and it is a temporary disruption of our routine.  The working title is “Duplex” and the “stars” are Danny DeVito, Ben Stiller, and Drew Barrymore. Many of us on the block have agreed to cooperate with the production, in exchange for which we are getting both individual compensation and tree plantings on the block. The couple in the big house have refused to cooperate at all, which was their right, but to disrupt the production, by restricting camera angles, they hung two huge American flags on trees outside their house and, between them, a huge red banner that reads, “We Support Our Heroes of 9/11/01. Support Park Slope’s Squad 1.” At one end of the banner is a Police Department logo; at the other, a Fire Department logo. One of the couple owns a printing concern that produced the banner.  Considering that they were nowhere to be found when the community got together to remember the twelve men from Fire Department Squad 1 who died at the World Trade Center, or to make sure that Squad 1 would not be closed down, that banner is an affront, an exercise that is cynical even by the standards that others imagine of us. It is as grotesque in its way as something I saw while walking up Eighth Avenue in Manhattan tonight. A souvenir shop had a rack outside with picture postcards of the incident, showing the World Trade Center exploding and collapsing. What people sell is less remarkable than what people buy, so perhaps one’s full displeasure ought to be reserved for whoever buys that stuff. Where is our sense of outrage?

The boys’ mother asked me whether I thought the World Trade Center should be rebuilt. I responded that the site should be rebuilt, not as it was, but with a memorial and with new development. She asked what I thought of an idea to have huge columns of light, vaguely resembling the twin towers.as a memorial. I said it would be good for a while, but eventually we need something to memorialize the lives that were lost and the impact on this city, not just the loss of some buildings. And we needed to move on, which is why I believe the site must be redeveloped. The people who lost friends or family there, and the people who were there and survived, will never be made whole no matter what is or is not built there.  The woman on the train said that what I was saying was easy enough for me to say.  I could only agree with her, considering that nobody close to me was killed on 11 September 2001. What we need in the way of a memorial is not a plaque on a lamppost but, for example, a section of the facade of one of the towers, which will be a permanent reminder and call to arms. This city has a compelling history, with many examples of devastation and rebuilding, but very little tangible evidence of it.  A memorial at the World Trade Center site will afford us the opportunity, at last, to have a meaningful reminder for today’s survivors and for people yet to come. For the memorial to mean anything it has to be coupled with rebuilding, a sign that we, and this city, suffer and we go on.  To turn the site into a memorial park, as some have suggested, would be a negation of our history and a resignation to defeat. That isn’t what we’ re about.

Notes from the City, 9 October 2001

Twenty-eight days after the atrocity, downwind the smoldering still smells. Tonight the wind blew toward the north. Turning from Grand Street into West Broadway in SoHo, the smell coming from an Indian restaurant was sweet respite indeed.

This has been a Kodachrome day in New York, an ideal early-autumn day for playing hooky and, more importantly, people-watching at lunchtime. Part of Battery Park has re-opened, though I could not ride down Broadway to get there.  Instead, I got to ride down the ancient, narrow streets of old New York: Nassau, Wall, Hanover, Pearl. Whole sections of the park had been fenced off for reconstruction before the atrocity.  They still are, and then some. National Guard vehicles occupy the northern section of the park. The ferries to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island are not running, and the gentlemen from West Africa selling knock-off Rolexes are entirely absent from their usual stomping-ground. Every day, people many deep press up to the barricades on Cedar Street and Liberty Street and Maiden Lane to look at the wreckage of the World Trade Center.

The commencement of hostilities against Afghanistan two days ago has a lot of people concerned that there will be retaliation. I am quite sure phony fatwas and additional atrocities would have come our way whether we launched our cruise missiles or not. Some people are somehow securing supplies of an antibiotic called Cipro in case they get anthrax. A lot of people in Harlem and Brownsville and Port Richmond aren't. Of greater consequence are the cuts in municipal spending that were announced today, and the runoff primary for the Democratic candidates for Mayor and Public Advocate in two days' time.  It has been a long time since the choice of candidates was so unappetizing, and the events of the past month have made this more so. The take for the city coffers was already suffering from the slowdown on Wall Street; now, the disruptions to business and tourism are affecting city finances suddenly and sharply. But Wall Street's fortunes always swing high and low; the task now is to get those companies now in temporary quarters, and those devastated by the atrocity, properly situated in New York City.

Many restaurants are doing a roaring trade. Others aren't. Natural selection is at work.

In a traffic island at Christopher and West Streets, which is as far west in Greenwich Village as one can go before splashing in the Hudson, there is a constant crew of people holding placards and lighting flares, cheering on the rescue and construction workers going to and from the World Trade Center site. I joined them for a little while tonight, blowing my whistle and holding up a placard, from among many available, that read "Gracias." For a  moment imagined myself representing NAFTA in this group: Brooklyn born and resident, wearing a bike helmet with a Canadian maple leaf motif, holding a Spanish-language placard. Some police vehicles slowed down to thank us for cheering them on. My favorite placard was one reading "Hero Highway."

I'm tired of people bemoaning the change to the skyline. What if the Port Authority had decided of its own accord to pull down the twin towers? The landmarks law would not have saved them. The skyline is surely an obvious symbol and manifestation of the spirit of this city, but this city, its life, its spirit are so much more than commercial real estate.  And the story of 11 September is of lives snuffed out and companies rent asunder, not of buildings lost. Riding homeward across the Brooklyn Bridge on a splendid evening, thinking of the cheerleaders on West Street and of the cop on Park Row very patiently explaining to a cabbie with passengers that he could not go south on Broadway, and looking at the Woolworth Building floodlit 3gain, and seeing some lights on in the towers of the World Financial Center, and then looking ahead at a wide swathe of this city, I could not help feeling that we'll get past this patch and be fine. There's work to do.