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.