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.