Originally written on September 13, 2001
Many of my friends around the country have asked me to give them my impressions of the past few days. There are so many New York stories these days; this is part of mine.
Below 14th Street, the streets are empty; people walk down the center of 6th Avenue or Houston Street tentatively, as if waiting for an onslaught of cars, buses and taxis. They still look both ways before they cross.
Every block or so, especially as you move toward West Street, there are TV crews. They don’t have to ask for volunteers to interview; people wait patiently to talk to them. Everyone wants to tell their story to someone, anyone at all. Where were you when it happened? Where was your husband, your boyfriend, your sister, your best friend?
Everyone is quiet, calm…nervous. Gone is the chatter, the bustle, the background noise of the city. If you manage to forget for a moment, you are reminded immediately by the smell in the air, the sight of downtown, smoke still rising from what used to be the trademark of the skyline.
Postcards are sold out everywhere; people want to look at the New York that used to be. A lot of people carry the postcards and look every so often; then look up and shake their heads.
About four blocks from West Street, the smoke starts to overpower; you must stand for a minute or two and get used to breathing shallow breaths. Your eyes start to water. When you get to West Street, you immediately look south – and you can’t breathe at all. No matter how many times you see it on TV or in the papers, the actual sight of downtown from close up knocks you out. A friend said; “It looks like a small child with a front tooth missing.”
West Street is the street that borders the Hudson; this is where the media are camped. There are candles and flowers everywhere. People are just sitting or standing around. No one talks. They mostly just stare at the bottom of Manhattan, trying to get used to the new skyline. You can’t breathe properly on West Street – you have to tie something around your face or bring your shirt up to cover your mouth. Your eyes burn and tear uncontrollably. That doesn’t stop all of these people from coming. They stand ready to hand out water to rescuers, to hug them, to applaud for them. Any time someone in any uniform at all moves around the streets, whether it’s on foot or in a vehicle, the people that are lined up everywhere applaud; they shout “God bless you” and offer bottles of water.
Up and down, men and women walk with pictures of their loved ones – “Have you seen this man?” You can’t just glance at the picture and say no; you must take the picture and study it, just so that the person looking for someone who is never coming back knows that they did a good job looking. Then you hand the picture back and say, no, I’m sorry, I haven’t seen him. You walk another five feet and get handed another photo.
The sadness is palpable, almost radioactive. But so, I think, is the spirit of New York.
We live among heroes.
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