A few months ago, the biggest concern on Wall Street was talk of a recession, and one of the most recognizable landmarks in New York City was the World Trade Center. Now the biggest concerns are things Americans never expected to worry about, such as inhaled anthrax and hijacked airplanes. The recognizable landmark near Wall Street is a 20-story-high pile of rubble.
Psychologists claim most people will experience a mourning period and temporary shock when tragedy strikes. Soon after, however, people come to incorporate new events, no matter how difficult or how bizarre, into their world views.
Two months after the bloodiest act of terrorism in American history, New York is back to business—but it’s not business as usual. The city, and much of the country, has had to adjust to a new kind of normal.
School days
A few minutes after school is out for the day, students at Stuyvesant High School head across the Tribeca bridge. Some of them walk in groups, talking and chatting like typical high school students. Those who walk alone almost invariably walk with their heads bowed or with their eyes trained to the right. Three blocks in that direction, the ruins of the World Trade Center are still smoking, a constant reminder of the event that literally shook the foundation of the 97-year-old school.
Stuyvesant is a public magnet school in New York City specializing in math and science. Of 16,000 applicants to the school only 750 were admitted last year, making Stuyvesant far more selective than Georgetown.
The students are some of the brightest that New York has to offer, and every year the seniors head off to some of the nation’s top colleges. Last year, according to the school’s college counseling office, 57 students applied to Georgetown. In past years, that number has been as high as 90. This year, their college counselor expects the number of applications to be even higher. The students at this school will be the next generation of Georgetown students, and their perspectives and experiences will be different from almost anyone else’s.
Watching from the sidewalk
Mary describes herself as the typical worried mother. Mary’s daughter started school at Stuyvesant this year, and Mary worries about whether her daughter is getting enough sleep and whether she is making good friends. But for the last two months, she has also worried about whether her daughter will make it home from school.
Since Sept. 11, Mary has headed down to Chambers Street every day to see her daughter after classes let out.
“Everyday I come here and worry, and every day she’s fine,” Mary said, managing a smile through the anxious lines on her face. “It’s hard not to worry though, you know?”
A few yards off the sidewalk, Mary waits, her black jacket closed tight against the wind, a pink shopping bag in her hand. Craning her neck for a better view, Mary scans the hordes of students passing by. She said that her daughter always seems to come out of school later than everyone else.
“I think she does it just to scare me,” she joked.
Except that it hardly seems likely that Mary’s daughter leaves school late to frighten her mother. Mary’s daughter doesn’t know that her mom waits outside of school everyday. Afraid she’d be an embarrassment, Mary watches her daughter leave school with her friends and then hurries home ahead. In case she is ever spotted, Mary carries the pink shopping bag so she can claim to have been shopping in the area and dropped by the school on a whim.
Using public transportation, Stuyvesant is about an hour away from where she lives, but Mary dismissed the idea of putting her daughter in a school closer to home.
“The camaraderie is excellent here,” she said. “They have so many clubs and activities and opportunities. You won’t find this in any other setting.”
And so Mary has rearranged her daily schedule and cut into her own free time in order to be there for her daughter. If she forgets why she is waiting, she only has to look across the street at the gutted buildings or smell the sometimes overpowering stench of decay in the air to remind herself how terrible the morning of Sept. 11 was, how she thought she wouldn’t be able to handle it if her daughter hadn’t been OK. A few hours of her time each day is worth it if it means she doesn’t have to go through that worry again.
A new tourism
Lower Manhattan is a different place now. American flags are everywhere, on buildings and cars, even in the windows of the McDonald’s restaurants. Police are everywhere, too. Missing person signs hang from lightposts, and shop windows display tributes to the dead and missing. The tone of this part of the city is subdued.
The outer perimeter of the recovery zone is guarded by police and eight-foot-high fences. Tourists with cameras around their necks walk around the recovery zone trying to get close enough to take a picture. Even off-duty police officers stop with film in hand to snap photos.
Delivery men stop anyone carrying a camera.
“I’m almost done with my route,” a UPS driver said to a woman in her 50s, who was standing on top of a garbage can to get a better view. “Where’s the best place to get a good look?”
The staggering loss of Sept. 11 is captured in the remains of the World Trade Center. A 20-story-high piece of the building’s outer wall still towers above the wreckage like a cracked tooth jutting against the sky. The sight is horrifying, but oddly magnetic. The whole thing develops like some kind of strange and sadistic pilgrimage. The jagged ruins of the World Trade Center draw people to them with an overpowering but irresistible sadness. The tourists walk around red-eyed, but it’s hard to tell whether it’s caused by their crying or the heavy dust in the air.
All in a day’s work
The streets of Lower Manhattan are perpetually wet. They always look as if a storm has just finished dumping its rain. Giant water trucks spray the ground for blocks in every direction. They are there to keep the dust down, but a lot of dust still hangs in the air. Escaping the haze means ducking into a local restaurant; offices are closed to anyone without a special pass.
Brady’s Tavern at 67 Murray St. is located half a block from the outer perimeter and within sight of the still-smoldering towers. With five Irish beers on tap and four dartboards against the walls, Brady’s feels like a true Irish pub transplanted to the heart of Manhattan.
The pub’s clientele has changed dramatically in the last two months. Formerly, the restaurant mainly saw tourists during the day and regulars from the financial district in the evening. Now, Murray’s is full of police officers, firefighters and recovery workers. They eat at Murray’s because the food is hot and fast and the Irish staff are good company after a day working in the recovery zone. Lunch at the tavern shows just how much life has changed in Lower Manhattan.
New York Police Officer Tommy Burke has become a regular at the restaurant. He sits down with a few fellow officers, his two-way radio in hand, and orders lunch. Throughout his meal, he uses the radio to talk back and forth with various recovery workers. Conversations that would cause people to stop and stare anywhere else draw little attention here.
“What’s the body count for the day?” Burke asked into the radio, loud enough for everyone in the restaurant to hear. No one stopped eating or looked up.
“We’re up to 28,” the disembodied voice from the radio said.
Other patrons in the restaurant talk about similar topics. Subjects that would cause most people to lose their appetites are commonplace now. The city seems like a place out of a movie, where workers talk about going into gutted offices in “a week or maybe two,” in order to look for victims, where entire buildings are demolished and cleaned up as a matter of routine. One worker talks about Seven World Trade Center, a smaller building that fell as a results of the larger towers collapsing. When he says it’s gone, he doesn’t mean it fell down.
“I mean it’s gone,” he said. “We scraped it off the floor weeks ago, paved over the site, took it away. It’s gone.”
Gillian, who is used to answering questions from sightseers, has become a favorite of the tavern’s new patrons. She’s tall and thin, with strawberry blonde hair and green eyes. She wears a white T-shirt with a silver American flag and speaks with a heavy Irish accent. A group of police are on the phone with a fellow officer who will be receiving his first disability check from Social Security right after Thanksgiving. They’re talking about taking him out for a drink to celebrate. They put Gillian on the phone with him.
“When are you coming in?” she asks. “We can have a party for you. I’ll buy you a Harps.”
She jokes around a few minutes more, asks him how he’s doing. “I’ll right love, take care” she says, “I’ll see you soon.”
Watching the wall
Just a few blocks from Brady’s, Officer Laurie Hammer spends all day in a police van parked up against Manhattan’s waterfront. Just in front of her, the Merrill Lynch office complex, with glass arches and gleaming windows, towers dozens of stories above. The building still gleams in the sun, but now chunks of it are missing where debris from the World Trade Center tore through. Cracked beams poke through the outer walls like broken bones through skin. Hundreds of windows are boarded up with plywood; the rest of the broken ones look like giant gaping eyes.
Hammer said they’ve told her the building is unstable, that the foundation might be cracked. The building is damaged but still standing, and now it’s the backdrop for a makeshift memorial commemorating those who died on Sept. 11.
A wall of teddy bears and colorful flowers sits against a chain-link fence. Hundreds of pictures of the dead or missing decorate the low, stone walls. Beyond the fence plastic garbage bags are packed with evidence sitting on dead grass, in front of the fence people browse the memorial in silence.
Hammer sits and watches the visitors come and go. Before Sept. 11, she had a desk job in Brooklyn, but now she comes to the World Trade Center site once or twice a week to take her turn on guard.
She said her new job is a nice change from being inside day after day, but the steady stream of tourists and dignitaries can be mind-numbing. Every day is an endless cycle. Visitors come to browse the wall of stuffed animals; police come and usher them away when a dignitary comes to speak; visitors come back to browse.
“The President of Ireland was here this morning, or maybe it was the Prime Minister, whichever one they have,” Hammer said. “I think it’s a president.”
She missed him though; she was out to lunch.
“Some big shot from somewhere is coming this afternoon at four,” Hammer said. “I think he’s from the Ukraine or somewhere like that.”
Presidents and prime ministers, big shots and big wigs don’t impress Hammer anymore; she’s seen more than she cares to count. They aren’t real people anyway. Besides, nothing is more imposing than the Merrill Lynch building, damaged but still standing. And nothing is more real than the family members who shuffle through the memorial site day after day.
Pictures and postcards
Dawn Meyer is one of those family members. Her father, David Meyer, worked in the South Tower that collapsed first. Dawn lives in New Jersey and made her third trip to the World Trade Center site with her mother this weekend.
“They’ve cleaned up a lot more since the last time we came,” she said. The last time was three weeks ago. “They’ve found a lot of people since then, but they still haven’t found my dad.”
Dawn and her mother, Marge, are both wearing hard hats issued by the New Jersey State Police. For almost two months, the police have been organizing guided tours for the families of the dead and missing. They take them through the memorial site, the recovery site and the Family Assistance Center.
The families are brought to the memorial and allowed to linger but not for long. The group doesn’t stop anywhere for long; they don’t have time to take everything in or break down before it’s on to the next site. The tour brings a little order to this visit to chaos. When the rest of the group moves on, however, Dawn and Marge stay behind.
Dawn is eager to point out her father’s picture attached to the wall. She said that she doesn’t come to the site to find consolation, but she feels a sense of obligation. She knows she’s not going to find her father, but the wall is a reminder.
“This sucks; it all sucks,” she said, but she shrugs a bit as if to say, “but that’s life.”
Marge Meyer seems more hesitant than her daughter. She lingers longer by the picture of her family. She hands out laminated cards with her husbands picture and a poem.
“We didn’t say goodbye that morning,” she said. “He usually called bright and early from work.”
But Marge takes consolation in her belief in God.
“Thirty-four years seemed like weeks,” she said, “but I know I’ll see him again.”
Dawn and Marge find a New Jersey State Police Officer, and they head away from the memorial. Their path will take them past Laurie in her van, past Brady’s tavern and within a few blocks of Stuyvesant High School. They are two people among millions whose lives have changed. As they hit the end of the block and turn the corner, they disappear into a crowd of everyone else.
