Talking Points, Part II

(By the by, I named this entry before the West Wing episode last week, so I'm not ripping them off.)

I was in Washington on 9/11/01, and drove past a Pentagon in flames. I lived through all the changes that this area underwent in the weeks, months and years since then. But I have always been fascinated - though I'm not sure if that's the right word for it - with the World Trade Center site. At times, but not often, I would almost be able to get a real sense of what it must have been like that day in downtown Manhattan. I'd only been to that area once, back in 1996, when Mel had her ACT audition @ NYU. We got into town via the Path station that ran under the WTC - that was the only time I'd ever been in the buildings.

I only had two things I really wanted to do just for myself: see my friends, and see the WTC site. It's probably the closest I'll ever get to making a pilgrimage. We went there on Wednesday.

In the blocks surrounding the WTC, blocks covered by ash and concrete powder and the remains of 2,000 people who were never found, there is no real reminder of the collapse of the buildings. Well, aside from the enormous gaping hole.

The hole really is a presence. It's noticeable. I suppose if you're down there every day, it's the 900 pound gorilla everyone keeps eyeing peripherally. But I was there to stare at the thing, to gawk at it, to marvel at it, and most importantly try to get a sense of What Was Here.

After a brief lunch of garlic knots and pizza, we walked over to the site, starting out on the east side (walking past St. Paul's Cathedral, the one in all the pictures that was unharmed by the collapse of the towers just across the street) where the new entrance to the Path station is. As we walked south along the ten-foot high fence that rings the entire site, we saw part of what I expected to see: tourists. Admittedly I was one, but there seemed something gauche about them. I can't put any more words on it than that.

The fence on the east and south sides was lined with a series of displays; aerial shots of downtown through the 20th century, before the towers and Battery Park existed, as they were being built, after they were completed and a series of shots from the months following the attack. There was also, expectedly, a list of all 3,000 people who died that day (save, of course, the hijackers) at the WTC, the Pentagon and Somerset County.

The east side did not move me. It was clear that things were being rebuilt, and I got a sense that - if the ones responsible for whatever ends up going there in the future let this happen - this memorial will be cold, manufactured and uninspiring to the people who see it. What's there now certainly was.

When you walk down Church Street, then turn right onto Liberty, that's when you start to get a sense of what was here. Liberty Street was a confluence of a number of sights and sensations that made it real for me in the way I was looking for. Across the street from the fence and the memorials and the big empty space, there's a shiny silver facade - it's the rebuilt station for Engine 10, a company that lost 5 people on 9/11. Beside the bay door entrance where the trucks come out, there's a bronze plaque with engravings of the likenesses of the five firefighters who died that day. As you move further west, further down the front of the station, you come to where the front door used to be. There's a window there now, displaying pictures of what the station used to look like, and what it looked like after the South Tower fell on it. There was also a note in the window that said, among other things, that people were free to visit the station, but that everyone should refrain from asking the firefighters to talk about that day since it is still (understandably) a difficult subject. However, it's the stuff directly surrounding the fire station - above it, beside it, behind it - that really started granting the perspective I was looking for.

There are a handful of buildings, including two large ones that were probably offices or residences, standing on Liberty Street that still visibly show the scars from that day. One building is draped in an enormous piece of black material, but behind it you can easily see where entire sections had been peeled away by the falling South Tower. Walking a little more to the west, you come across another building, a strikingly beautiful stone structure, with enormous gouges taken out of it. I tried to guess what caused them. Had it been part of the South Tower, as it splintered and fell? Was it part of the plane that flew into, then through, the North Tower? Thinking of this, thinking of the arc of the debris as it came down, the people leaping out of the top of the building before it fell, the noise, the flames, the smell (a smell that permeated the air all over the city for weeks).... basically, just trying to put all of those images I saw into some sort of real context ("Down there was where we saw people running toward the camera as the camera caught dust clouds dozens of stories high racing through the canyons of lower Manhattan," and thoughts of the like).

And it hit me. Standing there, by these buildings that still hadn't been repaired or torn down, near the skyway over the West Side Highway that had collapsed and a temporary one erected in its place, it hit me again. I won't know what it was like to be standing there on that day, the horrors that the people I saw there on Wednesday saw, but I can imagine, and that alone tore me apart.

We continued across the skyway into the World Financial Center, which has been completely repaired. From there, walking north along the West Side Highway, you get a better view than you can from the street level. You can see the support structures they're building in the pit. You can see the remnants of the underground mall and its many stories nestled under the city. And you get a true sense of the hole - in all its literal and spiritual senses - the loss of the towers has left.

Another effort of imagination I tried to pull off was trying to visualize the buildings as they had been. I looked at surrounding buildings and counted floors. The first one I counted had 30 stories (the Verizon building). And this was no slouch of a building. But I had to try to imagine almost three identical copies of itself sitting on top of the original. It starts to strain the limits of imagination, visualizing two 110-story towers, but if you can see it... well, I saw it, and it made it easier to picture in my minds eye what it must have looked like to see the top 45 stories of the south tower just tilt and fall to the ground, how unbelievable that must have seemed.

We continued walking up the West Side Highway (having left the building midway up the fenced-off length), then crossed over the highway in the skyway on that end of the site. We walked along the north side of the site, where 7 World Trade used to be. There's already a new building in the process of going up there that appears to have half the frontage of the old building. When you get to West Broadway, you can see north up the street to behind where 7WTC used to be, and back in there are a couple of burnt out buildings, clearly very damaged and abandoned, more wreckage from the day that has yet to be reclaimed by the wave of renewal.

It's eminently clear, however, that the work goes on all across that area. The entire site area and the surrounding blocks are still largely closed off to vehicular traffic (Liberty and Vesey streets on the north and south ends of the site are particularly notable), and pedestrian traffic is shunted through walkways bordered on either side by concrete barriers or iron fences.

We got to the corner of Vesey and Church and continued walking east until we got around to the front of St. Paul's Cathedral. The story of St. Paul's is somewhat remarkable. Despite the towers' collapse and tons of debris marring a dozen buildings around it, the cathedral survived without a scratch, a fact owed entirely to the former existence of a huge sycamore tree in the cemetery behind the cathedral, one of the casualties of 9/11.

Out in front of the cathedral there's a fairly massive display outlining the events of 9/11 and the days and weeks following, with emphasis on the church's role in sheltering and aiding the rescue and recovery workers. It wasn't a whole lot of new information necessarily, but it was bewildering just how involved the church became in the relief efforts simply because of a few factors working heavily in its favor: 1) the fact that it is a church, an international symbol of solace and relief in its own right; 2) it was intact; 3) it was probably the most intact structure closest to Ground Zero (which, by the way, was a phrase I encountered not at all anywhere in NYC - everything I saw in print referred to it as the "WTC Site"). Walking down the length of the display, reading the accounts and seeing the pictures brought back a refined memory of the time after the attacks, when hundreds of those homemade missing persons posters were attached to the gate of the church along Broadway - the one thing that really drove home just how many people had been lost. Looking at the display was what really got to Jenn. She'd been sort of avoiding going there (despite NYC being her hometown). But she'd come with me, finally accepting the rightness of the time, in a sort of 'best to get this over with' kind of way.

Maybe it's just me, and the fact that the memory and feeling of that time is always boiling just below the surface, but the reaction of her family to my want to visit the site ("there's nothing there") made me wonder about the mindset of people on whom this had a major impact at the time, but now registers dimly, if at all. A part of me believes that time does heal all wounds, and in a handful of generations yet-to-be, we'll look back on 9/11 with the same objective historicity that we look at Fort Sumpter, 1861 now, or may look at Pearl Harbor, 1941 within the next 20-30 years.

But the other part of me remembers what happened during the summer of 2002, when everybody was working so hard to get their lives back to normal that we suppressed the memory of the attacks, until they came back full-bore at the one-year anniversary. Everything one year later was just as fresh, hearing and seeing it all again, as it was that day. Kathleen's monologue during the run of Anger Box was no less powerful over two years hence. That other part of me believes that it is no less a fresh wound now than it was two and a half years ago, just that we've become better at working around it.

After looking at the display, we ventured inside to the sanctuary, the outer edge of which has been turned into a museum highlighting the church's role in aiding the rescue workers and engineers. The church really was the central stop for aid workers who needed to rest for a few hours - sleeping on the pews in those first few days until cots were wheeled in - or those who needed foot work to treat burns as they walked over the flaming heap of rubble, or those who needed water, or food, or anything really. It was all there. The story of St. Paul's on and after 9/11 is a remarkable one. Hopefully it will always receive the mention it deserves as a part of that day.

Something I've added to my Amazon wish list, which the historian and collector in me really wants, but is something I may not look at that often, is a book called "Here is New York." It's a collection of about 800 photographs, all taken that day and immediately after it, and is probably the most comprehensive photographic look at all aspects of the attacks and their aftermath - at least that I've seen. Some of the photographs are downright disturbing, including one still that made me literally gasp - an image that I haven't seen in months, simply because I haven't had any desire to see it again, that of the second plane a split second before it crashed into the South Tower. (Reading reviews of the book on Amazon, I discovered that there are other, even more disturbing - even grizzly - photos.)

(After writing this lengthy review of the visit, and all of the thought and time I've spent going back over not only what I felt and thought, but also remembering again the events of the day, it makes me kind of want to not think about 9/11 again for a while.)

Coming up in part III, meeting Joe, and my birthday.