12gauge.com 2002 - World Trade Center Tragedy

The Aftermath, Part Two. Living Post-Disaster

Read Part One: Warren St., October 25, 2001

March 12, 2002

Since my mother moved back into her apartment on Warren Street, she got about eight air purifiers donated to her from the Red Cross. They are very expensive, hundreds of dollars each. She keeps them running constantly at full blast. Even four, five, six months later. She would have to walk the dog, for about three months afterward, wearing a mask for asthma when the air had been dusty—and then complained about tourists snapping pictures of her. The mask looked deformed and huge, embarrassing. The dog’s feet have to be washed off before she comes into the apartment because of the dust on the sidewalks. The dog hates getting her feet washed, so it became this big hassle, trying to get her to put her feet in the soap bowl. Water spills all over the place, then you have to grab a rag and clean it up. Later, to make it easier, the bowl of water was replaced with towlettes, the kind you wash your hands with at restaurants. All shoes are left in the hallway. The lobby has now a metallic burnt smell in it—which hadn’t been there before 9/11. The apartment has been redecorated, with new curtains, rugs and bedspreads. The windows are all permanently shut. Mother used to open the windows constantly for fresh air—now if the apartment feels hot she has to turn on the air conditioner, in the winter. Sometime around December, when I slept there, even in an apartment full of purifiers and closed windows, and no smokers, there was some sort of dusty, strange smell—it was almost too much. It smelled like charcoal, burning metal, and something rancid. Not to be gruesome, but that’s how it was. I wanted to go home that night, but “home” was all the way in Jersey City Heights. Plus, I felt guilty for them because they had to be here. I couldn’t sleep in Mother’s or my sister’s room. I told my sister one night when I was about to go to bed, I thought I smelled something burning. Probably from the World Trade Center, she said. I would get calls from Mother saying the air is bad, it bothers her asthma, she’s worried about asbestos, and since they put the twin lights up the neighborhood has been crowded with tourists and noisy. One night when I stayed there we had to hurry and have all the dishes washed by 8 P.M., because they were doing some sort of Ground Zero-related repairs, or the water system there was screwed up. They had a board meeting a few days ago about air quality—and it was announced that asbestos was in the air, so my mother told me. Now she’s worried about sicknesses and what may be in the air we don’t know about. I don’t know if my sister is bothered by this or not. She is fifteen and I don’t know if stuff like this can roll off at that age, and she is too caught up in being in high school.

This neighborhood was always sort of a mish mash of arty and corporate stuff. There were lots of artists, more like graphic artists, young parents and thirty-something corporate people. People in their twenties, like me, came and disappeared—because all told there was simply not a whole lot to do. At night you could go to Starbucks or another coffee shop. JFK Junior used to live around here, and I feel sad that he isn’t around to witness this part of history. When the World Trade Center was standing, my sister and I sometimes sat in American Coffee or Sbarros. There was a cappuccino place and a Godiva chocolate shop I used to go to a lot. Still, it was really a tourist spot on the weekends. But down here on the weekends, except for maybe the South Street Seaport, was deserted. Absolutely no one was there except a few scary people. So you had masses of big, beautiful buildings and no noise and no people. I’ve lived in small dark spaces for so long that too much space and light on the street is out of my comfort zone. Try though I may have, I never felt comfortable on Greenwich Street in those high rises. I always felt like I was getting a headache. I always felt like I was dirty or I would trip over myself. I prefer Leonard and Franklin Streets, which are old and dark, with big buildings blocking out the light. The scenery that I walked through, to and from the Village, where I hung out as a teenager, was SoHo and Tribeca, with all the paintings-as-billboards and old buildings, a very attractive area. This neighborhood, which before 9/11, and in the twelve years Mother has lived here, had been barely ever mentioned in the magazines and newspapers, but is now globally famous. What used to be this scenic view off Mother’s street is now a mass of broken and charred metal, floodlights, Verizon trucks, police cars, scaffolding and funky smells. When I go out to walk the dog there is riffraff, a few residents, and occasionally someone walking their dog.

I must say—I am really glad I lived in Jersey City Heights from June 2000 until February. I lived in a remote neighborhood, up on a cliff. There, we only got the WTC smoke once, when the wind suddenly changed direction—and it had been suffocating. . I got very frustrated because my roommate wanted to smoke a cigarette indoors—while the air was full of smoke. At least she could have smoked it outside. Every time I inhaled I smelled the burning metal, which means every second. It was evil, that smell. I could actually taste metal. I could barely sleep, and the next morning I had lungs full of burnt-metal dust. I remember, on only three hours’ sleep, I decided to go to the gym because I would sweat and breathe out the metal. So I did. What an ordeal—getting through that 45 minutes of marathon training, but afterward I felt far better, and much of the smoke was out of my lungs. That smoke, fortunately, didn’t return again. Down the mountain in Hoboken you could occasionally smell it, on more nights. On all the houses in my neighborhood were American flags and candles burning. The Lincoln Tunnel, where I got the bus going into Manhattan, had a giant sign saying, “GOO BLESS AMERICA.” Later, to make a long story short, I decided to move back into the Lower East Side, and found a place. When the movers were driving into the city, at the Lincoln Tunnel they had to search the car. The Holland Tunnel is now barely accessible for trucks.

I realize in my first essay I had completely overlooked this part—what had happened at my job.

On Thursday September 13, we all came back into work. We’re right across the street from Madison Square Garden and about two blocks away from Macy’s. A few reporters and editors, myself, the copy editor, among them, showed up. I think we had been sitting in the office for about two hours when my mother called me and asked if I wanted to join her at Macy’s, where they were shopping for clothes. Her husband’s job had granted them whole new bedding material, curtains, rugs, and clothes. I said maybe in an hour or so. About half an hour from then, people started piling into the main hallway at work. Someone said that a bomb scare had been called to our building. I kept hearing that someone called in a bomb scare, everyone has to leave. We all gathered the hallway and proceeded down the fire escape. Someone was saying “everybody out!” So we went down, slowly, 17 flights and I spent the whole time hoping the building would at least light up after I got out of there. There was a brief moment when I seriously was wondering if I was going to blow up--if this was it for me. Down down down, flight after miserable flight. When we finally got into the hallway of the building, I really couldn’t get to that beautiful exit fast enough. I found a gathering of the people I work with, and the woman I work for took the people in our group to a Chinese restaurant a couple blocks away. We all sat down at a big round table. Two women started crying. A man from England, who had lost friends the other day in the WTC, began telling me about the London techno scene and suggested I make an excursion to Ibiza. They ordered food but I wasn’t hungry. The people from London wanted to leave the city but all the flights were called off. About an hour later, we all returned to the office. What else was there to do? Story after story was being written, this being a financial newspaper, and many of the companies being written about were the ones affected by this. They couldn’t deliver any papers that week because the mail was screwed up—so that week we had to do an on-line version. In the midst of this, I met my mother at the New York Times, and waited with her to see if her husband was able to get the dog and birds, not even knowing if they were alive.

Well, I can tell you I was practically faint by the time that Friday, when the deadline was over. There was story after story after story after story to edit. My fingers were hurting, my vision was blurry, my body hurt from being hunched over the computer. All I could think about, and it was Friday night, was crawling into bed. And every time I thought I was finished another story came my way. I barely knew what was going past me. Then, because it was on-line, the whole format was different and this added more problems. We had to check every last corner of the material and the content, of course, was different now. And do this over and over and over again. And we had, on top of that, the task of turning out a paper in not five days, the normal allotted time, but in two days.

The content has changed since Sept. 11, naturally. All the Sept. 11-related phrases have been added to the style list. There are now stories on “disaster recovery,” “relocation” and “business continuity” and stories on money laundering-detection software and surveillance equipment. I have had temp jobs on Wall Street years before 2001 and I know they’re not stupid--they’ve always had tight security, particularly brokerage firms, and they’ve always known that they had enemies. One temp job I had had was like an action movie--I swear to God the security guards had to escort us to the bathroom, because we were handling bonds. The security in the building I work in has changed. It is now mandatory to show I.D. to get into the building at all. The side street entrances are now inaccessible. We all had picture I.D.s made, and if you forget it you have to call upstairs. In the following four months, we’ve endured Anthrax scares, the post office near us being one target, and freak car accidents. In two or three cases in this neighborhood someone went ballistic and, for whatever reason, decided to run over the pedestrians.

I took a plane for the first time around Thanksgiving—to Indianapolis. When I arrived at Newark at around 5:00 A.M. after having to cab it there, there was a gigantic line going to the x-ray machines. They were emptying out people’s keys and tweezers. I spilled Coke while waiting in line, and had to go to three different sections of the airport to find my gate, then take some sort of elevator car to the right place and almost missed the flight. I wondered why on Expedia.com they didn’t tell us that a 5:00 AM flight out of Newark would be so expensive, because there were no bus services that early, no way to get there from Jersey City Heights, and that even then the airport was jam-packed because of some special package to Miami that weekend. Fortunately I was let in on the “boarding” line otherwise I would have had to wait three or four hours. On the plane, I noticed how many people sat there stiffly and the flight attendants had bags under their eyes. Once in Indiana, I showed my cousins pictures of my mother’s neighborhood and apartment, including the one of the clothes hanging in the hallway, wrapped in plastic. I watched their eyes pop wide open as I told them about my mother living four blocks away, and her and her husband running from the collapsing building.

Every so often I have “flashbacks” of the WTC and think—wow! It actually existed once. I remember always going up the escalator at night if I had to make a late-night run for something, and browsing around all the stores there. I want to feel detached but I feel as if my home had been bombed. I have home videos of my mother, sister and I seeing our uncle from Michigan off where the WTC buses came. I watched the 9/11 TV special last night and, for the first time, people have an idea what it was like to have been in the towers when that happened. Only to find out that there is no way you could really know what it was like to be there. And when I watched it, I saw that same area� we had been in falling apart and covered in smoke. I saw that big lobby which I had been through several times covered in smoke and with that constant glass smashing. That sound just made my heart skip a beat—I also knew that parts were being edited out—but nevertheless I felt nauseous after it was over, physically. I have had dreams about this incident—in fact after watching the Sunday special I dreamt about Osama bin Laden in a white house, with a giant lawn in front of it which had wooden arrows all over the place pointing up. I haven’t analyzed it yet.

In one of those (slap!) fateful twists, 10 some-odd years ago, when Mother and her husband were apartment-hunting, they looked at one place by Riverside Drive. This was the place they almost took. But something came up, and they took this place instead. It’s interesting to think how different my life would be/have been, if they had moved uptown instead of downtown. There isn’t time to go into it here, but I can say that I have many dramatic stories of my life, a decade’s worth, all revolving around Lower Manhattan. But I can say that Lower Manhattan is the greatest, still! In all my travels I have yet to see such a condensed and bubbling-over arts community. Right next to the world financial capital is the squatter punk scene—which had been far more powerful in the eighties, but in order to understand the atmosphere surrounding this event you have to take into consideration that many things have been happening here, one on top of the other, for several years before this. I lived to tell, at least some of it.

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