Life’s fabric ripped apart
Last Friday night, on the eve of the Empire State Building reopening to tourists, a bomb scare evacuated the building. My husband works on the 41st floor of what is now, once again, the tallest building in New York.
Until Friday, he hadn’t even told me that earlier in the week, the building’s PA system had broadcast an alert, telling the workers just to "Stand By."
Stand by for what? It’s been three weeks since Sept. 11 and the country is starting to move on a bit more, but around here it feels like our lives imploded only yesterday. Or a lifetime ago.
Other Friday evenings, my husband would call from his office in the Empire: "Want to go to the movies?" He’d take the subway downtown and I’d take the ferry across the Hudson River from Hoboken to meet him. Our favorite Manhattan theater sat right next to the World Trade Center, in Battery Park City. It’s in a dusty dangerous ghost town now, with most residents still shut out by police barricades.
Up until three weeks ago we all lived within sight of the World Trade Center. But now I scour the skyline more closely than I ever did when the towers were standing. They were just there. A normal landmark in your everyday life.
When the planes hit, my husband and I were with family in Texas, celebrating my birthday. I thought right away about the ticket agent at the Delta Airlines counter in 5 World Trade Center who always helps me with our travel plans. That building is collapsed. I keep wondering what happened to her.
We got our first glimpse of the rising smoke when we flew into Newark five days after the explosions. As we approached the airport everyone migrated to the right side of the plane, straining to see the southern tip of Manhattan. A young woman who had been ushered by the gate agents into first class started sobbing. What was she coming home to?
When we got back to Hoboken, there was a handwritten card waiting in the mail, dated Sept. 7, with a return address of 151 World Trade Center Concourse. A saleswoman I had met who worked in the shopping mall there, at Crabtree & Evelyn, had invited me in for a birthday discount. I wonder about her too.
From our peaceful green park at Pier A, we ponder the plumes of debris stretching for miles above downtown. I imagine a giant dragon snorting smoke into the sky – a wounded beast on its back, the fire still burning in its belly.
People from towns all around seem to be gravitating to the Hoboken pier to leave flowers, candles, poems and pictures of the family members who haven’t come home. Or just to soak up the sight, gaze at the gap. Silently, we all try to wrap our minds around this impossible deed, this missing piece.
Others walk their dogs, toss Frisbees or pass the makeshift memorials while jogging around the pier, just like they always did.
It’s a regular pilgrimage for me, a quasi-normal part of my day to stop by the pier. When I walk out the door, my feet just carry me there. But finally, you turn your back and walk away. You drop a few bucks in the relief efforts’ collection can at Starbuck’s. Maybe you volunteer a few hours to pack boxes of supplies or serve meals to searchers. But for us, the living, there’s still laundry to do, groceries to buy, jobs to keep.
On the way to that job, especially if it’s in Manhattan, we pass posters of the missing. Everywhere we look there’s a smiling secretary, a father cradling a baby, a guy hugging a Labrador.
They remind us that the people lost in the World Trade Center, whose lives were mostly still ahead of them, will strangely be forever identified with their jobs: Lorisa Taylor, age 31, Marsh & McLennon, 1 World Trade Center, 94th floor; brothers John and Tim Grazioso, Cantor Fitzgerald, 1 World Trade Center, 105th floor; Carl Bedigian, age 35, NYC firefighter, Engine 214; Thomas Gorman, Port Authority Police.
We know they’re gone. Their families know it too. The funerals have begun, even when there isn’t a body to bury. For others, it’s been only three weeks and it’s still too soon to say goodbye. They sit and stare, incredulous, at the stormy cloud of smoke that carried their hearts away.
The rest of us vacillate between our numbing everyday routines and the unpredictable connections to this surreal horror. Several years ago I earned a master’s degree in journalism at University of Colorado in Boulder. Last week, I received an email that a member of the local CU alumni group lost his life while working at Fred Alger Management on the 94th floor of the north tower.
You never know when you’ll turn the corner and some image, some comment, some piercing realization will strike you. A flier posted in our condo lobby by the local animal league asks if anyone knows of a stranded pet whose owner hasn’t shown up.
Soon after we returned to Hoboken from Texas I actually stood in a line that stretched a half-block to buy an American flag at United on Washington Street. Finally, I got to the front and bought one the store’s owners had dug out of storage to meet the demand. It was silk, with only 48 stars. We haven’t had 48 states since 1958.
When the young woman ahead of me had reached the counter she explained that she was with the USO, working at Ground Zero with the rescuers.
"The only thing they want," she said, "the only thing they’re asking for are those little American flags. How many can you get?"
Tears prick my eyes every time I remember it. My flag will fly on happier days. But I will never, ever forget the week I bought it. The week the country’s tallest towers came crashing down.
As amazing as they were, the towers that anchored the World Trade Center were not welcoming. They were New York City spaces – vast, soaring, impressive. Big enough to have their own zip code.
The enormous plaza that stretched between the monumental towers dwarfed other open spaces in the city. The hot dog stands and the flower carts looked like toys. It was always immaculately clean, even outside. They must have had armies of maintenance people to spit and polish the place.
Inside, the lobby ceilings soared up, up, up. Forty passengers could push into elevators that raced to the 110th observation deck so quickly it made your ears pop. We never missed a trip to the top when friends or family came to town.
At the World Trade Center, I always felt like I was really in the middle of something important. Things were happening, people were moving – fast. It was fun and it was exciting, but not what I’d call comfortable. There was nothing intimate, nothing human-scaled about it. But of course that behemoth commercial complex was full of people. Fifty thousand people. Every day.
Slowly, those big boxes wove their way into the fabric of our lives. Moreso, ironically, when we moved out of downtown Manhattan to Hoboken, which actually put us closer to the Trade Center. I loved riding the ferry over, any time of year. It was really the most fun in winter, when we’d hear the creaking ice and hang over the side to see the boat’s bow shove the floating chunks aside.
"You know, when we move and we have a car," I’d say, "we’ll remember the days when we went out to the movies on a ferry." I never imagined the last time we did that was the last time we ever would.
Last spring, during the annual orchid show, I took the ferry to buy my first Phalaenopsis. The Winter Garden, that mammoth glass atrium filled with 50-foot palm trees was, on that weekend, simply magnificent. Masses of people gawked at the rarest, most delicate, most stupendous blossoms you could ever imagine. Now, the only living things in that gorgeous space are trees, covered in soot. It looks like Los Angeles, after a volcano.
My friends and family want to know what it’s like around New York City right now. This is what I tell them: We’re all drained. We sleep too much. Or hardly at all. It’s a challenge to concentrate. Of course we carry on – sort of. But for those who sit and stare at that hole in the sky, the dust hasn’t even begun to settle. – Allison Anderson
Allison Anderson is a freelance writer living in Hoboken.