What Remains after 9/11

When I was growing up, if something bad happened to me at a particular place, I did my best to avoid it. Gradually, I let myself approach the bad scene, but still could not bring myself to look at it directly.

Shortly after 9/11, whenever I went downtown I averted my eyes as I approached Ground Zero. It was something awful that had happened to me, and it hurt to come close to it, to acknowledge what I lost. I took furtive glances as I walked down Broadway, at the blackened shell, twisted beams, mountains of debris, cranes, land-movers, and barriers, and a dense penumbra of dust and smoke.

Looking at the disaster up close was troubling, but it was worse to stare at the site from a distance, or from another direction. Looking southward from the Avenue of the Americas, I tried to replace through force of memory the landmark that always indicated south, but there was nothing there, not merely dilapidated but dead and gone. If I pretended that I had not seen New York for thirty years, or that I just arrived, an empty southern vista would be normal. The World Trade towers would be like other New York landmarks that disappeared. But I could not pretend.

That was why I passed the site time and again on my lunch break. I needed to look at the demolition site, because ruins were something; they accounted for what disappeared. Although the towers were never my favorite buildings and I had visited them only a handful of times, I tried to fill in the space they once occupied, with how I remembered them best. I recalled the sensation of walking the curves of Maiden Lane, and suddenly from two blocks away, confronting a bluish glass structure, like a vertical whale, and wondering what it was, to be told that it was the south tower. And I thought, “So that’s where it is.”

During these elegiac visits downtown, I walked back up Broadway and noticed the sign “The Woolworth Building” chiseled over the doors of the skyscraper. I crossed Broadway to admire the tallest building of a hundred years ago, its arches and filigree. I entered a new phase of mourning. My World Trade Center was taken from me, so I consoled myself by taking stock of other landmarks that sustained my New York identity. When I saw the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building through an office window, I stared at them to absorb and savor them. As powerfully built as they were, they might be as vulnerable and transient as I was, so I must preserve them in detailed memories.

It might seem absurd that a person links his identity to buildings. I don’t live or work in any of these places, and did not design them; yet they contribute significant motivation for living here, and they are a source of pride. One of my first defining moments in New York came a few weeks after I arrived. I had just painted my 3-room east village railroad flat when friends invited me for drinks at a midtown bar. After happy hour was over and we’d gorged ourselves on free hors d’oeuvres, my friends led me to the median strip on Park Avenue in the 50s and told me to look up.

In the twilight, colossal Bauhaus skyscrapers, glass and steel, inspiring, terrifying, and clarifying, surrounded and covered me in their shadows. They imposed on me a new perspective of myself in in a world that was alien to my expectations, impervious to my schemes and deaf to my desires. My new self-image was neither grandiose nor romantic--I was reduced to scale. Staring up at those buildings that did not scrape the sky so much as impale it, I could not avoid an emotional response, a sense of where I was, and what my relationship would be to New York. It was an initiation. When confronting structures of such immense scale, you either decided to exist in the midst of the power that built and maintained them, deal with it, perhaps benefit from it, or flee.

I chose to live in New York, to feed off of its size and power. Others no doubt have been repulsed by it. Over the years, I also learned where the small buildings were, the quirky neighborhoods, hidden concrete glades with fountains or waterfalls around the corner from bustling thoroughfares, quiet enclaves in bedlam. I cannot separate myself from New York’s buildings. I wish they had not destroyed the old Penn Station. Whenever I drive down 7^th Avenue and 33^rd Street I mourn a beautiful landmark of which I was deprived and which will never be again. And I am grateful that Grand Central Station still stands.

Now I take stock of what remains. I gaze at the golden roof of the New York Insurance building, and admire that big white cake at 40 W. 23^rd Street, and risk a voyeur’s disgrace by peering at the dark brick façade of the Hotel Chelsea. I stare at buildings whose names do not appear in tour books, because they capture my eye and imagination. If all men are mortal and Socrates was mortal, then the World Trade Center was mortal, and so are all things that humans build. We must do what we can to rebuilt them—in their empty lots and hearts.