New York: some self-indulgent observations at Ground Zero
It's a year and a half later, a little longer than that, to be accurate, and a lot of things in the area have returned to an approximation of the way things were before then. Offices are back to work, people are shopping and eating and working out and going to the movies, and there's this big gouge taken right out of the middle.
I know, another overwrought Ground Zero column by some emotional hack. You'll have to bear with me for a moment.
I came back to Lower Manhattan for a conference. They decided to hold it in a hotel a block from where the towers were, which annoyed me for a couple of reasons- first, it's a little far from most of the things I like to visit in the city, a long subway ride or an expensive cab ride. Second, I didn't want to be reminded. But I went anyway, and, while the Guys in Suits held a cocktail party, I bailed and decided to take a walk to see what was left of what I remembered.
The World Financial Center is populated again, although a lot of the part facing the towers emains empty and in a state of suspended "under construction." The part where the restaurants are, where I remember grabbing a Cosi sandwich before catching the subway to Yankee Stadium, is back to normal and reasonably busy for a Friday night, but the big glass-domed hall with the spectacular staircase where they held the concerts, while it's open and the concerts are back, seems to be only an approximation of its former self, the room oddly quiet on a Friday evening, the cleaned-up stairs looking almost unfinished, reaching up to... well, they used to reach up to the Twin Towers, but now they just seem to go nowhere. The boats still rock in the marina, people trudge against the stiff breeze and misty drizzle while a few hardy volleyball players practice in conditions the polar opposite of those back home. But this is on the river side, where you can look across past the Circle Line boats and the ferries to the skyline of Jersey City- it has a skyline, now, an impressive one- and Hoboken and Ellis Island, and you can forget for a minute what's a block behind you.
What's back there still packs an emotional wallop- right here, so many people died. Right here. They were here, now they're gone- but you expect that, and even the whistle-clean state of Ground Zero and the nice new fence with the official memorial plaques instead of that messy, emotional, emotionally messy makeshift memorial stuff that used to be there don't hide the horror or lessen the pain. It's still possible to pause, look, think right here, there was that Borders store, and you could take the escalator down to the concourse right by the subway gate and the lottery stand and all those people died and look, there's one of those light poles that used to be in the plaza but there's only half of it left and feel it like a punch in the gut. The weird thing I immediately noticed was that the buildings immediately across the street from the towers on the west and east side were relatively unscathed and returning to their previous state, but the buildings across the street to the north and south took it hard. There are several buildings with facades that just got ripped right off the frame, and they're still there with netting holding the debris back. Others are gone- the Amish Market with the great baked goods, the building just across from the concourse entrance with the dispirited-looking lunch patio about two floors up, the pizza place and the little bodega next to it, all gone. But the department store across Church Street is open and looks exactly as it did on 9/10, and the Millenium Hilton is, too- there's a bar facing Ground Zero, and if I was the manager of that hotel, I think I might move it. Clubs have opened a block away, a hip-hop crowd hanging outside one, a trendy sign above another- but it's otherwise quiet at night, just the way it used to be.
However tentatively, life has returned to the neighborhood. Soon, the new complex will be built, and it'll have a nice big memorial in the middle and shopping and restaurants and for a while, maybe decades, people will pause and remember 9/11 and remember where they were when they heard what was happening and there will be tears. And sometime after that, when the survivors are dead and their children are old and new generations take their places, you wonder whether they'll understand what the memorial's all about and what happened and how it profoundly changed some things and didn't change other things and life will go on. That's what happened with Pearl Harbor, known to the Youth of America as a bad war movie with that guy and that other guy and a Baldwin. It always happens. That's not all bad- it's a sign that no terrorist act can stop the human spirit and they can't take our way of life away from us and all that. I just hope that when the history books or videos or datastreams of the future teach about this place, they leave in the part about the market and the pizza shop and the sad little patio and how, in a moment of madness, the things in our life we take for granted can be taken from us. I'll never have lunch in that market again, never grab a slice at the pizza place before catching the subway across the street. It's not as profound as the loss of lives, but they took that from me. A year and a half later, that still makes me mad.
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