Sun, Sep 11, 2011 page7

• TEN YEARS ON: New York’s Sept. 11, 2001, and not letting go

  A CITY REMEMBERS: New York is a city that is always moving forward and puts its tragedies behind it, but the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks are different, and still deeply felt

  • By Michael Oreskes / AP, NEW YORK
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  Great cities are like the sea. They swallow their dead.

  New York has absorbed many horrors through its history, but most traces of them have long since been allowed to vanish.

  There was once a place called Five Points, where murderous gangs reigned. You could not even find it on a map now. The factory building where young women leaped to their deaths to escape the inferno consuming the Triangle Shirtwaist Co is a university office. The 1,021 souls who burned in 20 minutes aboard the General Slocum in the East River 107 years ago are remembered by New Yorkers, if at all, because they account for the worst loss of life before Sept. 11, 2001.

  New York strides relentlessly forward — a great place if they ever get it done, as the editor of the Commercial Advertiser put it in 1828. Tragedies are history to throw off, a roadblock to progress.

  However, this time, so far, New Yorkers feel differently. Ten years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, New York’s prevailing mood is to resist the city’s natural tides of forgetting, of moving on.

  Not letting go permeates the city these days. In large ways and small, New Yorkers still are trying to refill the empty sky that Bruce Springsteen mourned.

  The words permanent and New York do not sit naturally together. They are almost contradictions. However, New Yorkers do seem to be yearning for lasting, if not permanent, connections to their loss.

  To experience Sept. 11 as New Yorkers did, and still are, it helps to realize there were really two Sept. 11s. There was a global event, seen live on TV everywhere. The US was attacked, as will be repeated endlessly today.

  However, it was New York that suffered the grievous wound (many New Yorkers barely recognize the smoldering Pentagon and the wreckage in Shanksville). The New York experience of Sept. 11 was very personal, traumatic and individually horrifying. If we did not lose a close friend or family member, we knew someone who did.

  New Yorkers plunging from the towers were not icons of a tragedy. Other New Yorkers watched them fall, disbelieving. Then, later, with the acrid smell in their nostrils, the living searched for their own spouses, parents, children.

  “The centers of hundreds upon hundreds of webs of family, friends, work had been torn out,” Amy Waldman of Brooklyn writes in her new novel, The Submission, as she portrays the myriad ways the destruction of the twin towers shuddered through the fabric of the city.

  Whether they found who they were searching for that day or not, everyone was afraid, everyone was touched. For a long time, even simple things, like the beautiful fall sky, could trigger the chill of recalling the fear.

  When the unfamiliar, an earthquake, shook the city the other day, the first thought most New Yorkers had was that another attack was under way. A third of New Yorkers tell the Marist Institutes poll takers that even now, 10 years later, they feel their lives changed forever.

  New Yorkers lost colleagues and loved ones. However, they lost something else that day, too: the towers themselves.

  “There are going to be a whole generation of people growing up and people who never visited New York who will have no conception whatsoever of how big the towers were — how beautiful they were and how iconic they were, how many different vantage points there were where you could see them,” says Brian August, who can see that empty space where the towers should be from his roof in Brooklyn.

  They were not graceful or elegant, like the Woolworth or Chrysler buildings. Instead of sweeping upward, they bullied their way into the city skyline. However, they were their generation’s reaffirmation that here, as Russell Shorto wrote of the Dutch settlement where it began, was The Island at the Center of the World.

  The towers were an expression, in aluminum, glass and steel, of that Dutch idea that this was a city where commerce and exchange were more important than nationality or armies. They were, after all, The World Trade Center. So their destruction, as was intended, challenged the faith of New Yorkers in the founding idea of New York itself.

  In 1973, this reporter went to his first full-time job, on Cortlandt Street, which deadheaded right into the then newly finished towers. From Cortlandt Street, the towers filled the vista. It was the year of the Watergate hearings. At the office, TV blared the latest revelations.

  That summer it seemed the US system of government would fall at any moment and the towers would last forever. It turned out the other way around. The US system, for all its struggles, has proven remarkably resilient yet again.

  However, when the towers fell, something of New York’s vision of itself tumbled with them. And New Yorkers have spent 10 years refilling the empty spaces left by the attack.

  For Brian August, the effort is literal. He has designed an app to do it. When you hold your mobile phone up toward lower Manhattan, his app imposes an image of the vanished towers on the present scene.

  “These lost views conjure vivid memories in much the same way as hearing a favorite song from the past,” he explains of his project, which he calls 110 Stories. “’Seeing’ the towers come to life through your iPhone will transport you back in time. 110 Stories lets each of us show and tell our personal stories and share them with the world.”

  Hundreds of New Yorkers have donated money so he can complete his project.

  This is something new for New Yorkers. In a town that has plowed under cemeteries and repurposed the scenes of dance hall arsons and fatal factory fires, a piece of New York’s prime asset, real estate, is now reconsecrated in the mind of the city as hallowed ground.

  Not all of ground zero, of course. That would be too un-New York like. After 10 years of squabbling in the most New York of ways, the site of devastation will be shared by a memorial to the dead, a museum, a commuter hub and new commercial towers, one that will soar higher than the trade towers.

  Contradictory?

  Not here. The essence of being a New Yorker, this event has dramatized, is conceding only so much to tragedy.

  We will not forget, New Yorkers seem to be saying, but we will not bend, either.
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