how To Fill the Empty Sky
I circle the observation deck of the Empire State Building, looking beyond the city. The darkness of the surrounding water gives form to the lights of Manhattan and the bridges glow like the branches of a tree decorated for a party. I circle the deck, but always return to the southern prospect. Between the Statue of Liberty, toy-like in the distance, and where I stand, a living, hazy, smoking hole glows so bright, the lights of the city becomes like the darkness of the waters.
It has been a long November day, eight hours since I arrived in New York City. During the approach to LaGaurdia Airport this morning, I experienced my first ever moment of airplane panic when the flightpath crossed just below the southern tip of Manhattan. There's Ellis Island, the Brooklyn Bridge, Battery Park and the cracked skyline. A realization hits me, sending a bodily jolt from my gut to my fingertips, leaving me queasy. I was experiencing the same view passengers witnessed barely two months before, on 9/11, when that first hijacked airliner maneuvered for its kamikaze run. At that moment, with my plane decelerating over water and all sense of motion and speed is lost, and it feels like we're freefalling, that's the moment I see the cloud of smoke rising from a sinister hole in lower Manhattan. That's when my appointment with Ground Zero begins.
The panic passes as soon as we land, and I am intent on my premier visit to the city, though conceived merely as a half-day detour from a New England birthday party. My cabbie from the airport, 61-year-old Herman Davis of Long Island by way of the South Bronx, welcomes my confused giddiness and is all the more helpful for it. "Yes, those are housing projects. No, I don't know any Mob hangouts. No, that's not the Empire State Building, that's part of the city hall complex. THAT's the Empire State Building."
Things have settled back to normal since 9/11, Herman confides, as normal as can expected, considering. People go to work, people go home, people are skittish, but all is hustle and bustle, despite the disrupted transportation and utilities. The first couple of weeks, sure, everything was about the terrorist attack. "Nobody talks about it anymore. Hundreds of people I pick up. Not one," Herman tells me. "I guess we have this built in thing about forgetting. Not forgetting, really, but it goes away. It's good to be able to forget. You got to carry on.
"You smell it? That smell in the air?" Herman asks as we exit the Brooklyn Bridge into Lower Manhattan. A smoky miasma crowds the air like gauze. "That's the World Trade Center. That's been going on for two months." Herman drops me by City Hall. He smiles hugely when I take his picture, obviously flattered. To my surprise, he dismounts his hack to shake my hand. With a few suggestions about Ground Zero vantage points, I make my way to the site. The chemical smell is strong, but not as bad as some refinery towns. I don't smell death.
Volunteers serve meals to work crews. Pilgrims swarm the area. For every distraught visitor, praying or crying, is a dozen who are less than respectful. For the next few hours I circle the site and view the rubble from every possible angle. People pose for pictures in front of the seven stories of rubble like it was the Swiss Alps rather than the tomb of several thousand New Yorkers. A riotous scene dominates the area near the makeshift memorial on Broadway, as people try to get pictures over a shrouded chain link fence. South of the site, along Thames Street, workers repair the electrical and plumbing lines that were decimated by the Towers' collapse, and numerous signs ask that no pictures be taken, but everybody does anyway. Beyond the construction, to the north, the debris mountain dominates the skyline. A flustered Con Ed supervisor hurries pedestrians along the temporary wooden walkways. "There's people in there," he repeats. "Show some respect." Several visitors climb over the barricades, waving disposable instamatics.
An attractive lady photographer, obviously a professional, clicks away with a 35mm camera when a teamster barks, "No pictures!" When the photographer snaps her head around, he flashes his most alluring pick~up smile. Has the whole area become a tourist attraction? "Absolutely," says NYPD officer John Maderick. Did it bother him? He shrugs.
Residents from the surrounding boroughs venture to Ground Zero to satisfY something deeper than a freak show thrill. They stand out like the divinely lit figures of a renaissance painting. MariAnn Moble, an older woman with short silver hair and wearing a pink pastel knit vest, stands away from the throng in a relaxed slouch, puffing on a Salem 100. She lives in Staten Island, and although only a 15-minute subway ride away, she watched the attack/collapse on TV like the rest of the country. The heap of the south tower glows dramatically in the late afternoon sun on this, her first visit to the site. "I don't criticize the tourists for coming down, I just hope it's the last thing like this they have to see. What's really sad is my son's an actor and we'd come over to see him off Broadway. We'd drive by the Towers and that facade would turn a golden color in the sunset. Ahhh, it was gorgeous." She tells me about the half-price show tickets available in Times Square and moves away into the crowd.
I continue down Washington Street, which allows access to within a block of Trade Center Plaza. I look up, trying to imagine the huge shafts piecing the sky, these towers I remember being under construction as an elementary-schooler. I gaze to the hole in the ether, feeling their presence like the phantom limb of an amputee. On a nearby bench, three burly Black men, workers from New Jersey, take a break from their job of repairing offices and equipment damaged from the debris cloud of the collapse.
"We get most our jobs from the weather. High-tech restorations. The people in these offices were probably looking out the windows and when they saw them collapse, then took off and left the windows open," said Bill Lark. He gestured to the gawkers. "Most of these people have been here before and saw the towers. They want to see if they're really gone. It's a historic moment so people are going to want to see it. Some people would say it's sick and twisted. However, it is understandable."
"Just how high did they look from here?" I ask, looking up again.
"When your neck starts hurting, that's how high it was," said Lark's companion, Tony Phillips. "Like if it was raining, you go up on top and it's sunny."
The guys wander back to work and Dina Striano takes their place on the bench. She gazes at the Plaza with a thoughtful look, the shroud of calm, much like MariAnn Moble. Half a block away stands a tan building of 30 or 40 stories that is often used as a backdrop for television reports. I recall that the windows on the far side were blown out from the collapse. Striano, early thirties, attractive but not distinctive, dressed casually with curly shoulder-length brown hair and, once worked in that building and hasn't been back since 9/11. She lives in Brooklyn; her husband works on Wall Street. She arrived to work after the first plane hit and had just entered that tan building when the second plane exploded into the south tower. With that, she immediately left the area. "Isn't that just like your stereotypical New Yorker? So focused on work. I didn't pay much attention to the first crash. Thankfully, I didn't see anything really gruesome like a lot of people did. When I left, there were all these people standing around, looking up. I think if more people cleared the area, who knows?"
Striano reiterates what so many New Yorkers have said in the media, how much they appreciate the outpouring of support from the rest of the country and how the whole affair has pulled the nation together. She feels that the attack created a bond between a city that much of America perceives as remote and detached, if real at all, and the city that all too often thinks of everything across the Hudson River as "the sticks." Friendly and open, but forthright, Striano teaches me that New Yorkers are not such a different breed, after all is said and done. "All anybody did those first few days was watch TV."
I tell Striano about my conversation with Herman Davis. She smiles for the first time. I mention his philosophy on the ability of the human spirit to disregard the horror and move on. She agrees that the city is going about its business, as usual and as able, even though we sit within earshot of firefighters searching for human remains and black box cockpit voice recorders. Nonetheless, beneath the impression of normalcy, we agree it could be awhile before the threat of terrorist attack doesn't lurk below the surface of the New York state of mind. "I don't know what kind of holiday season it's going to be," Striano said. "I know I don't feel all happy." We exchange e-mail addresses.
By now, I have spent about twice as much time at Ground Zero as I had planned. I make my way to Broadway to find a subway station. I put my notepad and camera away, and now, with my vision unshackeled from the veiwfinder, I really see the city. People rush to catch buses, talk on cell phones, hand out flyers, hawk mounted and framed prints of the Towers. I pass the shrine again and the tourist types still crane their necks for a view beyond the fence. A few pray and a plain woman with mousy hair sobs quietly, reading the futile hand-written messages seeking lost loved ones and friends. I walk on. I have a ticket to visit the Empire State Building and I want to watch the sunset from the top -- New York City by day and by night.
At the corner of Dey and Broadway, the ruins of Tower #5 stop me cold. One of the smaller buildings on the plaza, twenty stories or something like that, #5 suffered too much damage to save and is being demolished. Only five stories and the mezzanine remain. I stand less than 100 feet away, seeing in detail the charred facade, the twisted steel beams, the flapping insulation -- charred, rusted, wounded, dead. My expedition, up to this point remote and academic, becomes suddenly very real and immediate.
Fast-moving pedestrian traffic brushes my back. The police wear gas masks. A wrecking ball pounds methodically at the corpse of #5 over the shrill scream of a saw, slicing iron beams. At my feet, the gray dust of the noxious debris cloud fills the cracks of the sidewalks and the creases of the steel security door of the comer bodega. I break away and by the time I catch the subway to mid-town and arrive on the 83rd floor of the Empire State Building, the sun has set.
From the observation deck of the once again tallest building in New York, I cannot escape the vision of#5. I think of a proverb of Loa Tzu: "We make a vessel from a lump of clay; it is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful." No one likes to say as much, but long before I ever came to New York City, I had concluded that the duolith of the World Trade Center was nothing more than a novelty. In reality, the Towers weren't very unique or compelling architecturally, at least to me. Even Houston has a 101 story building. It's about as exciting as a shoebox, but damn, it's really tall. No, if there hadn't been two World Trade Center Towers, there wouldn't be much to talk about. The demise of the Towers defines their glory. A sixteen-acre hole in the skyline, and how it got there assures their place in history, and a hole is just a well-defined emptiness. As Lao Tzu suggested more than two thousand years ago, while the tangible has advantages, it is the intangible that bequeaths immortality.
I don't know if anyone has been tracking the visitors to Ground Zero as compared to the visitors to the standing Towers. Whether more or less numerous, those compelled to visit Ground Zero, whatever their motives, will surely depart with an awful sense of immediacy, because the event won't end until the hole is repaired. Yet the rubble will be displaced as surely as the Towers crumbled. The hole will be filled and another change will have been wrought. I circle the observation deck of the Empire State Building and wonder what comes next. Will this tragedy create a stronger nation, like a family after the death of a child, pulling strength and unity from their grief? Or will the tragedy eventually fracture that fragile bond. I suspect it will be the latter.
It has been a long November day, eight hours since I arrived in New York City. During the approach to LaGaurdia Airport this morning, I experienced my first ever moment of airplane panic when the flightpath crossed just below the southern tip of Manhattan. There's Ellis Island, the Brooklyn Bridge, Battery Park and the cracked skyline. A realization hits me, sending a bodily jolt from my gut to my fingertips, leaving me queasy. I was experiencing the same view passengers witnessed barely two months before, on 9/11, when that first hijacked airliner maneuvered for its kamikaze run. At that moment, with my plane decelerating over water and all sense of motion and speed is lost, and it feels like we're freefalling, that's the moment I see the cloud of smoke rising from a sinister hole in lower Manhattan. That's when my appointment with Ground Zero begins.
The panic passes as soon as we land, and I am intent on my premier visit to the city, though conceived merely as a half-day detour from a New England birthday party. My cabbie from the airport, 61-year-old Herman Davis of Long Island by way of the South Bronx, welcomes my confused giddiness and is all the more helpful for it. "Yes, those are housing projects. No, I don't know any Mob hangouts. No, that's not the Empire State Building, that's part of the city hall complex. THAT's the Empire State Building."
Things have settled back to normal since 9/11, Herman confides, as normal as can expected, considering. People go to work, people go home, people are skittish, but all is hustle and bustle, despite the disrupted transportation and utilities. The first couple of weeks, sure, everything was about the terrorist attack. "Nobody talks about it anymore. Hundreds of people I pick up. Not one," Herman tells me. "I guess we have this built in thing about forgetting. Not forgetting, really, but it goes away. It's good to be able to forget. You got to carry on.
"You smell it? That smell in the air?" Herman asks as we exit the Brooklyn Bridge into Lower Manhattan. A smoky miasma crowds the air like gauze. "That's the World Trade Center. That's been going on for two months." Herman drops me by City Hall. He smiles hugely when I take his picture, obviously flattered. To my surprise, he dismounts his hack to shake my hand. With a few suggestions about Ground Zero vantage points, I make my way to the site. The chemical smell is strong, but not as bad as some refinery towns. I don't smell death.
Volunteers serve meals to work crews. Pilgrims swarm the area. For every distraught visitor, praying or crying, is a dozen who are less than respectful. For the next few hours I circle the site and view the rubble from every possible angle. People pose for pictures in front of the seven stories of rubble like it was the Swiss Alps rather than the tomb of several thousand New Yorkers. A riotous scene dominates the area near the makeshift memorial on Broadway, as people try to get pictures over a shrouded chain link fence. South of the site, along Thames Street, workers repair the electrical and plumbing lines that were decimated by the Towers' collapse, and numerous signs ask that no pictures be taken, but everybody does anyway. Beyond the construction, to the north, the debris mountain dominates the skyline. A flustered Con Ed supervisor hurries pedestrians along the temporary wooden walkways. "There's people in there," he repeats. "Show some respect." Several visitors climb over the barricades, waving disposable instamatics.
An attractive lady photographer, obviously a professional, clicks away with a 35mm camera when a teamster barks, "No pictures!" When the photographer snaps her head around, he flashes his most alluring pick~up smile. Has the whole area become a tourist attraction? "Absolutely," says NYPD officer John Maderick. Did it bother him? He shrugs.
Residents from the surrounding boroughs venture to Ground Zero to satisfY something deeper than a freak show thrill. They stand out like the divinely lit figures of a renaissance painting. MariAnn Moble, an older woman with short silver hair and wearing a pink pastel knit vest, stands away from the throng in a relaxed slouch, puffing on a Salem 100. She lives in Staten Island, and although only a 15-minute subway ride away, she watched the attack/collapse on TV like the rest of the country. The heap of the south tower glows dramatically in the late afternoon sun on this, her first visit to the site. "I don't criticize the tourists for coming down, I just hope it's the last thing like this they have to see. What's really sad is my son's an actor and we'd come over to see him off Broadway. We'd drive by the Towers and that facade would turn a golden color in the sunset. Ahhh, it was gorgeous." She tells me about the half-price show tickets available in Times Square and moves away into the crowd.
I continue down Washington Street, which allows access to within a block of Trade Center Plaza. I look up, trying to imagine the huge shafts piecing the sky, these towers I remember being under construction as an elementary-schooler. I gaze to the hole in the ether, feeling their presence like the phantom limb of an amputee. On a nearby bench, three burly Black men, workers from New Jersey, take a break from their job of repairing offices and equipment damaged from the debris cloud of the collapse.
"We get most our jobs from the weather. High-tech restorations. The people in these offices were probably looking out the windows and when they saw them collapse, then took off and left the windows open," said Bill Lark. He gestured to the gawkers. "Most of these people have been here before and saw the towers. They want to see if they're really gone. It's a historic moment so people are going to want to see it. Some people would say it's sick and twisted. However, it is understandable."
"Just how high did they look from here?" I ask, looking up again.
"When your neck starts hurting, that's how high it was," said Lark's companion, Tony Phillips. "Like if it was raining, you go up on top and it's sunny."
The guys wander back to work and Dina Striano takes their place on the bench. She gazes at the Plaza with a thoughtful look, the shroud of calm, much like MariAnn Moble. Half a block away stands a tan building of 30 or 40 stories that is often used as a backdrop for television reports. I recall that the windows on the far side were blown out from the collapse. Striano, early thirties, attractive but not distinctive, dressed casually with curly shoulder-length brown hair and, once worked in that building and hasn't been back since 9/11. She lives in Brooklyn; her husband works on Wall Street. She arrived to work after the first plane hit and had just entered that tan building when the second plane exploded into the south tower. With that, she immediately left the area. "Isn't that just like your stereotypical New Yorker? So focused on work. I didn't pay much attention to the first crash. Thankfully, I didn't see anything really gruesome like a lot of people did. When I left, there were all these people standing around, looking up. I think if more people cleared the area, who knows?"
Striano reiterates what so many New Yorkers have said in the media, how much they appreciate the outpouring of support from the rest of the country and how the whole affair has pulled the nation together. She feels that the attack created a bond between a city that much of America perceives as remote and detached, if real at all, and the city that all too often thinks of everything across the Hudson River as "the sticks." Friendly and open, but forthright, Striano teaches me that New Yorkers are not such a different breed, after all is said and done. "All anybody did those first few days was watch TV."
I tell Striano about my conversation with Herman Davis. She smiles for the first time. I mention his philosophy on the ability of the human spirit to disregard the horror and move on. She agrees that the city is going about its business, as usual and as able, even though we sit within earshot of firefighters searching for human remains and black box cockpit voice recorders. Nonetheless, beneath the impression of normalcy, we agree it could be awhile before the threat of terrorist attack doesn't lurk below the surface of the New York state of mind. "I don't know what kind of holiday season it's going to be," Striano said. "I know I don't feel all happy." We exchange e-mail addresses.
By now, I have spent about twice as much time at Ground Zero as I had planned. I make my way to Broadway to find a subway station. I put my notepad and camera away, and now, with my vision unshackeled from the veiwfinder, I really see the city. People rush to catch buses, talk on cell phones, hand out flyers, hawk mounted and framed prints of the Towers. I pass the shrine again and the tourist types still crane their necks for a view beyond the fence. A few pray and a plain woman with mousy hair sobs quietly, reading the futile hand-written messages seeking lost loved ones and friends. I walk on. I have a ticket to visit the Empire State Building and I want to watch the sunset from the top -- New York City by day and by night.
At the corner of Dey and Broadway, the ruins of Tower #5 stop me cold. One of the smaller buildings on the plaza, twenty stories or something like that, #5 suffered too much damage to save and is being demolished. Only five stories and the mezzanine remain. I stand less than 100 feet away, seeing in detail the charred facade, the twisted steel beams, the flapping insulation -- charred, rusted, wounded, dead. My expedition, up to this point remote and academic, becomes suddenly very real and immediate.
Fast-moving pedestrian traffic brushes my back. The police wear gas masks. A wrecking ball pounds methodically at the corpse of #5 over the shrill scream of a saw, slicing iron beams. At my feet, the gray dust of the noxious debris cloud fills the cracks of the sidewalks and the creases of the steel security door of the comer bodega. I break away and by the time I catch the subway to mid-town and arrive on the 83rd floor of the Empire State Building, the sun has set.
From the observation deck of the once again tallest building in New York, I cannot escape the vision of#5. I think of a proverb of Loa Tzu: "We make a vessel from a lump of clay; it is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful." No one likes to say as much, but long before I ever came to New York City, I had concluded that the duolith of the World Trade Center was nothing more than a novelty. In reality, the Towers weren't very unique or compelling architecturally, at least to me. Even Houston has a 101 story building. It's about as exciting as a shoebox, but damn, it's really tall. No, if there hadn't been two World Trade Center Towers, there wouldn't be much to talk about. The demise of the Towers defines their glory. A sixteen-acre hole in the skyline, and how it got there assures their place in history, and a hole is just a well-defined emptiness. As Lao Tzu suggested more than two thousand years ago, while the tangible has advantages, it is the intangible that bequeaths immortality.
I don't know if anyone has been tracking the visitors to Ground Zero as compared to the visitors to the standing Towers. Whether more or less numerous, those compelled to visit Ground Zero, whatever their motives, will surely depart with an awful sense of immediacy, because the event won't end until the hole is repaired. Yet the rubble will be displaced as surely as the Towers crumbled. The hole will be filled and another change will have been wrought. I circle the observation deck of the Empire State Building and wonder what comes next. Will this tragedy create a stronger nation, like a family after the death of a child, pulling strength and unity from their grief? Or will the tragedy eventually fracture that fragile bond. I suspect it will be the latter.
