THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: Nov. 19, 2001)
NEW YORK — Ten weeks after the Twin Towers collapsed into a mass grave, American flags fill every one of the 152 poles surrounding the Rockefeller Center ice-skating rink, a patriotic display in place of the international colors that used to fly there.
Splashes of red, white and blue — pasted on hard hats, hanging from fire escapes, stuck to the sides of the No. 6 train on the Lexington Avenue line — are consistent reminders of the horror this city has endured.
Even as people were struggling with the overwhelming grief of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, letters tainted with anthrax began arriving in the mail, contaminating post offices and sickening office workers. Then, a new blow came Nov. 12 — the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 into a neighborhood in the Rockaway section of Queens.
If the streams of pedestrians hurrying along Fifth Avenue look much as they did before Sept. 11, just below the surface their nerves are jittery and their emotions raw. The cacophony that was once just background noise — sirens, car horns, even a dropped UPS package — makes them start. Tall buildings in a city of skyscrapers are newly vulnerable.
"I was just up there at a conference on the 65th floor," Lewis Stockford said last week outside the GE Building in Rockefeller Center, where an 8-story flag now hangs from the scaffolding around the unlighted Christmas tree. "That made me nervous." Stockford, a 31-year-old information technology specialist from Brooklyn, was relaxing for a moment by the ice rink, one of the New York landmarks featured in a new advertising campaign timed for the holidays and designed to encourage tourists to visit. In one commercial, an instantly recognizable New Yorker, Woody Allen, glides and twirls across the empty ice.
Last week, as workers prepared the Christmas tree for its lighting, a small group took to the rink in advance of the crowds that come after Thanksgiving, one of many signs that New York City is returning to its pre-September rhythms.
Subway riders, like the woman tweezing her eyebrows on the Lexington line one morning, are again ignoring their fellow passengers. Bars and clubs are filling up. Tourists visit Rockefeller Center, looking down over the rink's railings taking photographs.
But things aren't quite the same. Security guards with hand-held metal detectors man the rink's entrance, screening skaters. Listen for a while to people in a city seared by the images of airplanes deliberately smashing into its tallest buildings, and some startling thoughts emerge.
"You kind of look over your shoulder when you hear a plane," Stockford said. "You turn your head to make sure it's not heading for you, and then you're OK."
Coming together
Ground Zero is, of course, not featured in the city's advertising campaign, but it has nonetheless become a grim stop on tourists' itinerary. They pause outside St. Paul's Chapel on Broadway, at one of several makeshift memorials that still dot the city. Potted mums, votive candles and rose petals decorate the sidewalk before a fence filled with posters from youth groups and drop cloths that visitors sign with messages.
Richard York, a construction worker from Queens, comes by on his lunch hour to read and reread the messages. He overhears conversations. Sometimes he tells the visitors that his brother, Raymond, died trying to save people in the towers.
Raymond York was a New York City firefighter who, because of an arm injury, had been reassigned to Rockefeller Center, where he gave safety demonstrations. On Sept. 11, he hitched a ride to the World Trade Center and rushed into the one tower still standing, even though the chiefs were telling everyone to get out. He died a month before he was to have retired from the department.
Now, Richard York said, he can't sleep at night, and he's become more religious, accepting the fliers that the proselytizers pass out on the edges of Ground Zero. The outpouring of love for the firefighters, as evidenced by the notes he reads outside St. Paul's, makes him feel good, he said.
"Every fireman I speak to is proud of him, that he did what he was supposed to do," York said. "It's just that in my mind … I say how can he not think of his wife and his children and mom and dad and me and all of us who need him so badly. But that doesn't come into your mind when you're a fireman. You think about saving lives."
That York and the other firefighters were so remarkably brave did not surprise Michael Batman, a teacher at the Mount Pleasant Christian Academy on the Upper West Side, who last week was at Lincoln Center, another stop for the new commercials. In the ad, Yogi Berra conducts the New York Philharmonic; Batman is more modestly supervising students as they interview passers-by for a project.
"I've seen New Yorkers be very kind, so I'm not surprised we stood up the way we were able to stand up," said Batman, 27.
But the tragedy has changed the city, he said, softening its sometimes nasty edge and bringing people together in their shared pain.
"Whether we're black or white, we have to learn to get over racial barriers," he said, "because we stand under one flag."
He was standing, in fact, under three enormous flags hanging from Avery Fisher Hall, the Metropolitan Opera House and the New York State Theater. But patriotism was matched by caution in the form of concrete barricades erected along Columbus Avenue.
Sherif Shehata, a financial analyst at the Metropolitan Opera who has worked at Lincoln Center for 13 years, gestured toward the barricades on his way to a meeting.
"It's just not safe anymore," said Shehata, 37, who lives on Long Island. "When you're at work, work takes your mind away from it, but the minute you go home, you watch the news."
'I'm very paranoid'
Back downtown, Yvonne Vaughan was returning to Battery Park City nine weeks to the day she fled with the 18-month-old boy for whom she baby-sits. As she occupied the toddler, Robert James, outside the residential complex built in the World Trade Center's shadow, his mother packed the family's belongings so they could move out for good.
Nothing was the same. The nannies and babies were no longer in the park Vaughan had visited with Robert James, and, in fact, there was not much of a park left.
Vaughan said she was not the same, either.
"I'm very paranoid," said Vaughan, a Brooklyn resident. "I have a daughter that's 22 and a son that's 25, and we're constantly on the cell phone, talking to them to make sure that they're OK. Believe me, I thank God that my daughter works in Brooklyn, and she's close to my home and she doesn't have to commute. Otherwise I don't know what I'd do."
Vaughan had been thinking about a December vacation, but after last Monday's plane crash she said she would not fly. As for Thanksgiving, she said she was thinking of it as just another meal.
"The holidays are going to be blah," she said. "How can you celebrate and have a celebration when you know young men are out there and you don't know what's going to happen here?"
Across town, Yvette Bassknight is going ahead with her vacation to the Dominican Republic, scheduled before Monday's crash.
"I tried not to think about it until my co-worker called me, and told me she doesn't want me to die and I should cancel my flight," said Bassknight, a subway token booth clerk who lives in Brooklyn. Upset, she hung up on her friend. "But I can't let that get to me," she said. "Because going across the street I could get hit by a car and die. So I just have to pray to God and walk with God and ask God to please bring me through." Her soldiering on is just the attitude New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has been urging on the people of his city. He has gone on television to tout the city's spirit and, in one advertisement, stands in Times Square with Gov. George Pataki to encourage visitors. On Broadway last week, opposite the Winter Garden Theater, Eric Bageot talked about that same spirit. The sales executive for the Gamma photography agency has been so busy since the terrorist attacks, selling pictures of the devastated cityscape and of later events, that he has had little time to sort through personal feelings. "New York is New York and it's not going to stop us from doing what we're doing here," said Bageot, who emigrated from France and now lives in Harlem. "I really feel that we're the best at what we do here in New York and we're going to keep on doing what we do, the best we can. Those people are not going to stop us." A constant reminder The closer to Ground Zero, the more disruptions people still contend with. At Battery Park City, the elementary school that served the area has yet to reopen and students are being bused across town to the Lower East Side. Esther Min is among the mothers who wait to pick up their children on the neighborhood's almost deserted streets. Although the family has a weekend house in Yorktown Heights, family members have decided to stay in Manhattan, at least for now. Min, a lawyer, and her husband both work in the same building on lower Broadway, and living in Battery Park City during the week means they avoid a long commute. It also means they have to walk past the former Twin Towers site. Min remembers the thousands of people she used to see going to work in the complex whose lives were destroyed in an instant. "The biggest change, at least to me, is that nothing is really important or significant anymore," Min said. "Nothing is serious, nothing is important." Life has changed immeasurably for her 8-year-old son, Jay Park, who is no longer allowed to play outside because of the smoke and soot in the air. Most of the time he plays alone because his closest friends have moved away. She has bought him a cell phone because he could not reach her for hours on Sept. 11, but not a gas mask, something he requested after the anthrax outbreaks. "He said what good is it to have money if we all die," she said. Min tries not to let fear dominate her life, but she said the one thing she cannot do now is look at clouds. They remind her of the clouds of smoke and debris she walked through to find her son that day. "Every time when I see the clouds, it just comes right back to my eyes," Min said. "I can't deal with it. It just gets me very irritable and angry for no reason."
Also, this is coming from Cleland and Barnes. That's two big strikes against it right there.