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| May 30 — So now we have a physical hole to match the other one. | |||
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| THE CITY OF
NEW YORK held a ceremony on Thursday to formally mark the ending of the
“recovery” phase at the World Trade Center, and it was a damn good
ceremony, filled with equal measures of sadness and pride, of closure and
potential, of conviction and doubt. Mostly sadness, though. From the opening bell—literally, the fire department’s “5-5-5-5” toll for fallen comrades—this was an event about remorse. An empty stretcher symbolized the remains of the 1,700 dead who have yet to be formally identified. A solemn drum corps slowly marched out of the pit. A truck bearing the last steel beam moved up the ramp. And when you didn’t think it could be sadder, they hit you with the bagpipes playing “America the Beautiful.” And then the cops, firemen and recovery workers filed out of the site, some of them on crutches.
The ceremony had remembrance, of course, but it did not have what it needed most: resolve. And by formally closing the “recovery” period, it merely gave a physical face to what we in New York have felt for eight months: There is a hole in each of us. And it’s not going away soon. We have not neatly moved from the end of the “recovery” period to the beginning of the “rebuilding” period, as has been stated widely, but have plunged into the purgatory of that 16-acre abyss, the “open wound in Lower Manhattan,” as Tom Brokaw called it. We are not rebuilding. We are not even close to rebuilding. We are paralyzed. |
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After all, just this one small event took two months of negotiations and
planning. There were questions of whether there should be speeches
(wisely, there were none). Should people be holding candles? Could an
eagle be released at Ground Zero to show America’s spirit? Even the date that Mayor Mike Bloomberg had selected—May 30, our nation’s actual Memorial Day—created controversy, with many of the victims’ families complaining that it would be inconvenient for them to attend on a weekday. No one in this town even knows how to grieve yet and some people think the “rebuilding” phase has begun? Not even close. Even the city’s greatest minds can’t come up with a consensus about how badly battered New Yorkers are as human beings. The New Yorker magazine’s fine writer Adam Gopnik argued this week that all of us in the city are like that magician David Blaine, who recently stood motionless atop a 90-foot pole in Bryant Park to prove, apparently, that he could. Gopnik, the magazine’s resident metaphor-maker, said that “a drawing of New York at the moment would show 8 million people, each person standing on a pole above an abyss of anxiety—not looking down, never looking down, looking only from side to side, warily. Yet with so many people perched together, New York life in this hair-raising time looks just like, well, just like New York life, only somehow heightened. We are scared, and we stand there.” |
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And sometimes we’re so scared that we don’t even stand there. After a recent government warning that the Brooklyn Bridge was a possible terrorist target, Brooklyn’s borough president cancelled a long-planned 119th birthday party for the famed bridge. Maybe he wasn’t scared, but he reacted as if we should be. At the same time, there’s plenty of evidence—in the form of published commentary, dysentery and bluster—that New Yorkers are not Gopnik’s scared sentinels, but are filled with daring and resolve. After the birthday party was canceled, Mayor Bloomberg took a high-profile, defiant walk on the bridge. And at Thursday’s ceremony, former police chief Bernard Kerik said he still walks the city whenever he wants, if only “to send the terrorists a message that we’re not going to cower and we’re not going to be intimidated.” But if we’re so strong, if we’re not going to be intimidated, why have recent studies all shown that New Yorkers are drinking more and smoking more since September 11? And why are we still fighting so much about what to do now? The president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation recently said that a consensus is emerging around a seven-acre memorial, incorporating the footprints of the towers. This latest “consensus” is significantly smaller than the 16 acres—the entire site—that many victims’ families are still demanding as a fitting memorial to their pain, as if all pain was created equal only theirs is more equal than others. |
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Whose pain will
be honored in a World Trade Center memorial? After all, if Thursday’s
ceremony was supposed to be about the victims’ families, how come
thousands of New Yorkers without “Ground Zero Access” credentials lined
the streets around the site hoping for a brief glimpse of the
black-shrouded steel beam or a faint echo of a bagpipe? Because when it comes to the World Trade Center, no one has a monopoly on sadness. While the public officials are getting sore from all the backward bending to please the victims’ families, they have been ignoring the rest of us. Last Thursday, the LMDC finally offered the average Joes a chance to be heard, albeit in the formalized ennui of a mandatory “public hearing.” Some had lost loved ones in the World Trade Center. But for many, the Twin Towers were the loved ones they lost on September 11 and the defeatist talk of “modest” replacements and “open space” memorials and cultural institutions was just too much to bear. “Please do not diminish the memory of all of the people who died there by building 50-, 60-, or 70-story mediocre buildings on the site,” said Jonathan Hakala, who worked on the 77th floor of 1 World Trade Center. “Build one of the seven modern wonders of the world, and please give us a skyline that will once again cause our spirits to soar.” Those who say that no one would rent space above the 60th floor of a new tower aren’t listening to people like Hakala or even to their own don’t-let-the-terrorists-win bluster, so Hakala spelled it out: If they build it, he will come. “Please save a little bit of space on the 77th floor for me,” he said. Spoken like a true New Yorker. Or, at least, the New Yorkers we all wish we could be sometimes. Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His Web site is at http://www.gersh.tv/ © 2002 Newsweek, Inc. |
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