The Site

I’m looking forward to seeing the site of the World Trade Center. The last time I was there, it was still just a massive hole in the ground. Daniel Liebeskind’s ickily named “Freedom Tower” was not yet under construction, and the press was all asking what the hell was taking so long. Now, the Tower (mercifully renamed World Trade One and seeming to have hit a reasonable balance between super-high security and aesthetics) is well under way, the Memorial is about to open, and the site is apparently beginning to be recognizable as what it will become, instead of just standing as an endless reminder of destruction.

For the record, I hated the process of re-imagining the World Trade site, and I’m not crazy about the designs that have come out of it, at least as they look in the marketing materials I’ve seen. The process was too violently public, gave too much weight to too many unprepared stakeholders, and seemed, in fact, intended specifically to prevent anything wonderful from ever being designed at Ground Zero.

But you never know how these things are going to turn out. Maybe the actual plan and new buildings will work wonderfully in person. Having something there again is pretty wonderful in itself, and the fact that much of it is bright, open public space can hardly be bad. In the beginning, it seemed that sentimentality was the only voice that held any sway in this, but with any luck the reality has moved past that. There is hope.

The site has certainly gone through radical stages of evolution in this past decade. In the days before 9/11, I knew the World Trade Center well. I remember watching a 60 Minutes story about its opening when I was a kid, and so the first time I ever visited New York it was, of course, one of the places I went. I rode up to Windows on the World and looked out, disappointed at how flat and uninformative the view turned out to be from so high, yet awed at the same time by its undeniable monumentality. That was pretty emblematic of my feelings about the whole place, come to think of it. It was monumental, impressive, on such a huge scale that it demanded awe. But it was also unbelievably dull architecturally, full of the worst excesses of latter day brutalism, absolutely cold emotionally and dull aesthetically. I spent a fair amount of time there, both on visits and in the first couple years I lived in New York. I always wished I could like it better, but even without liking, I was drawn there.

On the ground level and underneath, it came much more alive as a transit center. I traveled through it frequently — daily, for almost a year when I lived in New Jersey, and for frequent business meetings before and after that period. I hung out at the Borders on the plaza’s northeast corner — in fact, I applied for a job there at one point — and I resolutely bought sandwiches and ate out underneath the Towers when I was in the neighborhood.

For a long time after 9/11, we weren’t allowed anywhere within sight of Ground Zero, and I wanted desperately to see it. The site had become a ghostly void in my mind. I could see the old things — the plaza, its central fountain, the Borders building, the stairs up and down and into the PATH train station — but I knew they were all gone. Or, at least, most of them were gone. We heard some of the lower levels were relatively intact, and the lower buildings, like where Borders had been, still stood in the news footage. What did it look like? What was its new identity? What picture could replace the dead one in my mind that I knew was a gone-forever illusion?

On the first day West Broadway was opened again to pedestrians, I went down and looked. The number of people like me was huge. We stepped slowly, keeping our places, moving along a construction sidewalk on the west side of the street. I’m reminded now of climbing up through the Statue of Liberty, innumerable people climbing stairs one after the other, moving like ants, quiet, industrious, intent on getting up, getting through, looking, getting out. On West Broadway we stared. We were nearly silent. We all waited, practically holding our breaths, for the few seconds when we’d be able to see down a cross-street, catch a glimpse of the site itself, see the wreckage with our own eyes. Learn what it looked like. Get to know its new identity.

The storefronts on the opposite side of the street were all ash-covered. They looked like old movie sets, as if we’d been let into a defunct backlot to see some old New York Street where movies we half remembered from our childhoods had been filmed, had seemed magical. Now everything was sort of broken, some windows were boarded up, but many more still looked as they had before the Towers fell — just covered with ash, grayed out, dead and frozen. The street looked nothing like a ruin, nothing like a bombed-out neighborhood. It looked fake, pristine but abandoned. Smaller than normal.

And the site was black and broken. Broken teeth-like steel beams, the broken, black mouth of the hole where the plaza had been. The stacks of debris still surrounding it on all sides. Broken. Ruined. So broken and so ruined it demanded whole new definitions of those words. Black as an evil king’s land in a dark, scary fairy tale. Broken as a bomb site, as an earthquake aftermath, as destruction made manifest without hope of redemption or compromise.

A few years later, a clean, windswept plateau with busy workers hauling, clearing, making way for new things while the PATH train trundled efficiently through again and commuters poured in and out. A well-done fence with remembrances printed on it, information making sense of the whole thing, giving the place’s history from mid-century through original development and to death and destruction. Sidebars for the birth of Battery Park City and the whole new downtown the Trade Center had wrought.

And now? What? We’ll see. The beginning of the new thing. New place. With ghosts, or without, I wonder?

given a voice, too much The design process identified too many stakeholders and pandered far too much — and to far too much political purpose — to sentimentality and survivor groups whose needs certainly needed to be addressed by the City but who had no business whatsoever getting involved in what is, at base, just a great big development project.

Taller Than Giants

The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were so tall that it was hard to see them. I mean it was hard to conceive of how big they really were, even as you stood staring at them. Your eye tended to reduce them, to perceive them as more or less ordinary skyscrapers. I always had to make a deliberate effort, to go back and make my eye travel up all those rows of windows, to force myself to see how immensely out of scale they were. The Towers were never beautiful. But they were always awe-inspiring.

There was a moment, as I was running toward them on that morning, when that visual trickiness came into play. Staring at the gashes ripped through them by the planes, at the smoke and flames, I struggled to understand the scale of what I was seeing. How big were those tears? How expansive were those clouds of smoke and fire? I couldn’t figure it out.

Around the tops of the Towers there were fluttering clouds of debris. They looked like papers caught in a windstorm. But I had my usual moment of, “no, they’re much bigger than that — look closer,” and I saw that the debris was whole pieces of furniture, sections of wallboard with torn edges, things the size of my mattress at home, and bigger. All getting chucked and sucked out through the air hundreds of feet above the rest of Lower Manhattan.

I heard someone I was passing on the sidewalk say, “There goes another one,” and I squinted up, scanned the debris cloud, to see what he meant. I focused on a tiny figure with windmilling limbs arcing down through the air. A person.

Fallen? Or jumped? Sucked out as the air evacuated a burning room through a shattered window? Panicked? Deliberate? No way to know. Falling now, certainly. Arms and legs going in fast motion. Struggling, even as there was no longer anything to struggle against.

I looked down and didn’t look up again. How can you watch that? The person I saw flying out of the Twin Towers may have chosen their own end. They may have chosen the clear air, rather than continue choking on the smoke and waiting to be burned or crushed. It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable decision. Regardless — windmilling arms and legs, silhouetted against the blue sky, falling alongside all that fluttering debris.

It’s one of the moments that defines the day, in my mind. No matter what the story was behind that person’s fall/jump/fate, they are the tragedy of 9/11. The planes were an attack, the fall was a disaster, the plan was a crime against humanity, God, and the world. But that person falling was a tragedy. Even now, it makes me nauseous.

The Bones of It

Here’s what happened: on the evening of Sept 10, it poured with rain. I got to my stop on the A train (the end of the line) and found a knot of people huddled just inside the exit peering out at the bright, cheery skies, hoping they might promise a let-up. They didn’t, and after a few minutes I pushed through and strode home, getting completely soaked in half a block and reaching my apartment wetter than if I’d ridden a water slide home.

The next morning was gorgeous, warm and sunny and bright as hell. It was an election day, I knew Donna would have opened the studio, and I have some memory of trying to call her as I hurried to the subway.

The planes both hit while I was underground. The first one must have been just after I got on my train, the second when I was much farther downtown. We stopped at the West 4^th Street station, where other trains were also stopped and the platforms were full of milling people. It took me a few minutes to look up from my book and realize that something weird was going on and that it didn’t look like we were going anywhere. The conductor was leaning out of her window talking to people on the platform. I stepped out to hear her say something like, “I don’t know. They say a plane hit the World Trade Center!” with a laugh, as if she were almost embarrassed to be spreading such a silly story.

I headed upstairs, thinking that maybe the 1 train would be running still, even though I realized that, as it went directly under the Twin Towers, which the A didn’t, that wasn’t very likely.

I charged up the stairs next to the Waverly Theater on 6^th Avenue in Greenwich Village. I had my head down, like a good New Yorker, and I spun around instantly when I got up to the sidewalk, aiming for West 4^th so I could go a block west and get the 1. I looked up enough to see that there was no traffic in the street. There was no movement. There were people, standing frozen on the pavement and all over the sidewalk, staring with their mouths hanging open at something behind me.

You’ve seen this picture. It was in Time or Newsweek. It was one of the iconic ones of the horror and shock we all experienced. I don’t remember if the actual picture was taken on 6^th Avenue or somewhere else in Manhattan, but it might as well have been exactly the scene I saw.

I turned to look over my shoulder at what they were all staring at. The Twin Towers lay directly in line with 6^th Avenue in those days. Looking down the street was like looking into a frame with the top two thirds of the World Trade Center hanging inside.

The black gashes in the buildings. The smoke. The flames licking out. Everybody shocked, staring.

My first thought, as every single New Yorker’s I’ve ever spoken to who saw this scene live, was, “that looks so fake.” I heard about a friend of a friend who was jogging along the waterfront in Battery Park when the first plane hit. He saw it coming in low over the river, looked up and watched it hit the tower and explode, and his first thought, even though he knew while he was thinking it that it was ridiculous, was, “I didn’t know they were filming down here today.” The scene was unreal. It looked cheesy, like a bad, cheap special effect. Silly. In a movie, you would laugh at it.

In real life, no one could imagine how to conceive of it. All those still bodies, staring. Traffic stopped. New Yorkers, stymied.

I turned around and tore down 4^th Street. I knew there was no chance of the 1 train running but headed that way, anyway. That was what I’d planned, and I couldn’t think straight enough to come up with another idea. I pulled out my phone and started dialing — the studio, my roommate back in Washington Heights, any friend I could think of. I hit 7^th Avenue, saw people pouring out of the subway station there, turned south, with the Towers belching smoke and flames and debris in front of me. I ran toward them.

On the Ground

The fundamental thing you have to understand about the actual experience of being in Lower Manhattan on 9/11 is how little we understood of what was happening. I’ve seen, of course, replays of the live coverage, with the shots from across Hudson, the Twin Towers boiling smoke before elegantly falling — the ultimate real-world example of the “something horrible being shown beautifully” format that filmmakers so love. The experience of being in the immediate area of that collapse after living for several years with the towers themselves and their site as a primary location in my life, was nothing like that.

The TV shots are controlled. That’s the only way to describe them. Even though no one knew who had done this, why it had happened, or had any information about what was going on in the buildings or around the site, the very fact that the disaster could be encompassed so neatly in a single camera angle gave it a comprehensibility that was utterly absent on the ground. Even though it was horrifying, it only stretched from Point A to Point B, and if any more planes came anywhere near, they’d be visible from miles away. Moreover, it seems to me, from having watched plenty of other breaking news stories in my life, having hung about a TV waiting and listening while tiny little individual facts eeked out, that the very act of letting someone else explain what’s happening gives us a sense of control or at least sanity. We don’t know what’s happening now, but we’re learning and we’ll know more later. Someone, somewhere is uncovering what’s happened; someone, somewhere is untangling this madness and will explain it to us, not to mention make some kind of response.

None of that was available to us on the ground. We heard snippets of radio reports – we heard that a third plane had hit the Pentagon and a fourth one had… crashed? Was still in the air? Might be heading for us at that very moment? Conflicting reports. Later, I think we heard that all flights had been grounded so that the eerily silent skies of the city at least had some explanation as we walked north, if not any comfort.

It wasn’t until relatively late that I understood the size of the planes that had hit the Towers. I’d heard, when my subway car stopped at West 4^th Street, that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. That was all I heard, those words with a confused laugh from the conductor, clearly afraid of being ridiculed and unable to imagine it, herself. I imagined it was a private plane, and some sort of unskilled pilot. When I got up to grond level and saw the two Towers both smoking and weeping debris, I don’t remember what I thought. Two planes, obviously, but it still didn’t occur to me that they might have been big commercial ones. I did understand, I believe, that this was deliberate. We were under attack. That was one clear understanding from the very start.

And I had one clear thought. I had it sometime later when I stood on Duane Street in from the RealPilates, the studio I ran then. I looked up at the smoking Towers, the rain of glass and wallboard and furniture and flailing, screaming live people falling from it, and I thought, “We’ll never feel safe again.” I even thought about that thought, and marked how clear it was, how certain I felt about it, when the rest of my mind was all spinning and churning and trying to find anything solid to hang onto. That was my experience of being on the ground, deep within the TV shots.

9/11 Tenth Anniversary: Why I'm Going

Shortly before I moved away from NYC, I called a 9/11 help line and described some symptoms I’d been having. I couldn’t sleep without worrying about the five upper floors of my apartment building crashing down and crushing me. I thought about explosions or random violence every time I entered the subway. I’d grown afraid of heights, and I sometimes had anxiety attacks on airplanes.

“I’m not a physician,” she said, kind but careful not to commit herself or her non-profit organization to anything, “but what you’re describing sounds like post-traumatic stress syndrome. Many people who experienced the attacks, especially eye witnesses, have these problems. I have a couple groups I can recommend to you, or, if you’d prefer, a private counselor.”

I took the names of the groups. I didn’t go. For that moment, it was enough to hear that what I was experiencing was reasonable, normal, shared by others. I really couldn’t fall asleep without thinking about buildings falling on me in the dark. Not ever. Not one single time in any of the nights between 9/11 and May 2006, when I left New York City once and for all. In those years, I knew that my life was, if not falling apart, then not progressing. I was hauling around a weight of terror and sadness that was making real happiness or progress impossible. Many days, I dragged myself from home to job to grocery store and back home, and I was always exhausted.

Having a life that had, over nearly a decade in the city, finally come together, didn’t help. I had an amazing apartment, a job I adored, great friends, but those happy things only coexisted with the great darknesss. Even falling in love didn’t overcome it. The fear and anxiety monster always lurked just out of site, and came out with a vengeance every night when I turned the lights off, or in the subway, or at other times without warning, and often swamped me completely.

I knew, in the end, that leaving New York City was the only thing that was going to save me. And it did. I’ve never had one of those visions – airless, terrifying, crushing – of the building falling down on me in another city. I even get through plane flights much more easily now. And in the past few years, when I’ve gone back to visit New York, I’ve barely thought about my old relationship with it – the darkness, the feelings of asphyxiation.

I have to go back for the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. Recording this milestone anywhere else in the world would be completely inadequate. I’m going to retrace my steps from that morning, going with my husband toward the site and, I imagine, telling him stories about what I saw then and how that day went. We’ll walk past my old workplace, where, of course, I stopped on that day, and continue the last five blocks to the site itself, and no doubt join crowds of others who feel called there. I know there are dozens of events and rituals scheduled. I don’t know if I’ll want to have anything to do with any of them. But I want to be there, and I believe – we’ll see if I’m right, but I believe – that this will mark a new era in moving on. Putting the demons down.