> I'd gone down, thinking that if I could only see it
> with my own eyes I could begin to comprehend it. Of
> course, they're only letting residents down there,
> and I couldn't even begin to think of a credible
> reason why I needed to go below Canal.
Well, I had a credible reason last Thursday -- I needed to go to a Wall Street-based Verizon store to replace a dead cell phone -- and after I ran my errand, I decided to walk east and see how close I could get. Like Mike, I think I felt a compulsion to see the site with my own eyes after a week dominated by an all-encompassing, partially self-inflicted multimedia blitz.
To my surprise, Broadway had been reopened below City Hall -- unsurprisingly, only the east side of the street. When I crossed Cedar St., to the block bordered by Liberty St. and dominated by the HSBC building and the Big Orange Cube, and looked west, what I saw simply took my breath away.
Try to recall the experience of finally seeing a major landmark -- the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, the "Hollywood" sign -- after years of small-scale familiarity through books and postcards. Filter that moment of epiphany through a prism of accelerated media saturation, as well as the profound grief of tragedy. The largeness of what I was experiencing was not just physical, although its sheer mass was central to its impact; it was an overpowering collage of everything that the terrorists destroyed nine days earlier: the Trade Center never felt more symbolic to me than it did after I viewed its remains.
The twisted 10-story hull of what once was Tower Two is now an unintentional postmodern monument to an age of naively massive architecture. The five-story pile of detritus at its base -- chaotic, variegated, like the world's largest mound of Pick-Up-Sticks -- would make a devastating motif if the building's remains really was just artwork. For your own sanity, you have to try to apprehend the mound as what it resembles from your surface vantage point: a giant pile of *stuff*, rather than an impromptu mass grave.
I can partially validate Mike's comment when I say that seeing the twisted, chaotic wreckage on television can't compare to the visceral impact of seeing the site, silent and still, in person. It was a rainy day Thursday, and so while people were already gathering to stare and take pictures, it was a relatively small bunch considering how many hundreds of New Yorkers had expressed their desire to get closer to the site the week before. It was a fairly quiet, reflective crowd, matching the somewhat muted rescue effort underway in the midst of the day's rain.
This transformed two-block radius had personal resonance for me, bringing back the daily walk I used to take when I lived in Jersey City. I would ride the PATH into the Trade Center concourse, exit via the southeast corner of Tower Two, join the mass of people crossing Church Street amid very aggressive traffic, and make a beeline through the small, one-block-square park as I approached Broadway. The park is gone now; perhaps you've seen some of the photos of the hurricane of paper and dust that had subsumed it on the morning of the 11th, all of which has been bulldozed -- trees, statuary and all -- to create a parking lot for emergency vehicles. And the corner I traversed every morning? It's unrecognizable; it's as if was barely ever a corner at all. I hadn't reflected on it much previously, beyond the obvious thank-God-I-was-no-longer-a-PATH-commuter thought, but seeing my little walk route transformed symbolized for me the many things we took for granted that aren't coming back, and the people I used to walk alongside who may have had much closer calls to the tragedy that morning.
Quiet, rain-soaked reflection was just what I needed that Thursday evening, but I was drawn back to the site on Saturday morning -- a clear day, and so the block was packed with tourists and New Yorkers alike. This time I brought my camera, and the pictures attached to this e-mail were taken that day. (In fairness to those with dialup modems, like me, I've greatly lowered the resolution and corresponding file size.)
Given the myriad of photos you've seen in recent days, these might not be terribly revelatory, but I wanted to share them as a document to a firsthand glimpse of the aftermath. I'm trying not to dwell too intently on it all, because -- to answer Mike's implied question -- I have now seen the wreckage, and I still can't come up with answers or fathom the magnitude of this horror. But somehow I guess I feel better having gone in person to -- if this is possible at such a public wake -- pay my last respects.
Love to you all,
Chris
| New York City | WTC |
