My 9/11 Weekend in Lower Manhattan

(I wrote this back in September--obviously--of 2004.)

The stairs really threw me off. Just one flight of gray, concrete stairs, still (almost three years later) covered with dust and chunks of concrete, leading nowhere, on the north side of the now-phantom building that I used to go out of my way to pass through on my way to work. People were walking by without even glancing at the crater; clearly they’d been passing it every day for 2 1/2 years, and it had become as much a part of the usual scenery as the Towers had been for me 5 or 10 years earlier.

But, aside from a quick trip over by ferry from New Jersey (where I now live) to the World Financial Center one cold March day a couple of years ago, when I spent most of my time standing near the river and listening to glass from my beloved Winter Garden being broken by workers, I hadn’t seen the site. So I stood gawking at the truncated stairway, trying to replace the emptiness around it with mental images of what had been there before. To the left of them, it seemed, there would have been a Sbarro’s; to the right and back a bit, the bakery where I used to buy walnut rolls for breakfast. Around the corner, a Gap, a bookstore…But it had been so long, and I couldn’t be sure of anything.

So, having made, pretty much by accident after a dinner in Chinatown, my first foray back into the disorienting landscape of post-9/11 lower Manhattan, I decided that it was time to reclaim and rediscover what had been, at one time, one of my favorite parts of the city.

Several weeks later I returned, this time by the PATH train that runs from Hoboken to what is still called the World Trade Center station. My son, who as a 3-year-old had sat impatiently in his stroller while I watched the flaming towers from a hill across the Hudson, was with me (his impatience, as it turned out, was fortuitous, because it made me take him back home just before the first tower fell, sparing both of us from seeing it firsthand). I hadn’t known that, upon leaving the tunnel, the train passes right through the crater, taking, I suppose, the route it always has.

We were meeting my husband at the A & M Roadhouse, a restaurant just a couple of blocks north of the site. The bar of the place is, apparently, an after-work hangout for people working on the reconstruction of the area; many of the patrons still had their hardhats on. I don’t think that I was imagining the mistrust with which they regarded my husband’s monopod and big black camera bag as we walked through.

After dinner, I went outside to have a cigarette on a bench that had been placed there for the benefit of those whose smoking habits have not yet been altered by Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on smoking in bars. I started talking to a man who was having his smoke standing. I asked him if he worked at the Roadhouse; somehow he looked as if he belonged there.

“No, not me, he answered, and pointed vaguely west. “I work over there.”

I had to ask. “Were you here on 9/11?”

“Yeah, I was here. Wouldn’t want to live through that again.”

Next door to the Roadhousewas the New York Dolls gentlemen’s club. Pretty young women were getting out of cars in front, and going inside. Others were on their way out.

“Changing of the guard,” my smoking buddy remarked. “How are you doing?” he asked one of the girls.

“Good! Will we see you later?”

“Uh-huh!” Once the girl had passed, he muttered, “Not in this lifetime.”
******

It wasn’t my intention to be staying at a hotel just next to the World Financial Center on the third anniversary of 9/11; it just kind of worked out that way because I wanted to be in town to research an article I was writing (part of my efforts to rediscover lower Manhattan for myself), and that weekend was open. I wasn’t unaware that it might be, as I put it to my friends just before going, “a little strange” to be downtown on that particular date, but otherwise I didn’t give it much thought.

Once again I made the trip over by ferry with my husband and my son. The view from the water, this time, seemed much changed. It was, first of all, a warm late-summer afternoon rather than a gray March one. The promenade along the river was congested with bikers, roller bladers, runners, and families out walking, and there were new buildings all around (I couldn’t remember exactly which buildings were there before, and which were new, but there were definitely more). Yachts and sailboats bobbed on the water in the marina in front of the World Financial Center, and the shattered glass of the Winter Garden had been replaced.

That evening we went to the lounge where the hotel’s very generous and very long cocktail hour is held nightly. The scene was strange and incongruous; music by the Cure (not just one song, but an entire album of very melancholy, very 80’s new wave pop) was being played, while at the tables nicely dressed, midwestern-looking women, some with children, sat drinking margaritas and eating popcorn and tortilla chips. It finally occurred to me that all of the people in the bar might be “the families”, in town for the memorial service that would be held the following day at Ground Zero, a block away. All except us, anyway.

There were also big tables occupied by big groups of big men. At one, a man (whom I had thought to be a hotel security guard because of the way he was dressed) stood passing bottles of beer between the bar and the group sitting there. It seemed a strange thing for a security guard to be doing, and I pointed him out to my husband.

“He’s not a security guard,” my husband said. “He’s a fireman.” (I never claimed to be the swiftest travel writer in the world.) I finally began to notice that there were firemen everywhere. New York firemen were talking shop with British firemen, Scottish firemen were having drinks with Australian firemen, and Italian firemen, for the most part, were keeping to themselves. We would have been well covered had someone dropped off to sleep in his room without first extinguishing his cigarette.

******

I have no gripping 9/11 stories to tell, and no one I knew died on that day. I try not to give in to a tendency toward melodrama to which I have no right. September 11th, 2001, was, for me, simply surreal, and the weeks, months, and years thereafter became more so. I have nothing to cry about unless it is out of sympathy for those who died, and those who lost the people they loved, and a new, daily awareness that next time I might not be so lucky.

The day after we arrived at the hotel was September 11th. The weather had the same September sparkle that had made the day that much stranger three years earlier. Inside the hotel, over breakfast, we could hear the reading of the names of the victims from Ground Zero on TV. Outside, the names bounced from loudspeakers out around among the flag-draped walls of nearby buildings. If I didn’t know what day it was, I might have thought that there was a well-publicized street fair going on.

That night the cocktail hour lasted even longer, and the hotel bar was even more crowded than it had been the night before. The atmosphere was like that of the tail-end of a wedding reception; the people around us looked as if they had been, at least temporarily, released from something.

Outside, the twin beams of blue light created as a memorial to the Towers blazed up from a lot just next the hotel. Children played in a little park at the base, while adults stood staring up at the sky. Toward the tops of the beams there were what looked liked hundreds of tiny, blazing stars darting in and out of the light. No one, even the New York City cops watching the crowd, could say for sure what they were.

******

The following morning, my husband and son left early. I was planning to stay behind until checkout time, go to the fitness center, take a bath, enjoy a Sunday morning alone in a nice hotel.

But about fifteen minutes after they’d left, there was a knock on the door. It was my husband, on whose finger was perched a tiny green bird. Behind him was my son, breathless with excitement.

“Look, Mommy!” We found another birdy for you to take care of.” (I’m always taking in sick and injured birds.)

My husband told me that they had found the bird just outside. He’d been sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, apparently too sick or too dazed to move. When my husband put his finger under the bird’s breast, he stepped right on and stayed—through the hotel lobby, on the elevator, down the hall, and into our room.

I took him into my hand to try to warm him. I’d never seen another bird like him. His bright eyes kept closing, and I told my son that there was a good chance that he wouldn’t live. It occurred to me that the darting stars in the lights the night before might have been birds disoriented by the heat and brightness, and that this one, in his confusion, had flown into the wall of a building sometime in the night.

We took him with us as we headed for the ferry that would take us home. I didn’t have much hope that he would make it that far. But as we walked under the trees near the promenade, he began to try to flap his wings. He looked up; he was listening to the calls of the birds in the branches above us. Then he looked directly into my eyes.

“See what happens if you open your hand,” my husband said. I was afraid that he might have just enough strength to fly a bit and then land in the river, but he was really moving now. I opened my hand, and he took off for the trees, which were filled with birds just like him.

For someone with a tendency toward melodrama, not to mention a writer’s addiction to symbolism, there could have been no better way to end the weekend.
(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008