Wednesday, June 12, 2002
No closure at World Trade Center
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
On May 31, a day after the official closure, at lunch time, I took a walk around the Hallowed Ground. I'll tell you right off the bat that there will not be any closure for me. But that's another story.
The sidewalks at Trinity Church, Wall Street and Broadway, were filled with people. Along the two blocks to Cedar Street there were no religious doom-and-gloomers distributing literature, only the Foot Doctor's flyer people. The crowd was thicker at Cedar and Broadway, the spot from which one saw the cauldron of fire, for months, across the former Liberty Plaza where people before 9/11 sat on park benches, under the shade of green trees, eating sandwiches and enjoying a rest. The plaza is now enclosed by 8-ft green netting and turned into a parking lot for official cars.
Walking East, past it, to Trinity Place (in turns into Church Street at this point), I met a couple, a young chubby woman and a bank guard, discussing how they missed their breaks and and the adventures of meeting tourists from all over the world, visitors to the Towers.
One Liberty Plaza, the tall monolith office building, across from the park, where the Brooks Brothers ground floor store had been the emergency room during the early hours of 9/11, was back in operation. Turning the corner into Church Street, I walked to the Century 21's four-story clothing store, bustling with activity. The fate of the building had been much in the news. When I asked questions, the guard at the door told me; "Life goes on," and that was fine and dandy, the sooner the better.
The Century's block is between Cortland and Dey Streets.The next one South, to Fulton Street, Millennium Hotel, is still fenced in and non-functional, though the building appears relatively sound. Its next-door neighbor to the West, a sturdy columnated 19th century structure, has no problems. Looking East, along Vesey Street, the Verizon building, a typical old-time NY Telephone office structure with blue lights on top, was back in operations The space between it and the Federal Office Building on Church is a flattened surface. That was the site of #7 WTC. I could not look into the Ground Zero area proper, trailers parked side by side blocked out the view completely. A friendly policeman, Jeff Wagner, from the Office of Technical Systems Development, explained the area. The Ground Zero is a pit, seven sub-basements deep. he's been to the edge of it; it is hollow. It was hard to talk about it.
Hoping to geta better look, I went back to Broadway, along the Vesey Street fence of St Paul's Chapel. The entire fence is covered with what we know as 9/11 monuments - memorabilia consisting of flags, posters, mementos, writings of visitors, slightly ragged from the ravages of the winter. They stretch all around the churchyard. Up on Broadway, groups of people were standing in line, clutching tickets and waiting for admission to the viewing stand., made up of a long ramp leading all the way to a platform facing Church Street A pedicab driver in an athletic shirt held up a sign offering to take parties of two down to the South Street Seaport center, where the free ticket distributing agency has relocated ("Pay $15 round trip and save a 20-minute walk.") A passer-by offered as how that was no 20-minute walk, since he works down there. "You have a job, don't you?" responded the pedicab man, and there was no more dispute. Turns out the driver was once a sightseeing bus guide, and 9/!! put him out of work, one of 100,000.
A friendly guard accepted my home-made business card as a press pass, and I was able to walk up the long ramp to the viewing stand. The entire right side of the ramp is blocked by 8x8 foot plywood sheets, forming a solid fence.. Along about 120 feet of it people have carefully attached the slightly bluish-tinted plastic 20 oz water bottles you buy from a vendor for $1, with the tops cut off, filled with water, each one holding a bunch of short-stemmed roses and carnations. The bottles are stacked three and four high, there are several hundred of them. The flowers are fresh, in full bloom, cared for with love, not a wilted one in the lot, no careless puddles of water. Interspersed are messages of love. The memorials reach all the way, from the start of the ramp to the top, and include a large-print list of the WTC victims of 9/11. It became very hard to bear, and I rushed back down to Broadway and the throngs of people. The vista from the top of the ramp had not revealed any more of the pit than the street view. A policeman in parade uniform whites, there with his family, pointed out a few things. I found out that, as the WTC towers simultaneously exploded and imploded, flying beams not only pierced the upper floor corner of one of the World Financial Center buildings, which I had noted on a winter visit, but also that of one of the two tall buildings at the South edge of Ground Zero, still wrapped in netting and under construction. The blast had been ferocious.
The return walk along Nassau Street, from Fulton to Wall, brought me back to reality. Among the throngs of tourists, sellers of American flags, postcards and picture books of WTC history abounded .[The real mother lode is at Columbus Circle, where at the entrance to Central Park no less than nine stands sell photographs and paintings (mostly serigraphs but also original art), of New York City, WTC views and collages predominating.] It does prove that life goes on. We of the US are tough and capable of striking back, and by now we have some addresses, not just that of the hapless Saddam Hussein.
As an aside, on June 6 a young Muslim leader, Zayed Jasin, gave his undergraduate's commencement speech at Harvard. The 22-year old Chicago-born son of a Bangladeshi father and an Irish-American mother ("I am one of you and also one of them") spoke of the corruption of the term Jihad (inner struggle between good and bad) , with the results seen last Fall, and urged his fellow graduates to help shape a more just, honorable and peaceful society. The noble sentiments, heard in full on Brian Lehrer's WNYC show, were marred by the disclosures that Jasin is a fund-raiser for the Holy Land Foundation, an organization whose funds were seized by the Treasury because of its alleged activities as a terrorist support group, including paying the living expenses of suicide bombers' families. The disclosures, by student Pat Collins, were attacked as prejudiced and worse by another student, president of Harvard's Islamic Society, whose use of trick language ("..never supported those who exclusively..") left a bad impression. The dual performance, with Jasin refusing to condemn the WTC attackers specifically, the use of roundabout language that by implication equates Israel with vthe WTC terrorists and suicide bombers ("we condemn all those who...") did not heal any wounds. Rather, it left this listened with a reinforced concern about the loyalties of the young people studying in American universities who vigorously attack the perceived prejudices of Americans affecting people from the Middle East, but do not condemn the 9/11 terrorists directly and by name, for the record. I speak frankly. Complaints of prejudice will not allay our fears, other words and positive acts are needed. .
.
.
On May 31, a day after the official closure, at lunch time, I took a walk around the Hallowed Ground. I'll tell you right off the bat that there will not be any closure for me. But that's another story.
The sidewalks at Trinity Church, Wall Street and Broadway, were filled with people. Along the two blocks to Cedar Street there were no religious doom-and-gloomers distributing literature, only the Foot Doctor's flyer people. The crowd was thicker at Cedar and Broadway, the spot from which one saw the cauldron of fire, for months, across the former Liberty Plaza where people before 9/11 sat on park benches, under the shade of green trees, eating sandwiches and enjoying a rest. The plaza is now enclosed by 8-ft green netting and turned into a parking lot for official cars.
Walking East, past it, to Trinity Place (in turns into Church Street at this point), I met a couple, a young chubby woman and a bank guard, discussing how they missed their breaks and and the adventures of meeting tourists from all over the world, visitors to the Towers.
One Liberty Plaza, the tall monolith office building, across from the park, where the Brooks Brothers ground floor store had been the emergency room during the early hours of 9/11, was back in operation. Turning the corner into Church Street, I walked to the Century 21's four-story clothing store, bustling with activity. The fate of the building had been much in the news. When I asked questions, the guard at the door told me; "Life goes on," and that was fine and dandy, the sooner the better.
The Century's block is between Cortland and Dey Streets.The next one South, to Fulton Street, Millennium Hotel, is still fenced in and non-functional, though the building appears relatively sound. Its next-door neighbor to the West, a sturdy columnated 19th century structure, has no problems. Looking East, along Vesey Street, the Verizon building, a typical old-time NY Telephone office structure with blue lights on top, was back in operations The space between it and the Federal Office Building on Church is a flattened surface. That was the site of #7 WTC. I could not look into the Ground Zero area proper, trailers parked side by side blocked out the view completely. A friendly policeman, Jeff Wagner, from the Office of Technical Systems Development, explained the area. The Ground Zero is a pit, seven sub-basements deep. he's been to the edge of it; it is hollow. It was hard to talk about it.
Hoping to geta better look, I went back to Broadway, along the Vesey Street fence of St Paul's Chapel. The entire fence is covered with what we know as 9/11 monuments - memorabilia consisting of flags, posters, mementos, writings of visitors, slightly ragged from the ravages of the winter. They stretch all around the churchyard. Up on Broadway, groups of people were standing in line, clutching tickets and waiting for admission to the viewing stand., made up of a long ramp leading all the way to a platform facing Church Street A pedicab driver in an athletic shirt held up a sign offering to take parties of two down to the South Street Seaport center, where the free ticket distributing agency has relocated ("Pay $15 round trip and save a 20-minute walk.") A passer-by offered as how that was no 20-minute walk, since he works down there. "You have a job, don't you?" responded the pedicab man, and there was no more dispute. Turns out the driver was once a sightseeing bus guide, and 9/!! put him out of work, one of 100,000.
A friendly guard accepted my home-made business card as a press pass, and I was able to walk up the long ramp to the viewing stand. The entire right side of the ramp is blocked by 8x8 foot plywood sheets, forming a solid fence.. Along about 120 feet of it people have carefully attached the slightly bluish-tinted plastic 20 oz water bottles you buy from a vendor for $1, with the tops cut off, filled with water, each one holding a bunch of short-stemmed roses and carnations. The bottles are stacked three and four high, there are several hundred of them. The flowers are fresh, in full bloom, cared for with love, not a wilted one in the lot, no careless puddles of water. Interspersed are messages of love. The memorials reach all the way, from the start of the ramp to the top, and include a large-print list of the WTC victims of 9/11. It became very hard to bear, and I rushed back down to Broadway and the throngs of people. The vista from the top of the ramp had not revealed any more of the pit than the street view. A policeman in parade uniform whites, there with his family, pointed out a few things. I found out that, as the WTC towers simultaneously exploded and imploded, flying beams not only pierced the upper floor corner of one of the World Financial Center buildings, which I had noted on a winter visit, but also that of one of the two tall buildings at the South edge of Ground Zero, still wrapped in netting and under construction. The blast had been ferocious.
The return walk along Nassau Street, from Fulton to Wall, brought me back to reality. Among the throngs of tourists, sellers of American flags, postcards and picture books of WTC history abounded .[The real mother lode is at Columbus Circle, where at the entrance to Central Park no less than nine stands sell photographs and paintings (mostly serigraphs but also original art), of New York City, WTC views and collages predominating.] It does prove that life goes on. We of the US are tough and capable of striking back, and by now we have some addresses, not just that of the hapless Saddam Hussein.
As an aside, on June 6 a young Muslim leader, Zayed Jasin, gave his undergraduate's commencement speech at Harvard. The 22-year old Chicago-born son of a Bangladeshi father and an Irish-American mother ("I am one of you and also one of them") spoke of the corruption of the term Jihad (inner struggle between good and bad) , with the results seen last Fall, and urged his fellow graduates to help shape a more just, honorable and peaceful society. The noble sentiments, heard in full on Brian Lehrer's WNYC show, were marred by the disclosures that Jasin is a fund-raiser for the Holy Land Foundation, an organization whose funds were seized by the Treasury because of its alleged activities as a terrorist support group, including paying the living expenses of suicide bombers' families. The disclosures, by student Pat Collins, were attacked as prejudiced and worse by another student, president of Harvard's Islamic Society, whose use of trick language ("..never supported those who exclusively..") left a bad impression. The dual performance, with Jasin refusing to condemn the WTC attackers specifically, the use of roundabout language that by implication equates Israel with vthe WTC terrorists and suicide bombers ("we condemn all those who...") did not heal any wounds. Rather, it left this listened with a reinforced concern about the loyalties of the young people studying in American universities who vigorously attack the perceived prejudices of Americans affecting people from the Middle East, but do not condemn the 9/11 terrorists directly and by name, for the record. I speak frankly. Complaints of prejudice will not allay our fears, other words and positive acts are needed. .
.
.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 10:52 AM 
