Ground Zero, NYC
I have been trying to avoid writing this entry since my return from New York a few weeks ago, but for some reason, I felt compelled to write it this evening.
I took a very short trip to New York City at the end of April for a friend’s wedding. I was only in town for 26 hours, but was determined to fit quite a bit of personal time in with the wedding. I took a red-eye from Los Angeles so my flight landed around 6:30am the morning of the wedding. By the time I made it to my hotel and said a quick hello to a friend I was staying with, I had already burned two hours. After “freshening up” quickly, I grabbed my camera and set out to see Manhattan while I waited for my friends to finish sleeping in.
I walked in circles at first, heading up to Central Park just a few block from my hotel, and then back toward downtown as I tried to find a place to grab breakfast. After a pleasant meal and some coffee, I pointed myself toward the base of Manhattan and started walking.
Though I had visited the city numerous times in past years, I had only been to the World Trade Center once, perhaps when I was 8 or 9. In fact, I think it was on a trip when I was visiting the city with family for my grandmother’s funeral. I have a vague memory of looking out one of the windows at the top of the towers with my grandfather, but perhaps that was somewhere else. I imagine I should also have some memory of standing at the base of the buildings and looking up, but somehow I do not.
The last time I saw the towers in person was on a trip with my wife in August of 2001. We had walked to Brooklyn over the Brooklyn Bridge and took photographs back toward Manhattan during the trek over. We have one of my wife’s photographs from the trip on our living-room wall — through all of the cables and stone of the bridge, the two buildings seem to fade off into the mist, standing almost twice as tall as any other building nearby.
As I made my way closer to lower Manhattan, I thought a lot about my previous trips and how, during my one trip inside, I may have brushed shoulders with someone who didn’t make it out some 15 years later. I also thought about the physical size of the buildings’ footprint. When people talk about “Ground Zero,” they tend to fixate on the sheer size of the crater. Needless to say, I was expecting something huge. I’m not sure if it was the excessive buildup or perhaps the long walk I had been on all morning, but when I finally arrived at Ground Zero, I felt fairly disconnected.
As you wind your way through the surrounding buildings, at least from the direction I approached the site, your first exposure to the destruction is a huge chain link fence, and a number of street vendors hawking merchandise. I was a bit turned off by the presence of the vendors, but perhaps more so by the fence. I wanted to get right up against the pit and look down. Heck, I wanted to stand right in the middle of it and see if I could feel the weight of the buildings coming down.
I walked around the perimeter, stopping occasionally to see if I could nab a photograph through a gap in the fence. By the time the protected walkway ended and dumped me out in front of Deloitte and Touche, all of my expectations about the site had been dissolved.
The sheer size of the empty space was definitely intimidating, yet I think it would have appeared even larger if I had a clear memory of standing at the base of the buildings and looking up. Even so, you can get a pretty good gauge of what is missing by checking out Google’s satellite images of the site.
In trying to reconcile my reaction in the hours and days that followed, I decided that I, and perhaps the rest of the country, have more or less put the tragedy behind me. I don’t know if that is truly the case, or simply the answer I have come up with in an attempt to find some type of explanation. Regardless, it appears that time does move on. Buildings do really manage to be rebuilt. People do heal and move on. Life does keep ticking away.
If you haven’t had a chance to visit the site, I highly recommend making it happen.
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May 13th, 2006 at 3:05 am
When I was in New York last fall, I made it a point to visit Ground Zero on the morning of September 11, 2005. It was a touching moment, perhaps made more poignant by the many others who ventured there that day. I imagine not many had come from New Zealand, but I did spy two Australians, and I was also amazed at the number of Americans who came from across the country for the sole reason of paying tribute to the fallen.
¶ The feeling was very different for me as I was there when there were no street vendors, firemen were shedding tears for comrades they would not see again (at least not in their former incarnations), and the names of the c. 3,000 victims were pasted on a wall.
¶ It was the first time I had shed a tear over the events of that day—I didn’t on September 11, 2001 probably because I had too much to do and had to keep it together, and I had personal issues to deal with as well. I had watched every 9-11 anniversary on television, but by being there, I felt a sense of relief knowing that the deaths of 3,000 people did really get to me.
May 13th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
It’s great to hear your perspective, especially in the context of the 4-year anniversary. From your description, I definitely think I would have had a far more personal experience under similar circumstances. I’ll be in New England this September and will try to return to the site for the 5th anniversary.