DAY TEN:Sept. 20:
Thundershowers are in today's forecast, which means more water weight will soon increase the tonnage to be removed from the World Trade Center site. The more I stare at Ground Zero, watching the hard-working crews do their dangerous jobs, the greater the job ahead seems. Until you see Ground Zero, up close and personal as they say, you cannot imagine the scale of this operation. To capture it on film one would need extraordinary talents, wide angle lenses and spectacular quipment. None of the photos or footage I have seen so far have managed to convey the enormity and horror of it all.
Last night I got my first nightime view of Ground Zero. Looming out of the darkness, lit by harsh artificial lights, it is a far more despairing and frightening place. The lighting gives it a surreal quality, prompting the mind to recall movie scenes and imagine that the constant billows of smoke and steam are the result of some movie director's overzealous use of a fog machine.
My attorney friend, Ed Burke, and I decided to show solidarity with the beleagured TriBeCa folks by having dinner in a cafe down there. That was the vague plan in our minds as we first headed over to the FEMA command headquarters at the Javits Center, on 37th St. We went there to deliver back isues of Newsday, as requested, for the rescue workers' Wall of Fame. I knew there was a gamble element to the evening's plans: Ed is a civilian, an ordinary citizen. He has no press credentials. I would have to talk his way into everything. But Ed had a thirst to see, with his own eyes, the extent of the tragedy. And, I confess, I had a deep need to share it with someone. It's hard to hold these horrible images inside your own head and heart.
The media staff at FEMA were so grateful for the newspapers that they ushered Ed through security, allowing him to tour the bivouac nerve center of rescue response. Many of the squads I had interviewed more than a week ago have burned out and left. Their replacements were arriving from other parts of America, as were fresh search dogs. The center was in transition. And FEMA leaders admited nobody is getting much sleep in the well-lit, noisey space. The media reps for FEMA are almost out of their minds with lack of sleep: punchy, prone to hyper body movements, all those familiar jittery tics that college students cramming for exams display. As I left I mustered my Mother voice and said, "You boys get some sleep!"
We found a cabbie who, driving at high speed, was willing to take us as far as Canal St. and West Broadway. From there on police barricades prevent passage to all but residents of the lower neighborhoods and accredited rescue, police or press personnel. Canal St., the heart of NY's Chinatown, is usually packed 24-hours-a-day with cars and large trucks, and the vendors and hawkers that line the wide street are notoriously aggressive nearly round the clock. But not now. Every shop and business was locked down. And every single wall was completely covered in pleading Missing Person posters, crafted by grieving families, and impromptu memorializing and raging signs; bits of folk art. The length of Canal St., built by Robert Fulton 150 years ago as an actual canal to carry Manhttan's sewage to the East River, is now littered with vain pleas for help, loved ones, peace and retribution. The signs and litter offer a window on the current Gotham downtown psyche.
I tried unsuccessfully to talk Ed's way through two barricades, but struck gold on the third and we headed down Broadway from Canal, a leg I have walked thousands of times on my way to and from the Brooklyn Bridge. It was hard to recognize last night, however. Gone are the well lit signs advertising discount fabrics or Chinese food. Gone are the rivers of yellow taxi cabs. Gone are the camera crews that seem always to be using one of the government buildings near City Hall as a movie or TV set, casting such places in the bright glow of klieg lights. Gone are the tourists. Gone are the trendy night trippers dressed in clingy latex or baggy hip hop. Gone.
Ed and I searched for a cafe or restaurant to give our solidarity patronage, but found none that were open in zones police would allow us to enter. The police, National Guard, NY State Tropers and Army soldiers are all very polite, subdued and respectful. They do not shout or command, in the main. They simply quietly state the rules, and expect one to obey. And one does. For what point could there possibly be in dodging barricades or violating the State of Siege regulations?
We made our way down Broadway, towards Ground Zero. Few businesses had lights, and the moon was not visible, so the only major light source was Ground Zero, itself. Like moths heading to a lethal encounter with a hot lightbulb we, and stragglings of other souls, kept our pace, heading to the bright white glow.
Between Liberty and some three blocks below Cedar , Broadway has long since had a second name, in reverence to those who died in WWII: Canyon of Heroes. Today that canyon is Ground Zero, and with each block, each intersection, the view of the devastation looms, offering a different perspective, or nightmare. All the stores along Broadway are closed, and two struck emotional chords. There was the McDonalds that had a dust-covered bronze plaque on its entry, indicating it was named Tourism Hospitality Site of the Year for 1993. Certainly, that is permanently in the past tense. The other was a shoe store, located one block from the north WTC Tower. Covered with so much dust that passersby had taken to writing graffiti with their fingers, scraping clear paths in the debris, it looked like some 1960s post-nuclear vision. The dust had hit the store with such force, probably at the moment of the Tower's collapse, that it penetrated the closed doors and blanketed the displayed boots and shoes with a veneer of gray ash. It reminded me of a scene from the old "Twilight Zone" TV show.
At Cedar St. it seems The Queen, Leona Helmsley, has defiantly prevailed over the horror in her small way. A black marble slab honoring her deceased husband, Harry, has been thoroughly polished, its gold leaf lettering apparently repainted. It is stark: the only clean, shiney spot south of Canal street.
But stand with your back to Helmsly's tribute and several stories-high klieg light towers reveal the ghostly, ghastly vision of hell. That's what Ed kept saying, seing it for the first time: "This is hell. This is what hell looks like. And there are 5,000 souls in there."
Well, probably more like 10,000 souls.
For days rescue workers have tried to maintain hope, argueing that within the rubble were voids, pockets of air, in which living people might still be waiting delivery. But firefighters yesterday revealed that measurements done inside some of the discovered voids found temepratures in the range of 1,000 degrees F: they are ovens. The entire debris heap is cooking, and the sense of the intensity of its heat is revealed each time a fire hose jolt of water hits any spot, producing huge clouds of steam.Ê Last night a team of firefighters trained the superhose upon the debris from a crane, some 4 stories high. As the water arced its way to any given target the heat was so great that some of the stream emitted steam before even making contact.
Mingled with the white hot steam is yellow and black smoke, belching in puffs from the debris. It seems that the pile is behaving like a volcano, with a massive core of white-hot fire deep in its core, occasionally reaching the surface to spew not lava, in this case, but acrid particulates and smoke.
Out of this mist of smoke and steam looms the twisted outer sleeve of the WTC, a rust colored steel latticework that seems to be straining to reach the sky. As I gazed at it from a block away last night, lit by the harsh klieg lights, I thought of Harry Lime jumping across the ruins of post-WWII Vienna and emerging through the fog on the top of a pile of rubble in "The Third Man".
The din at the site is now overwhelming: jack hammers, Humvees, cranes and tractors.
Though rescue workers, exhausted and grim, continue their work, nobody could possibly look at that vast, cooking heap and imagine that a human being could be alive in there. It is utterly inconceivable. And the more I study that heap the clearer it is to me that DNA genotyping a million tissue fragments scraped off the debris makes no sense, either: they were incinerated.
Ed and I stood a long time at a particularly stunning vantage point, saying nothing. There was nothing to say. And then a convoy of 18-wheeler trucks and garbage dumpsters rolled by, loaded with something so terrible that my heart beat painfully in my chest and I leapt to a lampost ledge to be sure I was seing correctly. Each of the six vehicles carried enormous steel beams -- the sorts of beams that would normally form the essential structural elements of a skyscraper, carrying millions of tons of weight.Ê The steel was twisted, bent, and in some cases the tips were exploded life blooming flower petals. They ressembled the plastic waste of a malevolent child, who has spent hours mangling his toys. The force that could so-mangle the strongest steel known to humanity is staggering.
"It's like a funeral processesion," Ed whispered as the convoy passed. "There's parts of somebodys' bodies in there."
As we made a sad stroll through Wall St., and rode a silent subway back to Brooklyn, Ed and I talked of the future. With every passing day I become more convinced that the excavation should stop. How can we respect the dead, when the dead are incinerated and pulverized into the building? How can we rationalize pulling them from there, only to scrape their samples into test tubes? It seems far better, for the honor of the dead and the soul of the city, to shape this horror into a massive sculpture, surround it with a park and leave it for posterity, as a reminder of what must never be allowed to happen again.
I dream now that someone in leadership in this city will realize the opportunity to make something profound of this. Let the tip of Manhattan once again reach to the sea, its face no longer looking to uptown society, but to the harbor. Build the waterfront projects. Turn Govenors Island, the former Coast Guard Center that Guiliani once threatened to make into a casino, into a huge Center for Conflict Resolution. Build the Geary Guggenhieim, reaching into the water. And leave the dead in peace, buried in a massive monument.
Sadly, I know New York politics too well. Real estate is, after all, real estate. Ten percent of the city's office space disappeared on September 11th: greed will force excavation onward. And it will , I fear, override consideration of what is best for the dead. And for the soul of Gotham.
Be safe. Be well. Stay defiant.
Laurie Garrett
