NEW YORK — This is a city of no buffer zones. Pick any street corner in Manhattan, walk in any direction and you will find yourself in a different neighborhood, if not an entirely different world, within minutes. Koreatown sits just three blocks from little Brazil. Little Dominica is up the hill from historic Harlem. You can jog from the corporate castles of Wall Street to the bohemian enclaves of the Lower East Side in minutes. Usually, the changes are abrupt. Signs switch from Chinese to Italian, Arabic to English within a block of one another.
Those divides are nothing compared to what happens on the corner of Broadway and Cortlandt streets, just south of City Hall, where the real world and the surreal world run side by side. On Broadway north of Cortlandt, New York life goes on normally. Delis and sandwich shops are open for business, subway stations are open to commuters, and pedestrians make beelines up and down the sidewalk. Except for the slight burning smell that lingers in the air, it is essentially the same stretch of Broadway that existed before September 11. However, one block down, at the site of the former World Trade Center, sits oblivion, separated by an aluminum police barricade and guarded by men in camouflage.
I was escorted by the fire department and the mayor's office to tour the site, a rubble pit of charred concrete and twisted metal beams that has been dubbed Ground Zero and remains an uneasy resting place for more than 4,000 victims. In the six weeks since the Twin Towers fell, emergency workers have removed nearly 250,000 tons of debris from what officials casually call the Pile. Despite six weeks of round-the-clock cleanup, several stories of smoking dust still stand.
Maybe you have seen a photograph of the disaster zone or footage of it on television. It looks like a dusty construction site. It is full of cranes, bulldozers and ambulances, operated by relief workers who are dwarfed by the massive wreckage around them. Fires still smolder deep within the concrete, still burning after six weeks, and firefighters are constantly fighting them.
Somehow, the workers have numbed themselves to cope with the task at hand. "It is a daunting task but they're up to it," said Richard Sheirer, head of the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management. "You have to remember New York City firefighters, cops and the Port Authority cops are here looking for their families, their fellow workers. I've been here with friends of mine who were fathers digging on the pile for their sons, and sons digging on the pile for their fathers. It's the most horrific incident I've ever seen."
You cannot see the details on television. They somehow don't translate as well through the camera. Something will catch your eye, dangling in the wind out of one of the hundreds of windows that were smashed when the towers came down.
I see a computer monitor, blowing in the breeze, no bigger than a speck, hanging 10 stories above ground from a gaping hole in one of the office buildings that overlooked the WTC plaza. You count the number of windows around the hole to get an idea of how big and how deep it is. Whatever hit the building tore out eight stories and about 20 feet into it. How big was the piece that came down that did that damage? What did it weigh? How fast was it traveling?
When the mammoth dump trucks roll by, carrying huge loads of steel twisted like coat-hanger wires, you wonder what bent these sturdy beams. If you turn your head toward what's left of the Twin Towers, your sense of perspective is immediately thrown for a loop. Most of the 110 stories of concrete turned to dust when the building came down. The rest is compacted into the six-story basement of the Trade Center, along with pieces of the plane and over 4,000 victims. "You can't get away from the fact that it's people," Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen said. "It's not just steel and ashes and dust and concrete and cement — it's people. When they pick up a pile, you don't know if that ash is remnants of concrete or remnants of a person."
This is what is being sifted through and hauled off in trucks. Several stories of debris stick out of the ground, abuzz with relief workers and cranes picking through it. This is mostly near what once was the North Tower. Near the South Tower is a pit. It is not that nothing is at Ground Zero. Formless wreckage is there. Honeycomb skeletons of former office buildings that have been blown apart by dust are there. Several smashed facades of the Towers still stand, leaning precipitously against piles of garbage. You are aware that what you are looking at is a battlefield. Photos of Dresden, Hiroshima, London and Beirut come to mind.
After nearly a half-hour, I leave awestruck. Within two blocks, I return to the real world side of the National Guard checkpoint, after running a gauntlet of eye-wash stations, portajohns and makeshift showers that have been set up for the relief workers. Tribeca couples are pushing strollers and walking dogs. Starbucks is bustling. Behind me stands the Pile, almost indistinguishable, perched in a different reality, getting smaller and smaller every minute.
For more information on and audience reaction to the attacks, including tips on how you can help, see "9.11.01: Moving Forward".
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