email650.xml
Title
email650.xml
Source
born-digital
Media Type
email
Date Entered
2002-09-04
September 11 Email: Body
Came across an article this morning on time.com... Thought you'd like it, because it provides a sense of what NYC feels like now:
http://www.time.com/time/columnist/sullivan/article/0,9565,177276,00.html
...I was thinking about your comment about how odd it felt [as a former New Yorker] to be in Berkeley during the events of Sept. - and then to hear from ______, and hear her cry... I had been feeling a very odd disconnect too... engulfed by a primal, empathic grief on the one hand, but about an "event" that was mediated, not directly experienced.
So I spent last Sat. in downtown NYC: walking the streets of Tribeca (including where I used to work and play - about five blocks north of the WTC) and the financial district; observing silent, polite throngs of people making their way down to "the site"; talking with residents, firemen, National Guards, restaurant staff, street cops, small bodega owners; reading the signage, including two-page instructions about safety and clean-up posted in the doorways of apt. buildings for residents attempting to return home, "Most Wanted" printouts from the Interpol website on bin Laden taped to a building on Wall St., wreaths of paper origami cranes draped over barricades near the WTC, letters from schoolchildren mounted on display at the Duane St. firehouse, and a few forlorn "missing" signs, now starting to fade.
And seeing the now six-story-high smoldering ruins and blown-out windows of surrounding office buildings and the huge cranes doing their work, surrounded by barricades, cops, and National Guards, with convoys of trucks and legions of workers coming and going. Seeing the spire of St. Paul's Chapel, just south of City Hall and near J&R Records - and the empty sky behind it, where the towers once were.
One of the National Guards told me that the temperature taken Saturday inside the ruins was 1700 degrees, where the fires are still burning. (In the jet fuel inferno, it was above 2000 degrees.) Then you look at the "dust" that still lingers on the streets and coats the buildings, that you are breathing in and walking on - and understand what it is, in part, composed of.
One can read or hear about the immensity of the carnage. Nothing can prepare one for witnessing it, or even its aftermath.
http://www.time.com/time/columnist/sullivan/article/0,9565,177276,00.html
...I was thinking about your comment about how odd it felt [as a former New Yorker] to be in Berkeley during the events of Sept. - and then to hear from ______, and hear her cry... I had been feeling a very odd disconnect too... engulfed by a primal, empathic grief on the one hand, but about an "event" that was mediated, not directly experienced.
So I spent last Sat. in downtown NYC: walking the streets of Tribeca (including where I used to work and play - about five blocks north of the WTC) and the financial district; observing silent, polite throngs of people making their way down to "the site"; talking with residents, firemen, National Guards, restaurant staff, street cops, small bodega owners; reading the signage, including two-page instructions about safety and clean-up posted in the doorways of apt. buildings for residents attempting to return home, "Most Wanted" printouts from the Interpol website on bin Laden taped to a building on Wall St., wreaths of paper origami cranes draped over barricades near the WTC, letters from schoolchildren mounted on display at the Duane St. firehouse, and a few forlorn "missing" signs, now starting to fade.
And seeing the now six-story-high smoldering ruins and blown-out windows of surrounding office buildings and the huge cranes doing their work, surrounded by barricades, cops, and National Guards, with convoys of trucks and legions of workers coming and going. Seeing the spire of St. Paul's Chapel, just south of City Hall and near J&R Records - and the empty sky behind it, where the towers once were.
One of the National Guards told me that the temperature taken Saturday inside the ruins was 1700 degrees, where the fires are still burning. (In the jet fuel inferno, it was above 2000 degrees.) Then you look at the "dust" that still lingers on the streets and coats the buildings, that you are breathing in and walking on - and understand what it is, in part, composed of.
One can read or hear about the immensity of the carnage. Nothing can prepare one for witnessing it, or even its aftermath.
September 11 Email: Date
Oct. 3, 2001
September 11 Email: Subject
A letter from New York
Collection
Citation
“email650.xml,” September 11 Digital Archive, accessed October 6, 2024, https://911digitalarchive.org/items/show/37800.