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2002-12-15

Like an itinerant gypsy in a foreign village, I spent much of the last two weeks without sleep, wandering the streets of my hometown, New York City. This I did on the heels of unprecedented catastrophe and in the shadow of indescribable misery. Steel and glass and cement mixed effortlessly with the slight sting of the acrid, smoky air that smelled of burning rubber with a trace of ammonia as it hovered stubbornly over Manhattan. But this was perhaps the least significant residue of the tragedy. As a native New Yorker, I always believed, since childhood, that I knew the city about as intimately as anyone possibly could. Certainly, I have always loved it. But it has never been as beautiful or noble a place as it has emerged in recent days, its citizenry rising, with uncommon bravery, to an unwelcome occasion born of the most inconceivable horror.

On September 11 I was in Boston, where I had been for a month recording the dramatic and often soulful music of Rachmaninoff, Medtner and Scriabin. En route to New York that morning, I turned round when I head the news. For the first time in memory New York City had closed its borders, not only to foreigners, but also to American citizens. With neither entry nor egress allowed, I was stranded until the next day, when Amtrak resumed business.

The World Trade Center, especially for New Yorkers, had long been a part of a skyline whose ubiquitous presence was as reliable and predictable as an old friend. Many years ago, and just out of college, I worked for a year as a waiter at Windows on the World, on the 106th floor of Tower 1. It was brand new back then, and the most glamorous restaurant in the world. Its clients were mostly rich and famous, the atmosphere plush, and the panoramic views formed a spectacular tribute, all by themselves, to the ever-so-American idea of new horizons. The food was sumptuous, too; my fellow waiters and I took every opportunity to consume as much of it as possible between shifts, particularly the delicately seasoned poultry dishes and the fabulous chocolate soufflés. Later on, when I opened my real estate business in Soho, I closed innumerable deals in the WTC. The elegantly appointed offices of my attorneys, Hill, Betts and Nash were still open for business in the Towers on the morning of September 11, but have since bled into the indistinguishable rubble, presumably along with its staff.

Etched painfully on the often blank, expressionless faces of every New Yorker these days is the strain of an unbearable collective sadness. Even those who attempt to hide it cannot; it has something to do with the erosion of attitude and confidence, which New Yorkers have always projected so effortlessly. The brazen joy and once easy exuberance that have always defined them have vanished, at least temporarily

I recall in particular the face of one young man at a candlelight vigil in Washington Square Park that bespoke utter desolation. Listlessly slumped in the consoling embrace of his girlfriend, a single tear streamed slowly and uneasily towards his chin. He conveyed the unmistakable impression of one who was either a close friend or relative of a victim. His eyes were indescribably lonely and hauntingly distant. He radiated the poignant look of one unfulfilled, as if he were grasping at a thousand good-byes that he never had the chance to say. His look, so intense and solemn, penetrated me to the core, though he had no idea I was even observing him. He looked south towards the smoky remains of the World Trade Center, over and beyond the thousands of candles softly illuminating the no less tortured stares of those commemorating the tragedy. At that moment, it seemed to me as if he were looking for the one person in this world he may have loved but who had become, in the space of a few moments, only a memory.
Just as heartbreaking is the view of the resultant void, the ruins of which resemble Dresden after the war. The void, as Nietzsche once said, has an uncomfortable way of staring back. That the Twin Towers have turned into dust is not the only source of pain. What really comes into view are the thousands of young people in their 20s, 30s and 40s, who had so much to look forward to, who had dreams and aspirations, families and good friends, good health and a love of life. That was plain to see on their faces, which today adorn the many "Walls of Remembrance" that have sprung up spontaneously all over the city. These impromptu shrines invariably refer to the dead as missing, thereby providing a modicum of hope. A few nights ago I was reading several of them on the south wall of Ray's Pizza in Greenwich Village when a young woman excused herself, knelt in front of a photo of the smiling baby face of a 22 year old broker, and wrote simply, with a magic marker, "Body found 9/17/01". She hugged a companion, and disappeared in silent agony into an anonymous but sympathetic crowd.

That moment bore down with such overwhelming gravity as to devastate and even immobilize me, as it would any empathetic witness. The intermittent waves of sadness moved through me with the suffocating weight of a tsunami. As the grim reality moved in, it became impossible to supress the tears and the gripping swells in my chest. And yet, in spite of such overt, if natural selfishness, I cannot help reflecting that so much of life, which has been so good to me, was denied with such callous indifference and appalling cruelty to thousands of extraordinary people. It is an oppressive thought that weighs heavy , but that also renews the spirit as it compelled me to re-evaluate just about everything.

In the midst of all this, I felt compelled to take action. To do so was not only to serve and be useful, but also emotionally therapeutic. Along the West Side Highway in Greenwich Village near Pier 40, a few stalwart residents, along with several out-of-towners, set up a tiny distribution center. At first they offered peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bottled water to the legions of exhausted police, firemen, sanitation crews and rescuer workers en route to Ground Zero. While other centers, such as those at the Jacob Javits Center or Stuyvesant High School, remained under the strict control of the City of New York or the military, this remained an independent, grass roots effort, expertly organized and run by a few committed individuals who vigorously refused to call themselves its leaders, preferring instead to share both credit and responsibility. Within 48 hours, this open-air stronghold, which dubbed itself Tent City, had grown to some 7000 square feet, housing massive donations of food, snacks, medical supplies, new and used clothes, bottled water and juice, shovels, coffee, cigarettes, flashlights, hardhats and respirators. I joined a hundred or more concerned volunteers, who had come together from dozens of countries, including France, Switzerland, Belgium, Egypt, Italy, Australia, Argentina, Spain, and Russia. Each of us was assigned enough work to last the entire day and through the night. Trucks needed to be loaded and unloaded, sandwiches had to be made, clothing sorted, and supplies handed out. We formed human chains to carry and load with greater efficiency hundreds of boxes of supplies into police trucks. We also filled thumbnail sized glass containers with vapo-rub to counteract the effects of the stench of the dead, which was strong enough to penetrate the rescuers' masks.

This extraordinary effort was spearheaded by a group of young men and women, among them Michael Howard, a strategically savvy, brilliantly organized fund-raiser from Union City, New Jersey, who plans to document Tent City's contribution in a book; Darren Strickner, a fundraiser for the Michigan Republican party who drove to New York the moment he heard about the disaster; Bari Pearlman, a neighborhood resident; and by Herman Sanchez, a systems engineer at IBM in Albany and his wife Stephanie. Others, such as Peter Kouletsis, a software engineer with Salomon Smith Barney, were eyewitnesses to the explosion itself and threw themselves into the work with gusto. Rarely have I had the privilege to meet such phenomenally motivated, inspired, impressive, caring and humane people. Make no mistake: Like its sister organizations, Tent City, which was dismantled by the military on Thursday evening to make room for transport trucking routes, emerged as a breeding ground for tomorrow's leaders.

At a memorial service at St. Patrick Cathedral, an orchestra and chorus performed Gabriel Faure's exquisite Requiem. At the conclusion of the service, it was an easy thing to look south over the heads of the vast crowds that had assembled along Fifth Avenue, towards Ground Zero in the distance. The gray clouds of acrid smoke continued to rise from the site, mingling eloquently with the reassuring, avuncular baritone of Cardinal Egan; with the Requiem's ethereal Agnus Dei; and not least, with the exemplary courage and shining nobility of New York's finest: its magnificent citizens.

Copyright 2001 John Bell Young

The dead. The living.