story846.xml
Title
story846.xml
Source
born-digital
Media Type
story
Date Entered
2002-07-01
911DA Story: Story
THE TOWERS (essay on September 11)
by Michael Gates
"The World Trade Center is _gone_," I said.
By then, of course, everyone already knew this sad fact. But I said it anyway. I thought if I heard the words coming out of my mouth, I could begin to accept the unthinkable.
It was "that day," and I was talking to my mother on the phone. We had finally reached each other after several dozen tries. ("All circuits are busy" was the phrase I heard most often on September 11.) She wanted to know if my wife, who worked in Building 7 of the World Trade Center, was alive, safe. As it turned out, she was, so my anguish wasn't for her (praise the Cosmic Muffin) but for the thousands lost--and for the towers, the twin monoliths that had been part of the backdrop of my life for 20 years.
As anyone who lives in the New York metropolitan area knows, the twin towers of the World Trade Center were a constant, looming presence, visible for scores of miles in all directions. Wherever you were in New York--or in Jersey City, across the Hudson River, where I live--you could orient yourself by looking for the twins.
At 110 stories, the towers, designed by architect Minoru Yamaski, were sometimes criticized as too big; their lack of ornament was also disparaged as "bland." That's wrong, I think. To me, they were majestic--so enormous that they transcended architecture. They were New York's answer to the pyramids, two surreal pillars holding up the sky.
Whenever I visited the Trade Center, which included several smaller buildings besides the towers, I felt both excited and a bit overwhelmed by the "city within a city." The complex encompassed an enormous underground shopping mall, sprawling subway stations, and a five-acre outdoor plaza modeled after St. Mark's Square in Venice.
The twins were the main attraction, though. Standing at the base of one of them and staring up its neo-Venetian facade was a surefire way to induce an oddly pleasant feeling of vertigo--like being mildly drunk on the Promethean splendor of New York.
I ascended to the observation deck at the top of Tower 2 three times over the years, if recall correctly. You reached it via a high-speed elevator that was larger than many Manhattan bedrooms. It felt like going up in a rocket--your stomach seemed to have been temporarily left behind.
You exited the elevator into a vast, window-lined room with--to put it most prosaically--quite a view. The vista reminded me of one of my favorite childhood fantasies: sitting on a cloud and staring down at the world, like omnipotent Zeus. There were little metal seats next to the tall, slit-like windows; you could sit there and meditate on the roofs of skyscrapers. It was somewhat like looking out of an airplane's window, except that the toy-like world below didn't pass by. Time seemed suspended.
There was a stairway to the roof, where you could stand on an outdoor platform that seemed to hover in mid air. The top of the other tower, crowned by a huge broadcast antenna (used by every major TV station in New York), floated nearby. On a clear day you could see the curvature of the earth?I think. I imagined I could, anyway.
I wasn't always a tourist at the Trade Center. One of my freelance editing clients, Morgan Stanley, was located in Tower 2, on the 72nd floor. I usually did my editing for them remotely, via e-mail, but one day I was asked to come into the office and proofread some documents. Entering the building involved a complicated series of steps. I had to line up in the lobby with about 100 other "guests," then present two forms of ID at a long desk manned by a score of what looked like airport ticket agents. I was given a stick-on badge to wear. At the elevator, I had to show some ID again, despite the badge. And once I arrived at Morgan Stanley's offices, I had to explain myself to a guard in _their_ lobby. By then, I felt like I was entering CIA headquarters.
The massive security--how na?ve and pointless it now seems--was in reaction to the 1993 bombing of the Trade Center. A terrorist named Ramzi Ahmed Yousef had parked a truck bomb in an underground parking garage. When it exploded, six people were killed and thousands were injured. The towers filled with smoke but were otherwise unharmed. It was said that the terrorists had hoped they would collapse. "How absurd," I remember thinking at the time. The towers were so enormous, so permanent a part of the landscape, that I couldn't imagine anything short of a nuclear warhead bringing them down. If that.
As if in mockery, September 11th was a preternaturally beautiful day. A cerulean bowl of fresh air was suspended over the city, and the temperature was somewhere in the Mediterranean 80s. That morning, my wife, Beth, left for work as usual, and I made sure my son got on his school bus, as I do every weekday. I puttered around for a while, then sat down at the computer in my home office with a cup of coffee. The phone had rung twice earlier, but I hadn't bothered to answer it. I played back the first voice-mail message. It was my sister, who never calls me (since I see her several times a year at family gatherings), which gave me my first inkling that this would not be a routine day. "I saw on the news what happened at the World Trade Center," she said. "I just wanted to know if Beth is OK. Please call me." For some reason, I wrote down "Sept. 11" and "WTC" on the notepad I use for phone messages. (I look at that note now, and at the mundane phone messages I had scribbled on the page above it the day before, with a real sense of nostalgia.) I played back the second message, which was from my wife: "I'm OK?."
With a slight sinking feeling, I went into the living room and snapped on the TV, tuning it to CNN.
The next thing I remember is being in the park next to my house, Riverview Park, which has a Cinemascope view of the New York skyline. I had grabbed my digital camera and I was snapping pictures of the towers, which, for the moment, looked like huge smokestacks. Immense plumes were billowing from both of them. The park was filling up with spectators, many of whom were also taking pictures. Someone had a radio, and I heard that the Pentagon in Washington had also been hit. "Am I awake or asleep?" I asked myself. I decided I was, indeed, awake. Then I thought: "I am a witness to history." The clich? seemed perfectly apt.
Then the first tower collapsed, accompanied by gasps and a chorus of "oh-my-gawds" from the crowd.
I began to have a peculiar feeling that I've only experienced a few other times in my life: a contradictory sensation of time standing still while events rush forward at terrible speed. I'd felt it before, for example, in a car wreck, as the vehicle I was in was rolling over on a highway.
Involuntarily, it seemed, I climbed up on the iron fence at the edge of the park that faces Manhattan. So did several other people of the sort who normally don't climb fences. I watched a huge cloud of smoke rise from lower Manhattan, as if an atomic bomb had just exploded. "What about Beth?" I thought. "She was 'OK' before, but what about now?"
I ran back into the house and dialed her number at work. "All circuits are busy. Please try your call again later." The recorded voice was maddeningly calm and businesslike. I turned CNN back on, just in time to see the second tower collapse. I tried calling several more times, but only got odd-sounding busy signals or recorded messages about "technical difficulties." Then the phone rang, but it was Trish, a friend of ours, wanting to know if Beth was OK. "I honestly don't know," I said. "The second tower just came down."
I ran back to the park. I didn't know what to do with myself, so I took some more pictures of the smoke/dust cloud, which now appeared to extend about a mile up into the atmosphere. I don't remember how long I stayed there, gawking.
Eventually I went back inside to try the phone again and to see what I could learn from TV. The phone situation was no better, and what I saw on TV was far more horrific than what I'd seen from the park. I was sitting there, mesmerized, watching footage of people jumping from 100 stories up, of roiling dust clouds chasing people through Manhattan's canyons, when Beth suddenly walked through the front door.
She had caught one of the last trains out of the city, she said, just before the entire transit system shut down.
For several days after that I went to the park every few hours to observe the ghostlike cloud still rising from where the towers had once stood, trying to convince myself that I had really seen what I thought I had seen. After dark, the cloud glowed eerily, reflecting the stadium lights that had been installed at "ground zero" so that search and rescue operations could continue all night. In the days that followed, the cloud occasionally drifted across the river, giving off a faint smell of burning plastic. F-15 fighter jets roared overhead, but otherwise the skies were quiet, all the airports having closed.
On Saturday, I went down to the Jersey City waterfront to help load trucks with relief supplies. There was a huge crowd of volunteers there, of all ages and "types," though the majority seemed to be of college age. There were even some uniformed cops there who had driven overnight from Chicago to help load supplies. The atmosphere was surprisingly jovial as people formed "bucket brigades" to pass along an endless amount of bottled water and packaged food for loading onto trucks. Every so often, a boatload of exhausted firemen would arrive from the other side of the Hudson, to cheers from the volunteers. All of this bonhomie felt a bit forced, however, against the background of the smoking, gap-toothed skyline.
I look now at the new breach in Manhattan's jagged profile with a painful sense of loss. I didn't know anyone personally who died in the attacks, so I'm not sure if I can call if grief. Can you grieve for lost buildings? They were more to me than buildings, though, just as they were more than that to the people who destroyed them. Symbols of "capitalism" or "imperialism" to some, to me they were symbols of all that is "over the top" about New York: not just one awesome skyscraper but two, side by side, in relationship, "trading partners" if you will, and tall enough to rattle the gods. To me, their "two-ness" stood for something else, as well: it was a constant, iconic reminder that, though it's possible to be lonely in New York, it's never necessary to be alone. When the towers fell, the citizens of the New York metro area came together, as they always do when disaster arrives. There's a hole in the sky that may never be filled, but, for now, we've filled the gap between ourselves.
###
[a copy of this essay, including photographs, is available at:
http://www.panix.com/~mgates/towers.htm]
by Michael Gates
"The World Trade Center is _gone_," I said.
By then, of course, everyone already knew this sad fact. But I said it anyway. I thought if I heard the words coming out of my mouth, I could begin to accept the unthinkable.
It was "that day," and I was talking to my mother on the phone. We had finally reached each other after several dozen tries. ("All circuits are busy" was the phrase I heard most often on September 11.) She wanted to know if my wife, who worked in Building 7 of the World Trade Center, was alive, safe. As it turned out, she was, so my anguish wasn't for her (praise the Cosmic Muffin) but for the thousands lost--and for the towers, the twin monoliths that had been part of the backdrop of my life for 20 years.
As anyone who lives in the New York metropolitan area knows, the twin towers of the World Trade Center were a constant, looming presence, visible for scores of miles in all directions. Wherever you were in New York--or in Jersey City, across the Hudson River, where I live--you could orient yourself by looking for the twins.
At 110 stories, the towers, designed by architect Minoru Yamaski, were sometimes criticized as too big; their lack of ornament was also disparaged as "bland." That's wrong, I think. To me, they were majestic--so enormous that they transcended architecture. They were New York's answer to the pyramids, two surreal pillars holding up the sky.
Whenever I visited the Trade Center, which included several smaller buildings besides the towers, I felt both excited and a bit overwhelmed by the "city within a city." The complex encompassed an enormous underground shopping mall, sprawling subway stations, and a five-acre outdoor plaza modeled after St. Mark's Square in Venice.
The twins were the main attraction, though. Standing at the base of one of them and staring up its neo-Venetian facade was a surefire way to induce an oddly pleasant feeling of vertigo--like being mildly drunk on the Promethean splendor of New York.
I ascended to the observation deck at the top of Tower 2 three times over the years, if recall correctly. You reached it via a high-speed elevator that was larger than many Manhattan bedrooms. It felt like going up in a rocket--your stomach seemed to have been temporarily left behind.
You exited the elevator into a vast, window-lined room with--to put it most prosaically--quite a view. The vista reminded me of one of my favorite childhood fantasies: sitting on a cloud and staring down at the world, like omnipotent Zeus. There were little metal seats next to the tall, slit-like windows; you could sit there and meditate on the roofs of skyscrapers. It was somewhat like looking out of an airplane's window, except that the toy-like world below didn't pass by. Time seemed suspended.
There was a stairway to the roof, where you could stand on an outdoor platform that seemed to hover in mid air. The top of the other tower, crowned by a huge broadcast antenna (used by every major TV station in New York), floated nearby. On a clear day you could see the curvature of the earth?I think. I imagined I could, anyway.
I wasn't always a tourist at the Trade Center. One of my freelance editing clients, Morgan Stanley, was located in Tower 2, on the 72nd floor. I usually did my editing for them remotely, via e-mail, but one day I was asked to come into the office and proofread some documents. Entering the building involved a complicated series of steps. I had to line up in the lobby with about 100 other "guests," then present two forms of ID at a long desk manned by a score of what looked like airport ticket agents. I was given a stick-on badge to wear. At the elevator, I had to show some ID again, despite the badge. And once I arrived at Morgan Stanley's offices, I had to explain myself to a guard in _their_ lobby. By then, I felt like I was entering CIA headquarters.
The massive security--how na?ve and pointless it now seems--was in reaction to the 1993 bombing of the Trade Center. A terrorist named Ramzi Ahmed Yousef had parked a truck bomb in an underground parking garage. When it exploded, six people were killed and thousands were injured. The towers filled with smoke but were otherwise unharmed. It was said that the terrorists had hoped they would collapse. "How absurd," I remember thinking at the time. The towers were so enormous, so permanent a part of the landscape, that I couldn't imagine anything short of a nuclear warhead bringing them down. If that.
As if in mockery, September 11th was a preternaturally beautiful day. A cerulean bowl of fresh air was suspended over the city, and the temperature was somewhere in the Mediterranean 80s. That morning, my wife, Beth, left for work as usual, and I made sure my son got on his school bus, as I do every weekday. I puttered around for a while, then sat down at the computer in my home office with a cup of coffee. The phone had rung twice earlier, but I hadn't bothered to answer it. I played back the first voice-mail message. It was my sister, who never calls me (since I see her several times a year at family gatherings), which gave me my first inkling that this would not be a routine day. "I saw on the news what happened at the World Trade Center," she said. "I just wanted to know if Beth is OK. Please call me." For some reason, I wrote down "Sept. 11" and "WTC" on the notepad I use for phone messages. (I look at that note now, and at the mundane phone messages I had scribbled on the page above it the day before, with a real sense of nostalgia.) I played back the second message, which was from my wife: "I'm OK?."
With a slight sinking feeling, I went into the living room and snapped on the TV, tuning it to CNN.
The next thing I remember is being in the park next to my house, Riverview Park, which has a Cinemascope view of the New York skyline. I had grabbed my digital camera and I was snapping pictures of the towers, which, for the moment, looked like huge smokestacks. Immense plumes were billowing from both of them. The park was filling up with spectators, many of whom were also taking pictures. Someone had a radio, and I heard that the Pentagon in Washington had also been hit. "Am I awake or asleep?" I asked myself. I decided I was, indeed, awake. Then I thought: "I am a witness to history." The clich? seemed perfectly apt.
Then the first tower collapsed, accompanied by gasps and a chorus of "oh-my-gawds" from the crowd.
I began to have a peculiar feeling that I've only experienced a few other times in my life: a contradictory sensation of time standing still while events rush forward at terrible speed. I'd felt it before, for example, in a car wreck, as the vehicle I was in was rolling over on a highway.
Involuntarily, it seemed, I climbed up on the iron fence at the edge of the park that faces Manhattan. So did several other people of the sort who normally don't climb fences. I watched a huge cloud of smoke rise from lower Manhattan, as if an atomic bomb had just exploded. "What about Beth?" I thought. "She was 'OK' before, but what about now?"
I ran back into the house and dialed her number at work. "All circuits are busy. Please try your call again later." The recorded voice was maddeningly calm and businesslike. I turned CNN back on, just in time to see the second tower collapse. I tried calling several more times, but only got odd-sounding busy signals or recorded messages about "technical difficulties." Then the phone rang, but it was Trish, a friend of ours, wanting to know if Beth was OK. "I honestly don't know," I said. "The second tower just came down."
I ran back to the park. I didn't know what to do with myself, so I took some more pictures of the smoke/dust cloud, which now appeared to extend about a mile up into the atmosphere. I don't remember how long I stayed there, gawking.
Eventually I went back inside to try the phone again and to see what I could learn from TV. The phone situation was no better, and what I saw on TV was far more horrific than what I'd seen from the park. I was sitting there, mesmerized, watching footage of people jumping from 100 stories up, of roiling dust clouds chasing people through Manhattan's canyons, when Beth suddenly walked through the front door.
She had caught one of the last trains out of the city, she said, just before the entire transit system shut down.
For several days after that I went to the park every few hours to observe the ghostlike cloud still rising from where the towers had once stood, trying to convince myself that I had really seen what I thought I had seen. After dark, the cloud glowed eerily, reflecting the stadium lights that had been installed at "ground zero" so that search and rescue operations could continue all night. In the days that followed, the cloud occasionally drifted across the river, giving off a faint smell of burning plastic. F-15 fighter jets roared overhead, but otherwise the skies were quiet, all the airports having closed.
On Saturday, I went down to the Jersey City waterfront to help load trucks with relief supplies. There was a huge crowd of volunteers there, of all ages and "types," though the majority seemed to be of college age. There were even some uniformed cops there who had driven overnight from Chicago to help load supplies. The atmosphere was surprisingly jovial as people formed "bucket brigades" to pass along an endless amount of bottled water and packaged food for loading onto trucks. Every so often, a boatload of exhausted firemen would arrive from the other side of the Hudson, to cheers from the volunteers. All of this bonhomie felt a bit forced, however, against the background of the smoking, gap-toothed skyline.
I look now at the new breach in Manhattan's jagged profile with a painful sense of loss. I didn't know anyone personally who died in the attacks, so I'm not sure if I can call if grief. Can you grieve for lost buildings? They were more to me than buildings, though, just as they were more than that to the people who destroyed them. Symbols of "capitalism" or "imperialism" to some, to me they were symbols of all that is "over the top" about New York: not just one awesome skyscraper but two, side by side, in relationship, "trading partners" if you will, and tall enough to rattle the gods. To me, their "two-ness" stood for something else, as well: it was a constant, iconic reminder that, though it's possible to be lonely in New York, it's never necessary to be alone. When the towers fell, the citizens of the New York metro area came together, as they always do when disaster arrives. There's a hole in the sky that may never be filled, but, for now, we've filled the gap between ourselves.
###
[a copy of this essay, including photographs, is available at:
http://www.panix.com/~mgates/towers.htm]
Collection
Citation
“story846.xml,” September 11 Digital Archive, accessed May 3, 2024, https://911digitalarchive.org/items/show/8678.