David Bennahum
The view from a New York brownstone: a city's spirit daunted but unbroken. And a new understanding - the true value of freedom, impossible now to be taken for granted.
I'm sending out this note, because in the blur of today's events I received many messages from people asking if I was all right? So I am taking the liberty of writing to all my friends and colleagues to say, yes I am all right.
Many of us woke up this morning to see the World Trade Center on fire. Many of us saw it first-hand - some fearfully close. When I learned of what was happening, at around 9am, I was at home, which is three blocks from the Empire State building. I decided to leave the house (my mother?s idea, at 9.10 am, telling me to get out) because at that time two planes had hit the World Trade Center, and it seemed not entirely implausible that the third biggest building in Manhattan could be next. My four-storey brownstone is a poor match for the hundred-storey building across the way. So I walked out and decided to go to my friend Doug's house in the East Village, so we could be together and try to make sense of this incomprehensible event.
Walking down Sixth Avenue was unlike anything I've ever seen. There were the two towers on fire, as on TV, smoke pouring out, the sky completely blue and clear - an absolutely perfect late summer day. And the avenue was packed. Literally dozens of people at every corner, shading their eyes, staring at the towers, while trucks, double parked, played their AM radios extra loud and cars in the center lanes idled, moving a few feet a minute, as emergency vehicles tried to nudge their way through the streets. Yet everyone was gentle and calm, in a sort of mass hypnotic state. Dignity was everywhere. We listened to the descriptions over the air, and tried to connect them with the sight downtown. A young black woman stood next to me and began to tell me that her sister was in the Center. 'What should I do'? she said. 'She likes to run up and down the floors and visit all her friends in the building.' I didn't know what to say. 'Nothing will ever be the same,' she said. A man standing with us nodded.
At some point the smoke became really thick, and white, instead of black, and that, we realized, was the dust from the first tower that fell. At this point I cried, as did most of the people standing in the street. A man quickly walked by and said to anyone who would listen, 'They bombed the Pentagon.' A little while later the second tower fell and a huge cloud seemed to settle over lower Manhattan, where it remained throughout the day. At this point we began to notice the sound of jets above, and high in the sky we could see fighter planes circling the city. Somewhere in all this the same man walked by, saw me, and said, 'See, I told you - they bombed the Pentagon, right?' I nodded my head. The AM radios were all reporting the news, plus another story, about a plane crashing in Pennsylvania. By now I was hyper. I ran over to Doug's. What could be next?
The new landscape
When I got to Doug's, he'd been watching from his 12th floor window, where he had an unobstructed view of the two towers facing south and west. We both sat there, dumbstruck. And utterly sad, then agitated, sad again, until finally we had to do something. My cell phone was ringing. His phone was ringing. My Blackberry was going off. The TV was on, loud, with the same footage. We started getting annoyed with each other. I said we should go get food downstairs in a restaurant, before they ran out. He said they were all closed already. I said how do you know? That sort of thing. We were just, suddenly, crazy. Two sensible adults were about to panic.
So we bought 54 dollars worth of baked beans, canned vegetables, rice, pasta, and pasta sauce at the deli downstairs. I figured it couldn't hurt. After all, the tunnels were closed and what if we ran out of food? I was surprised there weren't more people in the there doing the same thing.
While we were at the checkout counter piling our cans, a young man approached with four six-packs of beer. 'That's a good idea,' I said, looking at his Heinekens. 'I've been there,' he said. We knew that 'there' could only mean the World Trade Center. 'Do you think I dress like this normally?' he added, looking down at his shoes. He was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and black lace-up dress shoes. The sort you wear with a suit. 'It made Saving Private Ryan look like joke,' he said. 'You know the plaza between the two buildings?' he added. Doug and I nodded yes - that's the Plaza with the fountain between Tower 1 and Tower 2. I knew it well. I've had lunch there, lying on the concrete benches, looking up at the twin towers, marveling at their only-in-New-York brashness (you have one? We have two!). Those were beautiful buildings. 'There were feet and legs falling down everywhere around me. I saw a torso, cut open on fire.' He took his bags full of beer from the cashier. 'I've got an apartment full of Trade Center survivors. We're going to have this and get drunk.' Doug and I watched him as he walked out the door. We hauled our cans back up to the apartment.
The absurdity of our food hoarding idea was only apparent later, when thirty minutes after we were eating take-out burritos in Thompkins Square park, while the rest of East Village café society sat along Avenue A chain-smoking and drinking lemonade. By then the giant plume of dust had become part of the new landscape of Downtown.
All terrorism rests on the precept of helplessness - there's nothing you can do. No one to fight back against, no object to identify as the enemy. You're just left alone, in your own corrosive monologue of anger, fear, and frustration. Thus the idea of donating blood seemed like a positive thing to do. After lunch, I walked up to Beth Israel on 17th Street and 1st Avenue. There already you could see things had changed (it was 2.30pm by then). The Avenue had a special cordoned-off emergency lane running along the left side, for ambulances. By the time I got to the hospital, it was weirdly apparent that nothing was going on. At least 'nothing' in terms of people being rushed to emergency rooms. There were nurses everywhere, sitting outside, with banks of wheelchairs and stretchers waiting to be used, smoking, and talking on their cell phones, while people like myself milled about asking where to give blood.
I was told not to bother by one nurse. 'Everyone coming here is either burned, blinded, or choking on dust,' she said, 'you don't need blood for that.' I asked her about later - would they need blood later when people were pulled out of the rubble and the real rescue mission started? 'We're just getting ready for the bodies,' she replied, shrugging. The message was clear enough: those that had survived walked out. Those that didn't would more likely go to the morgue than the hospital. I put my name on a blood donor list, manned by a volunteer, along with my phone number, and walked away.
Now I'm back home, and it's midnight (I eventually went Uptown to my mother's, where we had dinner, drank champagne and toasted to life - because that's all we've got). The streets nearby are completely deserted. All of 5th Avenue below 42nd street is closed to cars. My neighbor, the Empire State, is cordoned off, and I had to walk around it, past the one remaining all-nude strip club in Midtown, which, to my amazement, was actually closed (this place never shuts). And I've started to wonder, 'What am I going to do tomorrow?'
Doug offered to meet me on 14th Street and give me some of the cans, if I needed any, since I'd left my share behind. Turns out only people who live below 14th Street can go Downtown now (though if you live below Canal, you can't go there at all). I'm on the other side of the line, and my baked beans won't do me any good if they stay at Doug's, down on 10th Street.
Looking forward to tomorrow
Life goes on, though certainly not like before. It's hard to imagine what this city will be like in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. Making sense of this will never end. It's not the sort of thing we can ever bookend.
What I do know is that I've always come home - and wherever I've been, be it a month long trip or a six hour trip, seeing that skyline was always exhilarating. The best damn place in the universe. Coming to Manhattan, along the Long Island Expressway, to the Midtown tunnel, and seeing the island framed in front of you, from the Battery to Harlem, has always been one of the great wonders of the world. That skyline, with its antipodes of the Trade Center and the Empire State lost its balance today. And so, it seems, have we. Somehow in the coming days we will have to regain it. Otherwise they will have won. 'They' being those who wish to utterly unbalance our way of life, to make us doubt we can be safe in our own homes, our own city. To make us doubt the fundamental precepts of liberty, democracy, plurality, and the right for people to design their own lives, as they choose to.
To those people, our greatest act of defiance is ultimately to go on living as we have - with faith that our way of life, in this wonderful city and country, will persist, thrive, and grow. With faith that we will continue inventing our own future, for ourselves. That may offend some people. It might enrage others, who think we should all live a certain way - their way. Well, if they thought what happened today would do us in, they completely misread our spirit, and who we are.
I'm looking forward to tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that? I have a life to live, and I plan to continue doing so, with greater appreciation than ever for what we have - and greater understanding that our freedoms cannot be taken for granted. They must be earned. Daily. So with that in mind, I want to wish all of you a very good night, and hope for tomorrow.
I'm sending out this note, because in the blur of today's events I received many messages from people asking if I was all right? So I am taking the liberty of writing to all my friends and colleagues to say, yes I am all right.
Many of us woke up this morning to see the World Trade Center on fire. Many of us saw it first-hand - some fearfully close. When I learned of what was happening, at around 9am, I was at home, which is three blocks from the Empire State building. I decided to leave the house (my mother?s idea, at 9.10 am, telling me to get out) because at that time two planes had hit the World Trade Center, and it seemed not entirely implausible that the third biggest building in Manhattan could be next. My four-storey brownstone is a poor match for the hundred-storey building across the way. So I walked out and decided to go to my friend Doug's house in the East Village, so we could be together and try to make sense of this incomprehensible event.
Walking down Sixth Avenue was unlike anything I've ever seen. There were the two towers on fire, as on TV, smoke pouring out, the sky completely blue and clear - an absolutely perfect late summer day. And the avenue was packed. Literally dozens of people at every corner, shading their eyes, staring at the towers, while trucks, double parked, played their AM radios extra loud and cars in the center lanes idled, moving a few feet a minute, as emergency vehicles tried to nudge their way through the streets. Yet everyone was gentle and calm, in a sort of mass hypnotic state. Dignity was everywhere. We listened to the descriptions over the air, and tried to connect them with the sight downtown. A young black woman stood next to me and began to tell me that her sister was in the Center. 'What should I do'? she said. 'She likes to run up and down the floors and visit all her friends in the building.' I didn't know what to say. 'Nothing will ever be the same,' she said. A man standing with us nodded.
At some point the smoke became really thick, and white, instead of black, and that, we realized, was the dust from the first tower that fell. At this point I cried, as did most of the people standing in the street. A man quickly walked by and said to anyone who would listen, 'They bombed the Pentagon.' A little while later the second tower fell and a huge cloud seemed to settle over lower Manhattan, where it remained throughout the day. At this point we began to notice the sound of jets above, and high in the sky we could see fighter planes circling the city. Somewhere in all this the same man walked by, saw me, and said, 'See, I told you - they bombed the Pentagon, right?' I nodded my head. The AM radios were all reporting the news, plus another story, about a plane crashing in Pennsylvania. By now I was hyper. I ran over to Doug's. What could be next?
The new landscape
When I got to Doug's, he'd been watching from his 12th floor window, where he had an unobstructed view of the two towers facing south and west. We both sat there, dumbstruck. And utterly sad, then agitated, sad again, until finally we had to do something. My cell phone was ringing. His phone was ringing. My Blackberry was going off. The TV was on, loud, with the same footage. We started getting annoyed with each other. I said we should go get food downstairs in a restaurant, before they ran out. He said they were all closed already. I said how do you know? That sort of thing. We were just, suddenly, crazy. Two sensible adults were about to panic.
So we bought 54 dollars worth of baked beans, canned vegetables, rice, pasta, and pasta sauce at the deli downstairs. I figured it couldn't hurt. After all, the tunnels were closed and what if we ran out of food? I was surprised there weren't more people in the there doing the same thing.
While we were at the checkout counter piling our cans, a young man approached with four six-packs of beer. 'That's a good idea,' I said, looking at his Heinekens. 'I've been there,' he said. We knew that 'there' could only mean the World Trade Center. 'Do you think I dress like this normally?' he added, looking down at his shoes. He was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and black lace-up dress shoes. The sort you wear with a suit. 'It made Saving Private Ryan look like joke,' he said. 'You know the plaza between the two buildings?' he added. Doug and I nodded yes - that's the Plaza with the fountain between Tower 1 and Tower 2. I knew it well. I've had lunch there, lying on the concrete benches, looking up at the twin towers, marveling at their only-in-New-York brashness (you have one? We have two!). Those were beautiful buildings. 'There were feet and legs falling down everywhere around me. I saw a torso, cut open on fire.' He took his bags full of beer from the cashier. 'I've got an apartment full of Trade Center survivors. We're going to have this and get drunk.' Doug and I watched him as he walked out the door. We hauled our cans back up to the apartment.
The absurdity of our food hoarding idea was only apparent later, when thirty minutes after we were eating take-out burritos in Thompkins Square park, while the rest of East Village café society sat along Avenue A chain-smoking and drinking lemonade. By then the giant plume of dust had become part of the new landscape of Downtown.
All terrorism rests on the precept of helplessness - there's nothing you can do. No one to fight back against, no object to identify as the enemy. You're just left alone, in your own corrosive monologue of anger, fear, and frustration. Thus the idea of donating blood seemed like a positive thing to do. After lunch, I walked up to Beth Israel on 17th Street and 1st Avenue. There already you could see things had changed (it was 2.30pm by then). The Avenue had a special cordoned-off emergency lane running along the left side, for ambulances. By the time I got to the hospital, it was weirdly apparent that nothing was going on. At least 'nothing' in terms of people being rushed to emergency rooms. There were nurses everywhere, sitting outside, with banks of wheelchairs and stretchers waiting to be used, smoking, and talking on their cell phones, while people like myself milled about asking where to give blood.
I was told not to bother by one nurse. 'Everyone coming here is either burned, blinded, or choking on dust,' she said, 'you don't need blood for that.' I asked her about later - would they need blood later when people were pulled out of the rubble and the real rescue mission started? 'We're just getting ready for the bodies,' she replied, shrugging. The message was clear enough: those that had survived walked out. Those that didn't would more likely go to the morgue than the hospital. I put my name on a blood donor list, manned by a volunteer, along with my phone number, and walked away.
Now I'm back home, and it's midnight (I eventually went Uptown to my mother's, where we had dinner, drank champagne and toasted to life - because that's all we've got). The streets nearby are completely deserted. All of 5th Avenue below 42nd street is closed to cars. My neighbor, the Empire State, is cordoned off, and I had to walk around it, past the one remaining all-nude strip club in Midtown, which, to my amazement, was actually closed (this place never shuts). And I've started to wonder, 'What am I going to do tomorrow?'
Doug offered to meet me on 14th Street and give me some of the cans, if I needed any, since I'd left my share behind. Turns out only people who live below 14th Street can go Downtown now (though if you live below Canal, you can't go there at all). I'm on the other side of the line, and my baked beans won't do me any good if they stay at Doug's, down on 10th Street.
Looking forward to tomorrow
Life goes on, though certainly not like before. It's hard to imagine what this city will be like in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. Making sense of this will never end. It's not the sort of thing we can ever bookend.
What I do know is that I've always come home - and wherever I've been, be it a month long trip or a six hour trip, seeing that skyline was always exhilarating. The best damn place in the universe. Coming to Manhattan, along the Long Island Expressway, to the Midtown tunnel, and seeing the island framed in front of you, from the Battery to Harlem, has always been one of the great wonders of the world. That skyline, with its antipodes of the Trade Center and the Empire State lost its balance today. And so, it seems, have we. Somehow in the coming days we will have to regain it. Otherwise they will have won. 'They' being those who wish to utterly unbalance our way of life, to make us doubt we can be safe in our own homes, our own city. To make us doubt the fundamental precepts of liberty, democracy, plurality, and the right for people to design their own lives, as they choose to.
To those people, our greatest act of defiance is ultimately to go on living as we have - with faith that our way of life, in this wonderful city and country, will persist, thrive, and grow. With faith that we will continue inventing our own future, for ourselves. That may offend some people. It might enrage others, who think we should all live a certain way - their way. Well, if they thought what happened today would do us in, they completely misread our spirit, and who we are.
I'm looking forward to tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that? I have a life to live, and I plan to continue doing so, with greater appreciation than ever for what we have - and greater understanding that our freedoms cannot be taken for granted. They must be earned. Daily. So with that in mind, I want to wish all of you a very good night, and hope for tomorrow.
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