News: Seeking Normalcy in New York

NEW YORK CITY, SEPT. 12 — Just like many New York mornings, the shrill wail of sirens stirred me awake on Tuesday, Sept. 11. They’re an annoying but entirely typical part of life in the city. But these sirens didn’t stop and kept increasing in numbers, so I sat up in bed to see if a nearby building was on fire. One glance out my friend’s 19th floor apartment window revealed the tragedy that would change our world. I looked out her window and saw a ring of smoke around the World Trade Center, and as I was watching the fire unfold I suddenly saw a plane flying much lower than usual.

Although I didn’t see the impact of the plane on the second tower, I immediately saw the ring of fire and smoke and the hole in the front of the building. I gasped and wanted to cry but instead slipped quickly into the same shell-shocked mode that gripped the rest of Manhattan.

I turned on the television to see what was being reported, and the local stations as well as the national news shows were all live at the scene. Alternating between watching the news and the closeups and looking out the window, the next hour passed quickly. It was only when the towers had both collapsed, falling into a mushroom cloud that looked identical to the nuclear bomb shots so familiar from newsreel footage, that the true impact of what had happened began to sink in.

Every time I came to my friend’s apartment in New York, with her lovely wraparound terrace and view of the skyscrapers, I would look and marvel at the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Now there was a gaping hole in the skyline with nothing but a huge cloud of smoke, and knowing the devastation it left made me physically sick. But like other New Yorkers, I went into robotic mode. I called my friends and family to let them know I was all right and in between tried to watch the round-the-clock news coverage of the event. Finally, at 3:30 in the afternoon, I ventured out to walk the streets and get a bead on the mood of the residents. Everywhere you looked in the neighborhood, there were people wandering aimlessly, some still with a coating of the dust from the explosion. Many had walked the more than 30 blocks up from the tip of Manhattan. With all the subways shuttered and many of the tunnels and bridges blocked in and out of the city, people who came to work in the city but lived elsewhere had nowhere to go.

Perhaps the most noticeable quality was the sound of the silence. People walked wordlessly up and down the sidewalks, only occasionally uttering a sentence or two to friends or family walking with them. In the restaurants and grocery stores, no one talked. There were no words to say.

In the same way that hurricane warnings in Florida or snow storm warnings in Ohio spur people to grocery stores, the food shops in New York were packed with shoppers who didn’t even seem to know why they were there. But in case more tragedy would occur or the city was shut down the next day, they bought cereal and milk and snacks.

By Tuesday night, the city was a ghost town. The police had briefly opened some of the tunnels and highways heading out of the city, and for about an hour there was a steady flow of traffic. By later that night, however, streets usually bumper to bumper with cabs were virtually devoid of cars.

Wednesday’s morning began abruptly as well, with the phone ringing early. It was a producer of a radio show in Charlotte, N.C. My brother had apparently e-mailed his favorite radio station to let them know I was in New York and had witnessed the explosion. I agreed to come on the show later and talk for a few minutes. Again, the usual sounds of traffic and trucks and people in the streets were missing. A look out the window confirmed that the tragic events of the day before, as bizarre as they seemed, had not been a dream or a movie stunt. The twin towers were gone, replaced, still, by a huge cloud of smoke.

Another trip out on the streets was eerie. The silence, so unusual in this city, continued with conversations in near whispered tones. The dusty clothing from the day before was replaced by shorts and T-shirts. Usually impeccably dressed New Yorkers appeared to have grabbed whatever was on the floor. And now lots of people were walking around with surgical masks to keep out the dust or debris floating around in the air. It had the look of a bad science fiction movie from the 1950s.

The mailboxes on the street were all covered with handmade cardboard signs taped over them reading, “No pickups for at least TWO more days.” Later Wednesday, however, the signs had been removed. At the newstands, all editions of the the New York Post and Daily News were gone. There were New York Times editions for $1, up 25 cents from the usual daily price, and copies of Newsday. All the papers carried the same horrific pictures from “ground zero” — where the towers went down. They even showed the photo of a man flying toward the ground headfirst after jumping out of one of the towers’ upper floors.

Subways and trains had returned to service and the tunnels and bridges had reopened, but there was no traffic coming in. Most corporate businesses were shuttered with the stock exchanges closed, but the restaurants were doing a booming business as residents scrambled to return to normalcy.

But normalcy is a long way off. And in its place, in a city sometimes criticized as unfriendly, people were volunteering to help with the rescue and medical efforts and standing in long lines to donate blood. Everywhere, as friends saw other friends on the street, they embraced and said, “I’m so glad you’re OK.”

A city with a reputation of cold-hearted, hurry-up residents had slowed down long enough to appreciate what’s really important. The terrorist acts of Tuesday might have robbed us of our sense of security, but they didn’t even dent our humanity.

This article appears in Sep 19-25, 2001.