April 23, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:So I've been sitting on
So I've been sitting on the WTC site for seven months now, and it occurred to me today that it no longer looks like a grave. And though I know that there is, as the book says, a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up, it still makes me sad that it now looks like nothing more than the largest construction site in the world.
Every so often those of us who came in that first week play a game of "Do you remember?"
Do you remember how you had to drive through six or seven checkpoints, manned by soldiers with real guns, to get to the site?
. . . how it looked that first week, that unimaginably high tower of smoking rubble looming up between the buildings every time you turned a corner? How awful it was to look at it for the first time? And even more awful was the fact that it didn't look real -- we'd already seen too many movies that looked just like this to believe it in our hearts.
. . . how we worked 16, 18, 20 hours a day, every day? (I had two other jobs that I had to keep up while I worked at the site. Everyone else just stayed there trying to get control of things.) We felt terribly guilty when we finally went home.
. . . how we couldn't spend any money for weeks, even if we wanted to? The best restaurants in New York, the Red Cross, and several dozen movie stars were lined up six deep to feed us.
. . . how the cops demanded photo badges every time they stopped us, only we didn't have any such thing, so we ended up making them by hand with stuff we bought from Staples?
. . . how long it took to straighten out the pay records of the swarms of men who showed up and worked, some of them three or four days without sleep, before we lost hope?
. . . how the men were fine as long as they were working, but as soon as they left work they'd want to get drunk to forget -- and they wouldn't forget; they'd end up drunk and sobbing hysterically on the floor of the bar. Which wasn't embarassing because everyone else was crying too.
. . . how the machine operators would warn us not to look down as we crossed the site because of what we might see.
. . . how we had our own private little park off the river where we could spend fifteen minutes eating lunch, because no one was allowed south of Houston street. How silent the streets were, away from the site.
. . . how we merrily ignored the traffic rules (there wasn't any traffic!), zipping up one-way streets the wrong way and driving our little gators all over Manhattan. And kept getting stopped on our way home for forgetting that you couldn't just look both ways and motor on through the red light.
. . . how the National Guard was camped in Battery Park. With, I believe, a tank. And a lot of very nice, very young people from the Midwest. It breaks your heart to think of them trying to storm some beach somewhere.
. . . how our hearts stopped when we heard about the Anthrax letters. . . how sure we were that we would be the first ones exposed.
. . . how wrong it seemed when they really started clearing away the wreckage. It just seemed too soon to take away the husks of the buildings and the debris -- as if we were forgetting what had happened there.
For weeks after it happened I didn't even believe it -- not really. I worked in that building for years, on and off, and just a week before I'd been to the observation deck for the first time with some visiting relatives. Two weeks before, my then-boyfriend and I had met in the Cortland Street station, bought a cake at the coffee shop/bakery near 1 WTC, and gone to a friend's house in Battery Park City for cocktails and dinner. I could see every inch of the plaza -- the J. Crew where I bought my favorite plaid skirt; the escalator I used to take to Building Seven to visit one of our clients; the Citibank where I once spent almost an hour getting rid of some con-artist who must have thought I was fresh off the boat from hicktown; the Sephora where I first tried my favorite perfume -- oh, just everything. If you didn't know the building, you don't know what I'm talking about; if you did, you too can probably walk those stores with me in your mind, picking up some little thing on the way to your train, or windowshopping to kill a little time before drinks at Moran's or Tall Ships or Windows on the World. You can see the open space where the little carts were, especially the one that made those ridiculously good salads -- right next to the escalator to the PATH train, which rode to a client every day during the height of the Asian meltdown. And that stops my heart, because right now my trailer is right next to the place where that escalator used to be, and it's a couple of walls and a deep hole in the ground. Right outside my window is the cofferdam they're building so they can repair it.
For weeks I walked around the site trying to appreciate it. I wanted, as in the movies, a single moment when it all came crashing over me and I finally understood in my heart all that had been lost. I never got it. I had many, many moments when I cried -- the worst was when I saw those thousands "Missing" flyers papering Union Square, and every single flyer had a picture of a victim on one of the happiest days of their lives, looking radiant and expectant and utterly unable to imagine the kind of tragedy that had ended their lives. The oddest was when I was riding on the subway one night, and I was tired, and after Fulton Street the conductor said "Next Stop, Chambers Street" and I wondered, for a split second, why he wasn't stopping at the World Trade Center -- and realized for the first time that nothing would ever, ever be the same again.
So I still haven't comprehended it, in the sense of the word that means to develop full understanding. But I keep having these moments, like when I realize that I am sitting in a trailer, in a hole that contains nothing but the absence of two buildings, and that entirely unfamiliar objects in my line of sight are in fact the skeleton of a place that I did not particularly love when it was still around, but which was part of the fabric of my every day.
And if I am saddened by the loss of a couple of tons of steel and concrete, I know that I cannot imagine the continuing grief of the families of the victims.
The cleanup is almost done. There's one pile of debris left on the south side of the site; the rest of the workers have turned from removing to rebuilding. The subway and the PATH trains will be reinstalled (better than the original, if you listen to the workers), and new buildings will go up, and we'll move on. But, morbid as it might seem, I hope that we'll keep reminding each other what it was like in those first days. Partly because we owe it to the dead, and partly because we owe it to the living. But also because those of us who were alive on September 11, 2001 joined the generations of history who saw their world destroyed in a single hour, and I wouldn't like us to forget how much changed in that little span of time.
UPDATE: A reader sends this picture. I can't think of any better memorial.
