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NYC Day 6This is the final entry in Michael Stern's series of reports from New York. — DS This will be the last of my daily updates; it has been a week since the bombings and New York has found a routine. I hope to have access to my office tomorrow, and will be back to work. Many of the businesses in lower Manhattan have reopened, but our building doesn't have power yet. I managed to get inside to fetch a few things, but it required climbing 16 storeys with a flashlight. The army and police have set up a complex series of "frozen zones" in lower Manhattan. However, as with many secure places in society, once you get inside you have access to pretty much everything. My business card and driver's license got me to 42 Broadway, where I waited for hours until I could get into the building. One other business owner was there, a Greek guy named Michael who runs a networking company and who shares the 16th Floor with my company. A number of financial firms rely on him for their trading lines, and he was furious that we did not yet have power. However, ConEdison and the full force of the Federal government have gone into making sure Wall Street opened this morning, and those of us with more modest businesses must wait. The odors and dust near the wreckage are heavy, and almost everybody wore face masks of varying degrees of complexity. I am often suspicious when the government assures me that something is "perfectly safe," so I was relieved to see an official from the Environmental Protection Agency wandering around ground zero without any mask at all. I went as close as the intersection of Liberty Street and Broadway, a block from the base of the World Trade Center. By this point, you have all seen the wreckage on television. In some regards, the television coverage and news photos from Tuesday are more horrible than the scenes most of us saw in real life. The photos of people clinging to the holes in the building, for example (http://www.nytimes.com/images/2001/09/12/nyregion/dest.3.jpg), are more terrifying than anything most people actually saw. Photos of the wreckage, on the other hand, fall short. The iconic shot of the plaza (http://www.nytimes.com/images/2001/09/12/nyregion/dest18.jpg) fails to convey the layering of the destroyed material, or how crazily the beams have been twisted and bent. Things that used to be straight are curved and twisted. Orderly forms have been melted into organic shapes. Along the front of the Twin Towers there used to be horizontal building that housed retail shops and some offices. Emily and Jeremy will remember that we bought doughnuts there. Half of this building has been torn off. The exposed end is black and juts in, with girders sticking out at sharp angles. It looks like the stump bottom of a dead and fallen tree. You can see the rotten roots and the dark decaying space, and you don't want to lean against it because you know that slimy things live there. I had not appreciated from photographs that the tall shiny outer shell of the building, where still upright, is typically upside down and inside out. The shell was blown out like the petals of a tulip -- we used to see the outside, but now we see the inside, upside down. Most of the shops downtown were closed yesterday; the normal customer base was not coming to work, and the rescue workers were well supplied without them. Among the buildings close to the towers, cracked open when they fell, was a large Duane Reed pharmacy. Rescue workers who need aspirin, for example, or saline solution, step through the shattered windows and pick what they need off the shelves. The only stores that have been open downtown for the last several days are two liquor stores. I am told that they do a tremendous business. The city has cleared the powdered remains of the tower from the streets and sidewalks. If you walk through downtown with your head down, it looks normal (if empty of people). However, awnings, lightposts, cars, and mailboxes are covered with heaps of gray powder. Windows are caked in it. The McDonalds north of Wall Street has become a sign-in point, with rescue squads writing their names in the dust. "Manchester Squad #3 was here" "Brooklyn North EMS" "Nous sommes Arrives". I am a huge fan of the French team, by the way. If I should ever fall in a well, see that you get these guys on the job. In the middle of Broadway, south of my office, there is a giant bronze statue of a bull by Arturo de Modica. It is a popular landmark, and its horns and haunches are shiny from people patting it as they walk to work, and from tourists perching on its neck for photographs. Somebody has affixed American flags to its horns, and has taped an Osama bin Laden "wanted" posted to its ass. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, starts tomorrow. The traditional Torah schedule requires the reading of the story of Abraham and Isaac on the second day of this holiday. In this story, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham agrees and moves to kill his son, until God stops him and blesses him for his willingness to murder his only son. This is the passage of the Torah and the Christian bible closest to the "70 virgins" stuff in Islam (speaking of which, can somebody point me to the original text of that; I've never been able to find it). This timing doesn't intimidate me, but it does scare me that some of the smarest, best read people I know are talking about this seriously. They contemplate death and sacrifice. What will you sacrifice when the President asks? I hate to end on that, so let's remember that the big problems of two weeks ago now seem very small. We have also seen Homeric heroism — firefighters who rushed into the flames as others ran away, tower personnel who stayed to direct others out, and the passengers of United Flight 93 who tackled their hijackers despite certain death. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, usually unreadable, has been exceptional for the last week. They wrote on Friday, "How much more poignant to realize that the overwhelming majority of these quiet acts of valor will remain unknown but to God and the ordinary men and women who attempted them."
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