Color Change
From blue & red to red, white & blue.

September 17, 2001 2:15 p.m.

ew Yorkers will be pleased to know that their tragedy is the tragedy of their upstate neighbors. In the eastern Catskills, where the economy depends on fading farms, a fading tourism industry, and flourishing prisons, they were collecting the now-familiar materials for the business kits of rescue workers — socks, batteries — at supermarkets, and money for the families of firemen at middle-of-the-road checkpoints on Route 209, the big highway up there (it is two lane). All the stores, from gun and trophy-mounting shops, to Tae Kwan Do studios, to nail salons, had patriotic messages on their signboards. Flags hung on every porch, many with the creased brownish lines of long storage. (The mainline Protestant churches added a somewhat discordant note: "Revenge Restrained/Is a Victory Gained" said one church signboard. Food for thought. Was Dresden wrong? Arguably. Was D-Day?) On Route 17, closer to the city in Joisey, Satin Dolls, a strip club which claims to be the model for the Ba-Da-Bing Club in The Sopranos, offered "God Bless America," instead of a typical come-on such as "Brunette Night."

What else is missing, besides so much of the city's heart? The famous map of blue and red counties has temporarily become red, white, and blue. Osama bin Laden's strike at Gotham may have been like Pearl Harbor, tactically brilliant but strategically obtuse. Consider only the question of political psychology. What foe, bent on a major war, would strike America in liberal New York? It would be as if the Germans, early in World War I, instead of sinking the Lusitania and its load of eastern rich people, had cunningly sailed up the Mississippi and bombarded Des Moines or some other capital of the peaceful, Germanic midwestern heartland.

Al Sharpton is also missing. He might as well have been having breakfast at Windows on the World for all the noise he has made. The New York mayoral candidates were dancing around the issue of how much to praise the drop in crime, while promising to reform the cops. The latter was a feint to Sharpton, who argues that the telos of the NYPD is to shoot Guinean peddlers and ram nightsticks up the rectums of hapless Haitians. Now New York has seen that the telos of the cops is to rush to heart of disaster and die by the hundreds in the line of duty. A very cynical friend of mine said, "White people may be coming back."

Two great New Yorkers who died in the last few years are also missed. Think of the passion Leonard Bernstein would have thrown into a performance of the German Requiem. His politics was loopy, but he had a heart of gold, and the soul of a showman — not a bad combination for now. Kurt Masur will perform the German Requiem this week, and he will undoubtedly do a splendid job — the German repertoire is his mother's milk. Perhaps he will etch a new style of concern in our minds.

Also missed is John Cardinal O'Connor. The tough old Irish admiral would have been a welcome presence. Cardinal Egan is more austere and dignified: perhaps that too will become the prevailing style of the Roman Catholic Church. In a service at St. Patrick's he delivered a line — "not ground zero, but ground hero" — that could have seemed tinkling and vulgar, but that, combined with his demeanor, was instead ringing.

Which leads to a delicate point: What is the matter with the Pope? We hear more from John Paul II when a serial killer is about to be executed after numerous hearings and appeals, than when 5,000+ innocent New Yorkers have been murdered. Is this impression the result of faulty media coverage? Since John Paul II is one of the great men of the 20th century, I hope so.

Wall Street reopened this morning. I took the Lexington Avenue line to the Municipal Building, north of the financial district. City Hall, a fine old wedding cake of a building, had black and purple bunting — a very nineteenth century effect. One expected to see men in frock coats and toppers. Pedestrian traffic was directed away from Broadway to the west. At Nassau and Liberty Street, a loudspeaker was playing patriotic tunes. I caught the end of the "Star-Spangled Banner," with a trumpet taking the melody. What a grand and stirring song — and how untrue that it is impossible to sing. The one trick is to start it low, say the key of G, not the key of B-flat in which it is usually arranged, to suit the voices of professional singers.

Wall Street is the newest and oldest part of town at once. Old New York burned so many times — once during the Revolution, again in the 1830s — that most of the buildings are a museum of twentieth century styles, towering, and vastly overbuilt for their tiny lots. The streets, however, are still the warren of the seventeenth century, named from longest items or things (Beaver, Marketfield), or for English sovereigns or dynasties (William, Hanover).

Police were letting only people who worked at the stock exchange proceed to it. One man, New York reasserting itself, argued that he had to cross the cordoned off space because his office was on the other side. Sorry, pal — there's been some roadwork. By shuffling west, one could cross Wall Street at William St. Trinity Church at the head of the street looked undamaged, but worn — like an old man who has let himself become shabby. A big flag hung from the exchange. George Washington (he seems to be everywhere) stood on the steps of Federal Hall. At the corner of Broad and Wall is the Morgan Bank in front of which someone exploded a wagon full of dynamite and metal fragments in 1920. The shrapnel marks are still in the façade. It was the preceding great Wall Street disaster.

The spirit of the Exchange in reopening is admirable. But behind it loomed the backdrop of ever-burning smoke, and a twisted mesh of building. The wreckage of the World Trade Towers looks like the ugly modern sculpture that used to disfigure the courtyard in front of it. Firms have gone to New Jersey for temporary headquarters. Those will become permanent unless the city fathers offer some attractive packages, either downtown, or on Governor's Island, or on the Brooklyn waterfront. Wall Street cannot survive as a heavily guarded Colonial Williamsburg of capitalism.