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Friday Night
 s
the sun sets over an outraged Manhattan skyline small groups of
people begin to gather outside their apartment buildings. They are
holding candles, and they stand together, a little awkwardly, somewhat
embarrassed. This is not a city that is comfortable with open displays
of sentiment. This is a town where neighbors like to keep to themselves.
But this night they stand together, sometimes looking to that new
emptiness to the south, as the light cupped in their hands flickers,
but never, quite, seems to go out.
There's a soft
wind, a perfect early autumn breeze that blows against the flags
that seem to be everywhere, outside a bar, in the window of a supermarket,
on a baby stroller, outside our local firehouse, a base now of brave
men in mourning. The breeze also catches this city's newest, and
saddest, banners, little paper fliers stuck to the walls, to the
phone booths, to the streetlights, each one carrying a name.
Robert Sutcliffe,
Larry Boisseau, Gilbert Ruiz, Sara Harvey, Ye Wei Liang…
Each piece
of paper has a story to tell. Each is different, and yet each, heartbreakingly,
is the same. They almost all come with that identical, awful heading,
"Missing," evidence of tragedy and last, desperate hope.
Readers are provided with addresses, ages, height, distinguishing
characteristics, jewelry, and, often, a final, doomed location,
usually a floor or a stairwell in the buildings that we are still
learning to call the "former" World Trade Center. There
are photographs, wedding-day joyful, passport unflattering, graduation-day
solemn, awkward at a company dinner, smiling happily with a laughing
toddler, raising a glass in a restaurant, posing proudly in a fireman's
uniform.
Linda Oliva,
Taimar Khan, Jan Maciejewski, Gene Calvi, Arnold Lim…
The Armory
on Lexington Avenue and 26th Street has become one of the locations
where relatives of the missing can go to give these details to the
authorities. The building's monumental beaux-arts solidity
gives off a reassuring aura of civic order. It is a red-brick counterpart
to the city's tirelessly effective mayor, Rudy Giuliani; it is a
place where government is doing what it should do, and doing it
well. Kindly ladies sit in little makeshift booths dispensing hot
meals and snacks. Military types jump in and out of humvees, shockingly
soldierly in a city where camouflage is usually only a fashion statement.
Those little fliers are all over the place, attached, seemingly,
to every surface, even to the media trucks that line the sidewalks.
I see a middle-aged woman reach out to touch one. She strokes the
paper, softly.
John Scharf,
Terry Gazzini, Alexis Leduc, Jason Jacobs, Vanavah Thompson…
It is not far
from the Armory to Union Square, the place where downtown is traditionally
said to begin. Despite two decades of gentrification, it is still
a little scrappy, still believable in its century-old role as a
rallying point for demonstration and protest. Tonight it is, once
more, full. Thousands have come here, again carrying candles. Other
flames flicker by little makeshift shrines, illuminating the faces
that stare out from posters of the missing, pasted, to the trees,
to the walls, to the entrance to the subway station, to the concrete
of the construction barriers.
Arlene Babakitis,
Kevin Williams, Joanna Sigismund, Kristy Ryan, Margaret Echtermann…
For a city
that has got too used to the whiff of acrid smoke wafting up from
ruined Lower Manhattan, the sweet smell given off by the candles
is gentle relief. There is music too, "We Shall Overcome "sung
beautifully by women with intense, clever faces, from NYU probably.
Sung tonight, it is a memorial hymn, but also, perhaps, a reproach
to those mourners who want justice as well as "peace."
In this part of the square that night, there is a taste of future
controversy, with banners that protest American bombs rather than
the American bombed. Other posters warn against the temptations
of racism. Fair enough, but we have no need of lectures, not now,
not here. "War is not the answer," read the placards in
one corner. We will see.
But we are
downtown, a place where people prefer to do their own thing, so
others, less political, start to sing different songs, from slow
tunes to show tunes ("New York, New York," extempore and
ragged, never sounded better), from pop hits to, several times,
"The Star-Spangled Banner. " In an age of recorded music,
we no longer remember lyrics, but two men who do, lead the way,
coordinating the effort for the rest of us. It was a memorial service,
Big Apple style, moving and raucous, a wake, a party and a jam session.
Someone starts playing a sax. To add to the din, a jet, a fighter,
swoops low overhead. In our newly learned reflex, we all look up.
There are cheers
too, cheers for the fire truck making its way further downtown,
and applause as someone succeeds, finally, in placing a little American
flag in the hand of the statue of Washington that stands in the
middle of the square. As the Stars and Stripes slide in to old George's
metal grasp, the refrain goes out, "U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A."
Things are
quieter in Washington Square Park, ten blocks or so to the south.
A few people are sitting there, some, still, with candles, which
are guttering now as they slowly burn out. It is late. Someone has
a guitar and is playing songs from the Sixties. An appreciative
old man, eccentric in baseball cap and Allen Ginsberg beard, spins
round and round, dancing to the music in the jig of the irrevocably
deluded. At the north end of the park there is a triumphal arch,
splendid evidence of Victorian confidence. It commemorates the centenary
of Washington's first inauguration (which took place here in New
York, of course, not far from what we now know as Ground Zero).
Prolonged restoration work means that it is surrounded by a supposedly
temporary fence and this fence too now bears the spoor of Tuesday's
slaughter, the evidence of our lost confidence, those poor
hopeful, hopeless scraps of paper, garlanded with flowers and flags,
illuminated by clusters of votive candles.
Sean Fagan,
Andy O'Grady, Michael Baksi, Giovanna Gambale, Harry Goody…
Normally, if
you gaze south from here, towards Houston Street and beyond, you
can expect a view of the Twin Towers. At this time of the evening
they glitter and shimmer, transformed from their daytime ordinariness.
The blink, blink, blink of the lights at the end of their antennae
become Manhattan's lodestars, reassuring against the backdrop of
a blank, urban darkness. But not tonight. All that can be seen now
is a vast cloud of smoke, transformed by the rescue operation's
klieg lights into a ghostly, ghastly unnatural white. And we all
know what is behind that cloud.
Nothing.
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