Still Standing Tall
The greatest city in the world.

Mr. Dunphy* is an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department
October 26, 2001 8:15 a.m.

ne of the periodic thrills of my childhood was when my parents would load my siblings and me into our Ford Country Squire station wagon for the annual trip down the freeway to Disneyland. As exciting as it may have been to spend the day on the rides, cavorting with Mickey, Donald, and Goofy, and eating lots of things that were bad for me, what I remember most about those trips is, as we would get within a mile or so of the Magic Kingdom, looking out the window trying to be the first in the car to spot the Matterhorn. It was that fleeting first glimpse of what I then believed to be a real mountain that signaled the multitude of joys that would soon follow.

It was with that same sense of childlike excitement that I first beheld, as a young cop, in 1985, the New York City skyline. I had flown into Newark Airport and was on a bus that would take me to the Port Authority bus station. Unfamiliar with the geography, I wasn't sure which window I should look through to see it, and I'm sure my fellow passengers on the bus spotted me for a rube, a kid from the sticks who had never seen a skyscraper in his life. But my mouth fell open when the towers of Manhattan, gleaming in the sun like the Emerald City of Oz, at last came into view: the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings dominant amid the cluster of Midtown, and of course the twin giants of the World Trade Center standing guard over the harbor and the seemingly diminutive Statue of Liberty. There it was, the Magic Kingdom for grownups. (Yes, there are those who would say that Las Vegas bears that title, but I do not associate with such people.)

I've had the same reaction on every successive trip to New York, prompting a number of cab drivers to ask, on seeing my Gomer Pyle expression in the mirror, if this were my first visit to the city. This was the case last week as I rode in a cab from Kennedy Airport and approached the Triborough Bridge. The wonders of Midtown were backlit by a setting sun that seemed to rest for a moment on the shoulder of the Empire State Building. "First time here?" asked the driver, a pleasant man from Kenya. "No," I said, suddenly fighting back tears as it hit me: The view was so striking not only for what I could see, but even more so, since September 11, for what I couldn't.

It was my good fortune to have made friends through e-mail with two of New York's finest, whom I'll call Sean and Brian, and they picked me up at my hotel one day last week for what turned out to be one of the most memorable days of my life. The three of us are Irish Catholic cops, a solid enough foundation for friendship, but when I soon discovered that they could recite lines from Caddyshack, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Pope of Greenwich Village, and many others, I knew I had found true kinship.

Our day included a visit to the offices of National Review, where I at last met people with whom I've only spoken on the telephone and exchanged e-mail. To those NR benefactors who may suspect that their generous contributions have been spent on garish and opulent surroundings, fear not: I can report that the nicest piece of furniture in the place is a folding chair.

We also visited the NYPD's Operations Unit, from which is directed the department's reaction to any major occurrence anywhere in the five boroughs. Since September 11 an extra unit has been functioning, composed of representatives from each federal, state, and local agency having a hand in responding to the attack and preventing any future ones. One wall of the center is dominated by television screens, all of them carrying news broadcasts from various sources. The Fox News Channel seemed to be a favorite; conspicuously absent were any sets carrying CNN.

In talking with some of the cops there, I verified what I already suspected to be the case, something that will have every cop who reads this nodding and saying, "Damn right." When the stuff hit the fan, it was the cop on the street who carried the day. In those first crucial hours after the attack, while the upper levels of command were paralyzed by infighting and indecision, cops in the field took it upon themselves to make the hard decisions, decisions that may have saved hundreds, if not thousands of lives.

Prior to traveling last week, I dug through boxes and boxes of old photographs searching for those I had taken 16 years ago on that first trip to New York. Among them were some I took at the top of the World Trade Center. I had chanced to meet a pair of Port Authority police officers, who, after exchanging a few war stories with me, gave me a behind-the-scenes, VIP tour of the place, including its topmost level where the public was not allowed. How indescribable it was, standing up there with the wind in my hair (I had more of it then), marveling at what an achievement those buildings were and looking out at all the proud glory that was New York and the envious world beyond. How dreadful, how staggering, how impossible it is today to know that those buildings — and with them so many people — have been reduced to so much rubble waiting to be hauled off to the dump.

I was ambivalent about visiting the site of the disaster, the area known as Ground Zero in the media and as the Pile to those who labor there, but Sean and Brian persuaded me to go. We drove downtown on Broadway, and where it makes a dog-leg turn to the right, at 10th Street, once again there was the sickening feeling in the gut, that palpable absence: the Woolworth Building, so long dwarfed by the Twin Towers, now stood naked and alone in the distance.

You may have heard it said that no image on television, no picture in a newspaper, no two-dimensional representation of any kind can do it justice. In any direction you choose to turn you will see destruction, not only in the rubble of the Twin Towers themselves but also in the buildings that surrounded them. We stood and watched as a welder worked to cut away one of the taller remaining fragments of the south tower. At last it gave way, falling to earth with a thunderous crash all too reminiscent of the moment the building came down. Sean summed up the moment perfectly: "Anybody who says we shouldn't be over there wasting every one of those [people] who did this," he said, "oughtta come down here and see it."

When a cop has worked a part of town for a while he gets to know places not by the names of the streets or the businesses on the corners, but by what has happened there: Here's the corner where So-and-so was shot; there's the corner where that kid got hit by the car; and, too often, here's the place where a cop was killed. There wasn't much I could say at that moment, standing at a place where 23 policemen, 74 Port Authority staff and police, over 300 firemen, and more than 6,000 other people lost their lives. And being there with Brian was especially touching, for his younger brother, an employee at Cantor Fitzgerald, was also killed that day. "They haven't found his body," he said, "and now I'm praying they don't."

But life away from Ground Zero is remarkably vibrant. If one of the terrorists' goals was to bring life to a standstill in New York, they would have been sorely disappointed to see what I saw last week: The weather was glorious, the restaurants were chock-a-block, and the streets were teeming with buyers and sellers of anything one could imagine. There was a long line at the TKTS booth on Times Square, and cabs were flowing through the streets like so many drops of water in a river seeking the sea, governed only slightly by such niceties as lines on the road, speed limits, and traffic signals. And, in a display of what has become, to me, sickeningly routine, the Yankees are yet again headed for the World Series. There seems to be a prevailing attitude among New Yorkers that says to the terrorists, "Yes, we are wounded, but we will carry on. You've killed thousands of us and hurt many others, and you've knocked down two of our tallest buildings. But we've got lots of tall buildings and you don't have any, and there are millions of us left alive and pretty soon you'll all be dead. So take your anthrax and stick it in your ear."

As a life-long Dodger fan I never thought I could bring myself to utter such blasphemy, but here goes:

Go, Yankees. Show 'em who's a bum.

(*Jack Dunphy is the author's nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management .)