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City
Diary
New
York maintains its air of disconnected calm, encouraged, as we were
yesterday, by a day of superb September beauty.
By Richard Brookhiser, NR senior editor
September 12, 2001 3:30 p.m.
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 ew
York maintains its air of disconnected calm, encouraged, as we were
yesterday, by a day of superb September beauty. Manhattan is in
such a strange state because a part of it was annihilated while
the bulk of it was untouched. Buses have run continuously since
the attack. Most restaurants closed, but a few stayed open —
chiefly bars, and ethnic places (indian, Chinese). Little India
on Lexington just south of NR's offices had a highish concentration
of these. My wife and I ate last night at a place called Curry Leaf,
owned by an old Armenian grocery called Kalustyan's. The owner,
a gracious old man, handled the crowd with two waiters. He expressed
his horror. I wondered, given his ethnicity — possibly Indian,
but could pass for Arab — if he felt any need to be especially
explicit.
I had my first
unpleasant conversation this morning with my super, who said in
effect that we had done worse to Yugoslavia and now knew what it
was like. Natural reticence, and the perennial difficulty of understanding
him, prevented me from replying just then. I was also thrown because
he is the only other Republican in my building. But he was a Buchananite.
Looks as if I will have to fix my own damn faucets.
I got a much
better message from an old blues guitar player, a red diaper baby
now trending neocon. He addressed me as Comrade American, and quoted
Malcolm X and the Spanish Communists: "By any means necessary...No
passeran." A line overheard as I marched north to NR:
YOUNG WOMAN to Asian owner of a beauty parlor: "I really need
my nails done, but I'll come back..."
Gramercy Park,
the tony private park four blocks from my house (I am not even close
to being special enough to own a key) had its doors open. Most of
people inside were parents with children. Three small boys imitated
marching soldiers; the boy in the lead had a plastic pistol and
gave orders. Two real soldiers in fatigues, stationed at the armory
up the street, were asked by a woman with a camera to pose before
the statue of Edwin Booth, who founded the Player's Club on the
park's south side. I thanked them for being here. The last roses
are turning brown at the edges of their leaves.
New Yorkers
wonder what they can do; the main option so far is to give blood.
I ran into my oncologist on the street yesterday who told me mine
would not be taken (cancer and chemotherapy nine years ago apparently
make me unworthy). It gives one a sense of connection to the sufferers,
and a feeling of doing something consequential.
Mayor Giuliani
has been an excellent presence, a real leader, far better than the
President so far. Gouverneur Morris's harsh judgment of Lafayette
came to mind: "You cannot extract a trumpet's note from a whistle."
W. is no Churchill, but perhaps he has other virtues which will
emerge.
New York lost
the twin towers — "the great shroud [in this case, of
the sky] rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago" —
but two twin towers remain, and I went to look at them. If you stand
on Lexington Avenue and 34 St., you can see them both — the
Empire State Building, and the Chrysler Building. Long ago dwarfed
by other structures, they still strike a viewer as the world's tallest,
because of their pointy Flash Gordon Deco tops. The Chrysler Building
blazed like foil; the Empire State Building had the subdued glow
of granite. At about where I stood, George Washington watched the
flight of his army as boatloads of the King's soldiers advanced
from Kip's Bay. He kept on.
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