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.

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.