10
By Dan McVeigh, Associate Professor of English
round Zero is about a million tons
of rubble in the 16-acre quadrilateral
between Liberty, Church, Vesey and
West Streets. Signs call it, perhaps in
defiance, a “construction site.” You can’t get
closer to it than a few blocks, near enough
to see about five or six waffled stories of
debris and twisted girders, but not quite near
enough to tell what 110 stories crumpled into
a few really means. At about 10,000 tons
removed a day, they hoped to get down to
street level by New Years. It seemed impossible at Thanksgiving when I visited.
New Yorkers know that the World Trade
Center was really 117 stories, with seven of
them under the ground, including its own
mall, parking garages, and subway station.
On the
revised
city
subway
map, the
latter has
been
reduced,
along with
a few
nearby stations, to an unexplained light gray,
and it is where my cousin, John McCabe,
was when the first plane hit.
introspective True Buddha Diamond Temple.
Stands hawk flag pins, art photos of the Twin
Towers, and “I Love NY More Than Ever”
sweatshirts Tourists snap photos of the devastation, sometimes with their families posed
in the foreground.
Everywhere lurk odd reminders of how near
September 11 really is. Posters welcoming
you to the city highlight the WTC as a main
attraction; the two L’s in the Downtown
Alliance logo are still recognizably towers
that simply aren’t there anymore. Although
police and firemen are newly popular, a visitor may get a jolt from cars all over the
place advertising the COP-SHOT program
of rewards for capturing anyone who’s shot a
policeman, complete with a dramatic bloodstain over the
“SH.” With
dismal irony,
fire vehicles
tell you to
report a fire
by
calling
“911.” Still, a
crowd on the
sidewalk will applaud strolling firemen like
celebrities, and people buy FDNY T-shirts
for their kids. More than 340 firefighters
were killed that day, after all, more than
in city history before that. It’s hard to imagine the nerve, or job, that rushes you into
a building where, 80 stories above, jet fuel
is burning at 2000 degrees, melting girders
and incinerating bodies. I bought two FDNY
shirts.
Tourists are drawn to Ground Zero, maybe
to make sure it’s real, not a scene out of a
disaster movie. To New Yorkers, it’s different. John’s sister won’t go there.
Around the perimeter of Ground Zero, life
goes on. In fact, there’s a strange sense of
one famous tourist attraction being replaced
by another, sad one. Signs on stores and
restaurants read, “We will rebuild. Support
your local business.” Moran’s Restaurant is
newly re-opened; its flyers—printed flyers
dot windows everywhere—pay tribute to
dead patrons. The Pussycat Lounge boasts
that it’s back in business; so is the more
Having grown up in Brooklyn, I left the city
a couple of years before the towers were
built. Now almost every New Yorker, I’m
told, knows someone of the thousands who
died. My own coll Y