Looking back, moving forward
SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN
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Ground Zero now looks immeasurably forlorn.
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PHOTO: AFP
Shrouded in gloom: Work continues at the WTC site.
THE weather has a knowing sense of propriety. The first time I saw the World Trade Center towers, New York City was drenched in sunshine. Buskers were busking, pretzel-vendors were pretzel-vending, and the afternoon seemed almost incongruously idle for such close proximity to a centre of high finance and frenzied activity. It was Sunday; it was also four months before September 11, 2001.
Last week, when we were driving past, if a friend hadn't wordlessly pointed out Ground Zero to me, I would have missed it altogether. Under grey, pallid skies and insistent drizzle, it looked for all the world like an abandoned construction site, shrouded in a gloom that couldn't entirely be chalked up to the weather. New York is still rainy, and the fifth anniversary of 9/11 will, in all probability, unfold in depressing dankness.
Think back
Depressing, too, because the WTC Memorial Foundation, in a series of nationwide advertisements, asks America to think back to that day: "Where were you when it happened?" "It reminds us that September 11 changed the world," says Joseph Daniels, acting president of the Foundation. The advertisements, the Foundation hopes, will drum up the $167 million in funds needed to complete a Memorial and a Museum.
Ground Zero, as it is now, looks immeasurably forlorn. Two layers of chain link fence seal off the site from the curious public, although there really isn't much to see. In a deep pit, turbid with rainwater and slush, steel girders and bulldozers sit on either side of an elevated walkway. This will be the location of the Freedom Tower — the Daniel Libeskind-designed project that, with much bureaucratic stopping and starting, was finally modified and approved for construction. It will be, strategically, 1,776 feet tall, a tribute to the American year of independence and it will share the WTC complex with the Memorial and the Museum.
The commemorative complex is a part of the Foundation's effort to "Think Back. Move Forward" — its slogan this year. In a sense, the Freedom Tower is the move forward; the Memorial itself, Reflecting Absence, will feature the representative gaping footprints of the two towers. The WTC subway station, which suffered extensive damage as well, has now been made functionally operative; only the paintings of children whose parents died on September 11 ("Poppy died here") distinguish it from other New York stations. This too is in for an overhaul, though; the forthcoming WTC Transport Hub, designed by Santiago Calatrava, is meant to resemble a bird in flight, although the projected design looks nothing so much as the skeleton of one of the bigger species of whale.
On a section of the outer link fence is a sprawling photo exhibition, tangentially touching, with a quiet sensitivity, on the events of that September day. There are photos of artefacts, like burned metal beams wrenched out of shape by the heat. There are images of happier days, like a young girl and her grandfather seated in front of the Towers. In other pictures, people gather on the roads to watch the destruction, with awe and horror writ large on their faces; immediately afterward, one man stands in the crowd, holding up for the benefit of paramedics a large piece of paper with "O+" scrawled on it. At the end of a 9/11 timeline, a photo shows plumes of dust and smoke rising from the debris, so thick that they block out the setting sun.
* * *
On September 11, 2001, Nelson Lopez was at work in the massive Brooks Brothers emporium right across the street from the World Trade Center. He's been cleaning the shop's doors and shelves since 1997, and even as I talk to him, he can't prevent himself from spraying and wiping clean little metal fixtures around the store. "I was in the restroom, I remember, when I heard the sound," he says. "A co-worker burst in and asked if I'd heard it. I said yes, and that I thought it was the computers or something." When Lopez reached the glass doors, he saw only clouds of white paper, falling like confetti from the skies. "The plane had struck the other face of the building, which I couldn't see. So when I saw only black smoke coming out, I thought it was simply a fire."
Real panic
When the second plane struck, just after 9 a.m., the real panic began. "That plane hit much lower, I could actually feel the heat on my shoulders." Lopez began running down Broadway, often jumping over people who had stumbled and fallen. "I stood for a while near a bank building, and then began edging my way back. People were jumping out of the towers. There was chaos on the streets because there was nowhere to go; all the trains had stopped."
When the first tower fell, Lopez heard rather than saw it — a low rumble that prompted him to run away again, pursued this time by a galloping cloud of thick dust. "The air started turning black, and I couldn't breathe," he says. "I thought about my son and my family. I thought I would die." But he didn't. When the air started clearing, Lopez, his throat lined with dust, joined a throng of people crossing the Manhattan Bridge on foot, back to his son and wife.
His son, Angelo, is nine now, and he has only asked his father about 9/11 a couple of times, and that tentatively. When Brooks Brothers reopened the store, exactly a year later, Lopez had the option of shifting to a different branch, but he chose to come back here. "I guess I came back to see how strong I am, to not be scared," he says. "I don't think about it now, I block it out." Lopez looks out of the glass doors he has just cleaned. "Even after five years, when you look out of here and don't see the towers, it feels weird. It's a strange thing to say, but I miss having them there. I really do."
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