Papering over the cracks in New York City

8 Mar, 2002 12:08 PM11 mins to read

The scars are healing for New Yorkers but, as Herald correspondent ROGER FRANKLIN reports, the wounds of last
September's terrorist attacks cut deep.

There's a fellow known as Kiss Me, a desiccated Finn smoke-cured by cigarettes and vodka, who inhabits a corner stool at a bar on Second Ave called Lola's. He seldom says a word, except to justify his nickname by the occasional demand for affection from the barmaid, so it's a rare treat when something makes his rheumy eyes light up.

A young guy called Mickey, who wholesales garbage pails and plastic whatnots, managed the feat the other night, when he told a story doing the rounds all over town.

"There's this hot-shot Wall St broker, making a million bucks - you know the sort," Mickey began, "and he's in bed with his secretary first thing in the morning in some plush hotel room when his cellphone goes off beside the bed.

"So he answers it, and on the other end there's his wife, and she's crying and bawling and going, 'Oh honey, thank God you're still alive because I had to tell you how much I love you before it's too late.'

"And the guy says right back to her, 'Are you crazy! Haven't I told you not to call me at work! I'm in the middle of a very important meeting up here in the boardroom on the 99th floor'.

"There's this silence on the phone," Mickey continues, milking the moment with his salesman's sense of timing, "and then she says, 'I know who you're with, you cheating son of a bitch! A jet just knocked your building down. You better be dead when you get home'."

Everybody laughed, Kiss Me longest of all, probably because he's the only one who hadn't heard what is undoubtedly an urban myth.

But it's good to chuckle at last about September 11, even at a yarn that is sprouting whiskers. And then the talk went back to the woeful Knicks and what it must be like to be as rich as the new mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who has been making headlines for slipping out of town aboard his private jet for a hot weekend in Bermuda with his latest girlfriend.

Of September 11, however, not another word. If the shrinks and talkshow counsellors are to be believed, a joke means that some sort of healing is going on, the merest hint of a suggestion that a damaged city's psyche is papering over the cracks. You can't joke about bad memories until they have lost the ability to rip the heart apart.

It has been six months since the twin towers fell, half a year from the day when one of the planes flew so low over my son's school that the whole class ran to the windows. For weeks afterwards, the sound of thunder, even the rolling squall of random sirens that have always been a part of Manhattan's soundscape, brought his conversation to a halt.

Another attack? The thought was his and all who heard them, instant and universal. These days, while that reflex fear has faded somewhat, New York remains a very different town from the one that sparkled by the Hudson on September 10. But it is different in ways we might not have predicted when the notion of such a massacre was still a work of fiction.

Other than the hole in the skyline, it would be almost impossible for a casual visitor to pick the differences.

In Midtown, for example, the skaters carve another winter's rings on the ice rink at the Rockefeller Centre, and the tourists block the sidewalks to snap the same pictures they have always taken.

Once again, you can ride the elevators to the top of the Empire State Building, which hasn't seen a bogus bomb scare or a forced evacuation for better than four months.

But in most office buildings and places of employment - unlike at the airports, where the business of travel grows more tiresome by the day - things have regained a superficial normality.

Even at Ground Zero, order has been imposed on chaos and a tribute in the form of two columns of light where the twin towers stood is to be turned on next week. The piles of steel and concrete finally stopped burning two months ago and many residents and businesses closest to the epicentre of the horror are reclaiming their abandoned real estate.

The Wall Street Journal, which withdrew from the flames all the way to New Jersey, moved back into its former digs only last week, as did a number of brokerage houses whose traders had been camping out in hotel rooms converted to emergency offices.

Others won't be back. Those companies have discovered that commercial life is safer, quieter and cheaper in the suburbs. But a tourist wouldn't notice that, not yet anyway, not until the city's coffers begin to feel the pinch of its diminished tax base.

Loft dwellers are reclaiming their downtown homes as well, and the customers are back at Robert De Niro's string of chic TriBeCa restaurants. These days, the actor no longer finds it necessary to tout for business 6km to the north in Times Square, where he and other eatery owners hired vans to shuttle the hungry, free of charge, to the desolation zone. Meet Bobby D. on the bus, the pitch used to be, eat well, linger over coffee - and then the unspoken attraction: Stroll over to the Big Dig after dinner and watch the floodlit trucks and cranes work around the clock to haul away the rubble.

That effort, too, has gone much better than anyone could have imagined. At first, the civil defence chiefs said it could take all of five years to move the mountains. Now the latest estimates say the site might be ready for rebuilding by the new year, although the underground arteries of subway lines, telephone links and sewers may be years away from a full restoration.

The tourists queuing for the tickets that enable them to spend a few minutes on a special observation platform overlooking the 6ha crater are duly impressed by the spectacle of so much damage and all that has been done to remove it. But again, they won't have followed the ongoing debate in the local press about what should go up in the towers' place, nor will they have heard the talkback callers who swear blind that, no matter what gets built, they will never set foot in it. If they erect another target, they say, don't expect us to work in it.

The Stars and Bars that sprouted from car aerials in September are fading and fraying at the edges. The patriotic lapel pins, too, aren't seen nearly so often, and the tip-trucks filled with sand that once served as hopeful roadblocks to stop car bombers reaching potential targets - places like City Hall and the United Nations headquarters - have mostly been recalled to their garages.

True, many of the city's fire stations remain wreathed in the black and purple bunting of bereavement, the tables outside their doors still laden with votive candles and pictures of the dead. But the initial compulsion - more a sense of obligation, really - to pause for a silent moment is nowhere near as strong as once it was. The condolence books are signed and now we move on.

They are still there, though, the faces of brave lives snuffed out, and if their surviving comrades happen to be out front catching the wintry sun, two words - "Any news?" - will always elicit an update. You feel compelled to ask; it's the least you can do for their 350-odd comrades who never made it out.

"Yes, so-and-so was identified by his DNA in February and buried just last week," you'll be told, matter of fact. And, "No, there has been no news of the others", but any fireman will add that hopes are high the excavators will reach them soon.

The optimism - if that is the right word for eagerness to see a mass grave exhumed - soared last week, when excavators at Ground Zero switched their attention to the platform of compacted rubble on which the forest of cranes had stood while tackling that first mound of rubble.

Everyone knew there were bodies underneath the monsters' tracks, but not much was said about how many might be found. Now, the supervisors are daring to hope that the elusive mother lode of corpses - the cops and firefighters and medics who ran into the smoke, the office workers who had the furthest to descend and perished just metres from sunlight - is at hand.

The bodies must be there somewhere, since a mere 300 or so of the 2895 victims have been recovered. At the Staten Island "sorting site", where the debris is trucked in and scanned on a giant conveyor by eyes that have acquired a grim talent for spotting a baked arm or a severed foot in a sooty shoe, 12,000-plus body parts have been pulled from the parade of dead stone. The fact of the matter, as the firemen and volunteers who have worked the site quietly explain, is that most of the dead will never be found. They were pulverised and smashed to atoms by the crushing weight of concrete and steel.

If you can push those images from your mind, as New Yorkers have learned to do, then things are almost back to normal -almost - but not really.

To be sure, the unnatural silence that descended on the streets in the week or so after September 11, when to whistle or laugh was to invite stares of disapproval from total strangers, has been banished. There is even comfort to be found in the return of familiar aggravations - the blare of angry horns and curses of kamikaze bike messengers.

In September, especially when those anthrax letters began turning up, the mood was of incipient, anxious panic. What would be next? By last week, however, when the news broke that New York had been kept oblivious to White House fears that a stolen nuclear bomb might have been on its way to the city, familiarity with the unthinkable had robbed even that diabolical threat of its ability to chill. It's the same with the passenger jet that took off from JFK and nosedived into Rockaway Beach back in November. All manner of theories have been advanced to explain how the tail and both engines could have come loose.

But in the absence of an iron-tight explanation, we prefer to shut out thoughts of terrorism and cling to the notion that, sooner or later, the experts will be able to provide an innocent, unthreatening explanation.

It is Big Apple bravado, of course, the sort that was once, in more innocent days, displayed for the benefit of the hayseeds who wondered how New Yorkers could live, let alone love, a metropolis allegedly infested with muggers, murderers and subway slashers. But even before departed Mayor Rudy Giuliani kicked and cuffed the city back into line, things were never quite as bad as outsiders imagined.

Now, the jaded tone with which assorted urban perils were contemptuously dismissed has been redirected. So Osama bin Laden wanted to nuke us, too? How pathetic! Couldn't that sucker have come up with something more original?

The lies we tell ourselves, the fiction that it won't happen again, bring comfort when we New Yorkers speak among ourselves. But then, much more often than we would like, some random factor makes that spirited self-delusion impossible to maintain.

For many, it happens on the nicest sort of days, those mornings when the sky is clear and a bold sun defies the season. On days like that, you'll step outside to have a smoke or grab a cup of coffee and the radiant blue dome above becomes a torment. It was that way on September 11, you recall, and there is no way to stop the images flooding back.

Or could be any of a thousand things that shatter the hardening shell. One day last week, for example, at the Sixth Ave headquarters of a magazine publisher, a visitor would have noticed the iridescent orange bags that seemed to be hanging in every second cubicle. They were survival kits handed out by management, each filled with bandages, a face mask, bottled water and a flashlight to see workers down the darkened, high-rise stairwells if - dear God, don't make it when - another flight crew of fanatics parks a jumbo jet on Midtown.

So it's good to take a drink after work and find a smile in a lame, unlikely story. Humour, they say, is a balm for the spirit, and New York's soul could use a double measure.

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