Sept. 11 Anniversary is Observed in Many Ways

POSTED OCT. 2, 2006

Last month, the Trib presented snapshots of daily life along the perimeter of the World Trade Center site. This month’s stories are from Sept. 11, 2006. It was not, of course, a day like any other. This report from the blocks surrounding the site was written by Andrea Appleton, Etta Sanders and Carl Glassman.

A GATHERING AT P.S. 234
Five years later, as the bells tolled and the names were read aloud a few blocks south, nearly 100 P.S. 234 parents gathered in the school cafeteria to chat with old friends and new acquaintances. There were no ceremonies and no speeches, just muffins, coffee and memories.

Some parents were new to Downtown. Others were here on Sept. 11, 2001. Sabina Barrett tossed a ball to her 15-month-old daughter, Twyla. On the day of the terrorist attack, her middle daughter, Thea, was about to begin preschool. Her oldest child, Melinda, was a P.S. 234 1st-grader. “She had a little bit of a hard time with it,” Barrett said. “She’d ask weird questions like, ‘How tall does a building have to be for someone to want to fly a plane into it?’”

On this day full of reminders that such bad things can happen, it was more difficult to leave after the children went  to their classes. “It was hard today to drop my child here and then walk away,” said Vivien Dybal, mother of Maxim, 5. She recounted how she had fled her home near the South Street Seaport, her 4-month-old son strapped to her chest.

At 9:15 many parents went to the auditorium to watch “Our School,” a film by fellow parent Linnae Hamilton that tells of the school’s evacuation. Sabina Barrett stayed downstairs. She hadn’t seen the film and wasn’t ready now. “In some ways it is harder to face now than it was at the time,” she said. “Because I truly believe it will happen again.”

As the cafeteria cleared out, she coaxed Twyla into the stroller. But she wasn’t going far.

“I always have in the back of my head how far I am from my children if I had to walk,” she said.

ALONG THE PERIMETER As on each previous anniversary, visitors gathered along the perimeter of the World Trade Center site while the names of the dead were read aloud, hour after hour. There were solitary buskers who took song requests and a Mennonite choir that sang. A man in a goose suit promoted Kindness Day and a group of Japanese teenagers made origami peace cranes. There were calls to prayer and drummers for peace, and the fences were jammed with flower bouquets and balloons.

Sgt. Rick Kowalker, a retired Marine, stood at attention in his dress blues, next to his horse Melody. A pair of empty riding boots rested backwards in her stirrups to symbolize the fallen victims. The horse nuzzled an empty baby carriage, and those who had gathered to watch her laughed. They took turns stroking her soft nose. “She’s the message,” said Kowalker. “I’m just the accessory.”

Linda Raeside brought her own form of creature comfort, a blue-and-gold macaw named Chuckles. Wearing a firefighter’s patch around his neck, he posed for pictures with dozens of charmed firemen in front of Engine 10, Ladder 10 on Liberty Street. “My neighbor was on one of those planes,” Raeside said, as the parrot sidled along her arm. “She used to come and play with Chuckles every day on her way to work.”

Around the corner, a woman stood at the fence, staring towards a police trailer. “I’m sorry. I can’t talk,” she said. “I’m waiting for a name.” She leaned her forehead against the fence as the voices over the loudspeaker worked their way through the letter G.

TRYING TO HEAL
Twice a week, Cruz Delgado, 60, leaves her home in North Bergen, N.J., and travels to 170 Broadway, where counselors and holistic therapists of the Saint Vincent Medical Center’s World Trade Center Healing Services work to rid her of the demons of Sept. 11, 2001. Coming into the PATH station at the trade center site this day, exactly five years after she walked down 31 flights from her office in the north tower, made her nervous, she said.

“With all the news about 9/11 and walking around there, it’s very difficult.” Delgado lost nine coworkers at Blue Cross and Blue Shield. “I saw a lot of things,” she said. The therapy has helped with her anxiety and depression, she said, “but I don’t think I’ll ever get back to the way I was.” “With all the news about 9/11 and walking around there, it’s very difficult.” Delgado went into a room with an acupuncturist, who placed needles into her ears. She sat beside a window overlooking the site where thousands gathered. But Delgado didn’t see the scene. Her eyes closed, and she soon fell asleep.

A DAY FOR GOOD DEEDS
A short boat ride from Ground Zero, some volunteers observed the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 by doing a simple good deed.

Organized by New York Cares, 75 volunteers went to Governors Island to spruce up its public spaces. They built and painted picnic tables, and weeded the overgrown grounds around the island’s stately homes.

The number of visitors to the island was twice what it was last year, according to volunteer coordinator Judy Rivkin. “There was no place for them to sit,” she said. “These picnic tables are really going to make a big difference.” Cathy Ellsworth felt a personal connection to the day’s work. Sixty-seven of her husband’s co-workers at Sandler O’Neill died on Sept. 11. “We lost several good friends that day,” she said, dipping a brush in a can of mahogany-colored paint. “It’s a celebration of what people’s lives were like on 9/11 rather than the sad thing that happened.”

Mary Zinni, from the Bronx, taking a break from weeding, said that if she hadn’t volunteered she probably would have been sitting at home mesmerized by the images of the World Trade Center attacks being replayed on television. “It’s beautiful here,” she said, looking at the peaceful, grassy expanse around the area called Colonel’s Row. “I’d rather be doing something than just thinking about what happened.”

Sherry Fazio said that on past anniversaries she had been at Ground Zero helping check in family members attending the ceremonies. This year she wanted a different way to honor the day. “You don’t want to have an emotional day, but you do want to have an impactful day,” she said.

THE SURVIVORS In a tiny green space near the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge are five trees that once stood at the trade center. Battered but alive, they were replanted courtesy of the Prince of Monaco. On the day before the Sept. 11 anniversary, a small group from the Tribeca Spiritual Center visited the garden after their ecumenical service. Two of them, Sherri Rosen and C. Bangs, chose to approach each of the trees and hug it.

“To know that something survived through all that disaster was so meaningful to me and so uplifting,” Rosen said. “When I hug the tree I feel connected to that inspiration.”

Bangs was beneath the East River in a smoke-filled subway car after the first tower collapsed. “Like these trees, I also survived 9/11,” she said. “These are my kindred spirits.”

A TIME TO SING
The Down Town Glee Club gave a special anniversary concert at Trinity Church. Among those who sang was  second tenor Chino Lever, who limped into position in the third row and belted out his part like the others. But unlike the others, he had not performed in concert for years. Five years, to be exact.

As a mechanic in the north tower, Lever was working in the metal shop in the fourth basement on the morning of Sept. 11. He believes it was a freefalling elevator, blowing out doors as it dropped, that sent something crashing down on him, shattering his ankle. His foot, he said, “was dangling like a pendulum.”

His escape was harrowing, his recovery tortuous. But three operations later, after much encouragement from Glee Club leader Jerry Osterbergg, Lever returned to the group he had sung with for 12 years. But it didn’t matter that this was an anniversary.

“Nine-eleven to me is every day because I wake up in pain, I go to bed with pain,” he said. Some nights he hears cries and people screaming.

But after the concert Lever was smiling. “As long as I can mingle with my friends and I can sing,” he said, “the day goes good.”