|
Curiosity & Coping Encircle WTC Site
“Those people are up against the fence and they’re smiling and having their pictures taken. It’s morbid.” Saban complained to Morabito. “I wanted to come and look, to imagine the enormity of it, but I don’t want to have a picture enjoying the experience.” “It’s human nature to take something back to show their families,” he told Saban and Foley. “They don’t mean harm by it.” “It’s okay to live. Life goes on,” Morabito counseled the woman. “We can’t lay down and die because then they beat us. It’s O.K. to be sad.” On 9/11, Morabito was evacuating civilians from the north tower lobby when the south tower collapsed. Caught in the rubble, he barely escaped with his life. The firehouse, badly damaged, reopened in November, 2003, and since then he has often stood at the entrance. Drawing tourists by the dozens, he does not tire of fielding their questions, listening to their recollections, or repeating his own. He accepts every request to pose for a picture—as many as 200 a day—and particularly welcomes the chance to recall the men who went into the burning tower with him and did not return. “I feel like I was blessed to survive that day and to be able to speak about those guys,” he told a reporter, as a fresh group of tourists assembled nearby. “I know that they’re looking down on me and smiling and saying, ‘You’re doing a good job. Just keep up the good work.’ So I don’t mind being here. And I don’t mind talking to people. Every day, a thousand times a day, if that’s what it takes.” MR. INFORMATION “History, history, don’t let it be a mystery,” he shouted one recent afternoon. A vendor’s license and a jug for tips hung from his neck. “I still get people from Texas who think there were only two buildings, some of them even argue with me,” he explained to a reporter. “My mission here is to wake them up, give them the facts.” His booming recitation of the facts is hard to ignore. “Cops say to me, you’re educating them and that’s fine, but don’t yell so much,” he said. “Ah, I was looking for you,” said Canadian tourist Harry Prizant, who explained that he was returning to listen to Roland a second time. He brought his sons, Joshua, 15, and Samuel, 9. “Can you explain to them what Ground Zero means?” he asked. That, Roland later noted, is the most common question. Another popular one is, “From which way did the planes come in?” Roland will not discuss politics, and has no patience for people who do. “On Saturday and Sunday you get the hard-core conspiracy nuts out here,” he said. “Oh, they drive me crazy. Sometimes I have to go over to the other side.” He carries a stack of laminated photographs, maps and charts to help explain the layout of the former trade center site, and to answer the tougher questions. But not all can be answered. “A lot of kids will come straight out and ask you why,” he says. “That’s the hardest one.”
“We all know each other a lot better now. It was kind of like a big group therapy for while,” Dierickx said. “But we don’t talk about it anymore. We got more normal. More New York, less Mayberry.” Five years after Dierickx, 57, and her longtime companion, Ed Serrapede, fled the dust cloud and burning wreckage, her attention has shifted to the towering crane that looms outside the Deutsche Bank building. It’s not just the contaminants that fill the building that concern her. “Most people are worried about the environment,” she said. “I’m worried about something falling.” Dierickx looks forward to the new park planned for Liberty Street and the trees at the memorial, which will bring green into her view. And she is happy about the retail stores planned for Church Street. “Downtown is going to be fabulous about when I’m ready to retire, which is not that soon,” she said. Upstairs on the 12th floor, Gail Langsner, slender with long, curly brown hair, shares an apartment with a companion and the exotic birds that she boards for a living. When the towers fell, the couple fled with only the birds. It was 15 months before they could live there again. Every Thursday since March, she has gone downstairs to relive the day by giving tours on behalf of the Tribute Visitors Center across the street from the trade center site. “When you live here, the reminders are constant,” she said. “This is a way to contain it.” While giving the tours and telling her story serve a purpose, it is not something she exactly enjoys. “I’ve not gotten to the point where I look forward to it,” she said. She still sometimes has doubts about being here, as when construction work causes her building to shake. But she is mostly happy to be in the place that has been her home since 1997. “Overall, I’m glad. I couldn’t have done it without my neighbors.” FARMERS TAKE A STAND As tourists snap photos, Perez watches the often-tearful scene at the fence behind her. “You would think they come to the market, but mostly they come to see the site,” she said. The vendors are busy at the beginning and end of the day when crowds of commuters walk to and from the PATH train, but the market has struggled. “It’s not like it used to be. It never will be, I think,” said Joe Cuniglio, the market’s manager. “Not until they rebuild the trade center.” Rich Concklin set up his first stand at the market 19 years ago. After 9/11, he was determined to return. “We were happy to come back because these were our regular customers,” he said, pausing when he could no longer shout over the construction noise behind him. “The real problem is the jackhammers over there.” He was busy on a gray morning last month as a steady stream of patrons paid for blueberries and tomatoes, apple cider and doughnuts. “By not being here, we’d be giving in,” he says. “I don’t feel that we want to give in to anyone.” A PUB ON CEDAR STREET It was the lunch hour and Keane had two customers. They were seated at the bar looking at a photo album. When tourists ask about Sept. 11, Keane finds it handy to simply show them the album, which contains remarkable images of the devastation at the site, and at the pub. Keane says he welcomes curious tourists, who are helping support the business until the day that office workers finally return to the site—if that day should ever come. “I used to get excited when I would hear about what they were planning to do over there,” he said of the ever-changing rebuilding plans for the trade center. “Now, I don’t even pay attention, ’cause it ain’t going to happen,” he said. He returned the photo album to a shelf below the register. “We’ll be ready if anything happens,” he said. “We made it through the worst. But I said that before.” “HERE, LOOK CLOSER” “It is two thousand photographs of Sept. 11 taken from media,” he says whenever a curious pedestrian pauses long enough to show promise as a customer. “Here, look closer,” he will say, handing over the magnifying glass. If there is more than one tourist on the hook, he will reach into a bag and pass glasses out all around. Then, he reels them in. “Closer,” he says. He gives a three- to five-minute presentation on how he creates each mosaic, and the mysteries that lie within. In his version, the towers stand as they did on Sept. 10, 2001. But a closer look reveals a collage of chaos. The mosaic is made up of miniscule Sept. 11-related photos from newspapers, magazine covers, television and the Internet. From afar, only the colors of the photographs are apparent. Images with steely hues blend with photographs of smoke and twisted metal. Some of the blues in the mosaic are achieved with screen shots from television reports. The reds are made up of flames, fire engines, sirens, and so on. Celiker constructs the pieces on his home computer. “Each one takes three months to make,” he said of the large image in his hand. “There are no photos of victims,” he adds, in anticipation of the question. A falling man does not count, by Celiker’s criteria, because he is anonymous. “You cannot see his face,” he said. Celiker says he hopes to sell enough mosaics to be able one day to leave the corner and open a music school in Flushing, Queens, where he lives. In his native Turkey he made a living teaching the Saz, a stringed instrument. But he expects to be working the corner for a few more years. “The first year things were so fresh, the business was perfect,” he said. “It’s not so fresh anymore. I have to give deals now.”
There were anarchists, loosely gathered in Liberty Plaza, who took a dim view of the ideologies of the other two groups. Quietly circling the crowd, a political campaign staffer gathered signatures from onlookers in an effort to get a Green Party candidate onto the ballot. “You know what’s wonderful about America?” Jim Gilchrist, the leader of the Minuteman group, could be heard shouting to his supporters. “It’s called the First Amendment.” “Racists go home!” came the cry from across the street. THE THREE VENDORS “You see me, I’m not busy,” he said. He was sitting on a milk crate in the shade of the yellow and blue umbrella of his cart. He was scowling. “Why would you ask that question, ‘How is business?’” “I am sorry for my attitude,” he later said, explaining that he was frustrated by the meager sales. Tourists are good for only a few dollars a day and most only buy water or a Snapple, he said. “If I could find a better job, I would not be doing this.” The vendor next to him sold t-shirts, ball caps and sunglasses. But not many, he said. “Nothing is a big seller. This location is no good.” He would move, he said, but there are no more places near the site to legally set up his table. The third vendor in the row did have customers. They ignored the cheap New York City souvenirs, the rubber Statue of Liberty replicas, the crystal paperweights with frosted images of the Twin Towers inside, the collection of miniature bronze bulls modeled on the famous one on lower Broadway. Instead, two customers hovered at the end of the table flipping through a glossy, 26-page magazine titled “Day of Tragedy, Sept 11, 2001,” which was chock-full of color photos of the World Trade Center towers, burning and collapsing. “Price is on the back,” the vendor said. It was $10. “That’s the big seller,” he later explained. “Easy.” THE TOUR Yet, as they stood there, hanging onto the words of Geri Travis and June Grancio, it was as if it they were hearing the story for the first time. The women are among 120 guides—rescuers, Downtown residents, former office workers in the towers, victims’ family members—who lead free tours of the trade center site, and whose connections to the events of Sept. 11 give tourists a personal link to the vast emptiness the visitors have come to see. The tours are organized by the 9/11 Families Association and its Tribute Visitors Center, dedicated to providing information to visitors until there is a museum and memorial to do the job. Speaking over the clanging of construction work, Grancio pointed to the 55-story building at 1 Liberty Plaza, then explained that the towers were twice as tall. “Wow,” gasped several in the group, raising their gazes even higher. They climbed the steps of the Liberty Street bridge to the World Financial Center. The staircase was equivalent to two flights in the trade center towers, Travis said. “Imagine the firefighters, God love them, going up carrying 100 pounds or more to save people.” “I can’t imagine a spouse walking this block looking for her husband,” said Carol Marron from Rochester, looking out at the site and choking back tears. The tour helped her to better comprehend the tragedy. Living far away, she said, “you’re kind of in a bubble.” “It has to be remembered,” she said. DELI MAN It was lunch time on a hot summer Friday at the Stage Door Deli on Vesey Street. Behind a long glass counter, 10 mostly Spanish-speaking workers rapidly wrapped sandwiches, tossed salads and ladled soup. Every few minutes one called out, “Next, please!” Asked how things are different from the way they were before 9/11, he shook his head slightly. “What do you think? It’s not as busy.” He looked toward the door, past the few people waiting at the counter. “At this time you couldn’t walk through here. Before, it was 24/7. Now we close at nine o’clock, weekends six o’ clock. “ Norman and Cheryl Foster were in town for the day from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., showing the trade center site to their three children, ages 6, 11 and 14, each of whom held a bottle of Gatorade. Cheryl said she had tears in her eyes when she saw the site. “I think there’s a lot of reverence there. It’s a special place.” It used to be that most of the deli’s customers were office workers. Now business comes from construction men wearing orange vests and carrying hard hats, and tourists clutching cameras. “Most of the [regulars] are gone, only a few left,” Mostafa said. He nodded when asked if he was at the deli on Sept. 11, 2001. HISTORY IN THE MAKING The job pays well, he said as he picked up a sandwich on his break. More important is that it’s long-term work. The project, which will refurbish several subway stations and create a new transit hub at Fulton Street and Broadway, won’t be finished until 2009. He has taken pictures every day since his crew broke ground on the project, in order to have a record of the construction. Remaking Lower Manhattan after the World Trade Center attack will be part of the legacy he leaves to his five grandchildren. “I’ll tell them I was part of the new Downtown area,” he said. “When they walk by here they’ll think of me. They’ll think, ‘My grandpa did this.’”
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
