"Missing" signs: observations from 9/13/01
This is the third part in a series of posts about my personal experiences during, and after, the 9/11 attacks. For the previous installments, see "Totally terrorized": observations from 9/11/01, and "We kept our masks on": observations from 9/12/01.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Email to family and friends, 9/15/01, 7:20 PM:
12:30 A.M., technically Thursday morning, 9/13/01:
After walking all over Manhattan all day Wednesday, I got home and went up on the roof of our building to see what I could see "down there." "Ground Zero" was becoming the most commonly used name for the site of the WTC disaster, but if you said "down there" people understood what you meant, too. I stood on the roof looking over at the cloud of dust and smoke from Ground Zero, which was now lit up from the huge baseball stadium lights they had brought to the scene to keep the rescue going all night. I still couldn't decide exactly where the towers had stood in the view from here, though I could guess based on where the smoke was coming from.
To the right in my view was the huge dark presence of the Domino Sugar Refinery, which sits one block away, right on the East River. As the oldest industrial plant that's still in use in New York City, the 108-year-old building had been there since before "skyscraper" was even a word. You can imagine, with each major skyscraper that went up, a group of workers looking out across the river, saying things like: "What are the building now?" and "I heard it's going to be the tallest building in the world" and "How can they build something that tall without it falling over?"
A Japanese girl came up on the roof. She was staying in our building with a friend of hers, uncomfortable staying at home alone in her apartment a few blocks away. We had the same conversation everyone had had with everyone they had talked to - it turns out she had been at home sleeping when it all happened, and her mother had called from Japan to tell her what was going on. After about 10 or 15 minutes of talking about it, with the glowing cloud of smoke right across the river from us, she apologized and said she had to leave, and suddenly went downstairs - she was sick at her stomach, and was going to throw up. This didn't come as a surprise to me at all - everyone's stomach was just a huge knot.
Just after she went downstairs, I noticed a helicopter flying near the Williamsburg Bridge. It pointed a bright spotlight onto the bridge's roadway, and flew parallel down the length of it. I don't know anything about helicopters, but I could sense a hyper, almost reckless energy in the way it was moving - it was going faster than any helicopter I'd ever seen, and the front of the rotors' diameter was tipped down about 30 degrees lower than the front. It not only shined the spotlight on the road part of the bridge, but paused to point it up and down the bridge's trestles. It went back and forth like this for 7-8 minutes, and at one point as the helicopter circled around, the light hit my spot of the roof, blinding me for a second. Other people joined me on the roof, having seen the search light. Then a cop car pulled up onto the bridge, turned its lights on, and stopped on the part right even with us. Could this be an escaping suspect? A suspicious van or rental truck? We kept watching, but after a few minutes the helicopter and police car left. We'll never know what was going on - I guess this kind of stuff was happening all over the city.
9:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M., Thursday, 9/13/01:
There was no "Don't come to work" message on my voicemail this morning, so I headed into Manhattan. The trains were not running south of 14th Street, which is right where the L Train, the one I take to get to work, comes into Manhattan (it used to be called the "14th Street Line"). The L was running, though, and there were trains going up to Midtown, where I work, though my usual train wasn't running.
The Arab guys who work the city's thousands of coffee/donut carts weren't out there today. I should explain that if you ride in a taxi or by a coffee on the corner in New York, it's an Arab guy 90% of the time. The Arab guy who works the one inside the lobby was there, though. He asked if I'd heard about the guys the FBI had caught in Boston and on the Amtrak, who were supposedly linked to the attack. "THEY SHOULD HAVE SHOT THE MOTHERF***ERS RIGHT THEN AND THERE," he added. I felt lucky that I didn't have to constantly prove what side I was on. Not surprisingly, every yellow cab in the city was now adorned with an American flag.
Going to work was worthless. How were we supposed to care about what rating "Everybody Loves Raymond" gets in Minneapolis when the bloodiest scene in America since the Civil War was taking place 3 miles away? We all had gone into work trying to go along with what Giuliani had said about going back to work to prove they couldn't stop our city - going to work actually felt like a tough, defiant act for a while. But then, as my assistant put it, "we could only fake it for a few hours." The constant sirens passing by on Third Avenue didn't help. Neither did the bomb threats that caused nearby Grand Central Station and a rival advertising agency down the street to be evacuated. We watched the news and checked the internet all day.
5:00 P.M. - 8:00 P.M., Thursday, 9/13/01:
No trains were heading towards downtown now, or at least that was the latest report. So I walked down Lexington Avenue. Though I had heard about it, I had forgotten that the Armory on Lexington between 25th and 26th Streets was now set up as the place for people with missing family members to come try to identify them. "The mayor's office is asking family members to bring dental records to the Armory," the newscaster had said, not needing to explain why. As I got near the Armory, I started to see the "missing" signs. I put "missing" in quotes because after seeing thousands of the photocopied sheets, it hit me that the whole thing was delusional. These people weren't missing. Everyone knew exactly where they were. On one local news channel, a newscaster had been talking about the number feared to be dead, and another quickly corrected her, "we should say, those believed to be MISSING."
The signs looked like the signs you put up when you're missing your dog, but with pictures of people: women posing in wedding dresses; overweight guys smiling, beer in hand, at a 4th of July barbecue; photos from work functions with two guys' heads circled saying "both feared missing from WTC." There were Thompsons and there were Kristnamurthys. Guys who were security guards at the World Trade Center and guys who were CEO's. Near the Armory, the walls, posts, phone booths, and mailboxes started to be covered with the signs. Family members were walking around with missing signs taped to their shirts, and some were handing out the signs to everyone passing by. On a normal day in New York, you look away when people try to hand you something on the street - it's probably an ad for a clothing sale or a menu for a new restaurant. Today, you couldn't look away.
As I got to one intersection, I saw a huge crowd that was blocking the street. Someone said that Bill Clinton was over there. Sure enough I saw that unique head of white hair sticking up from the crowd. There were some guards there, but they let a crowd surround him, and get right up to him. Family members were going up to him and crying, showing him their missing signs. I don't know what you say when a sobbing woman comes up to you with a picture of her husband and says he's one of the 4,763. I thought to myself that was probably the first time Bill Clinton had absolutely nothing he could say to a beautiful young woman. But the crowd loved seeing him - it meant a lot to them. Everybody started chanting, "U. S. A., U. S. A." As I passed the cop who was responsible for directing traffic in the intersection, he shouted towards the crowd "Enough already!" He had a point - vehicles needed to get to the Armory.
The Armory had names of Civil War battlefields engraved into the stone walls - Bull Run, Gettysburg, Antietam. Antietam, I thought, wasn't that the bloodiest? 22,000 men in one day or something like that? The street outside the Armory was packed with family members, police, and military personnel. I asked where you volunteered, and they said they didn't need any more help today, but that if I gave them my number, they'd call me.
They said they need people with cars to move supplies, so I told them I probably could have access to an SUV tomorrow, and left a voicemail for a friend who had one. It was frustrating trying to volunteer to do something, but being unable to do anything at all. You couldn't even give blood - there hadn't really been any need for it yet. The big news of the day was that they'd rescued 5 firefighters. It was good news, obviously, but also bad news. A whole day of work, with thousands of people digging through the rubble, and only five people out of the 4,763?
Thursday night, 9/13/01:
This catastrophe brought out the patriotism in everybody. On the subway, a normal-looking 30-something black man wearing a baseball cap stood in the middle of the car, leaning against a pole. He had a 4 foot by 6 foot American flag tied around his neck, hanging down behind him like a cape. He was reading a Superman comic book, with Superman posing in his cape right on the front cover.
I got back to Brooklyn and went to some friends' place. We played Trivial Pursuit to try to get our minds off the craziness. One of the questions I got was "What is the largest office building in the world?" "The World Trade Center," I guessed, cringing. "No, the Pentagon."
-------------------------------------------------------------
See also "Totally terrorized": observations from 9/11/01, "We kept our masks on": observations from 9/12/01, and "This is the morgue": observations from 9/14/01.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Email to family and friends, 9/15/01, 7:20 PM:
12:30 A.M., technically Thursday morning, 9/13/01:
After walking all over Manhattan all day Wednesday, I got home and went up on the roof of our building to see what I could see "down there." "Ground Zero" was becoming the most commonly used name for the site of the WTC disaster, but if you said "down there" people understood what you meant, too. I stood on the roof looking over at the cloud of dust and smoke from Ground Zero, which was now lit up from the huge baseball stadium lights they had brought to the scene to keep the rescue going all night. I still couldn't decide exactly where the towers had stood in the view from here, though I could guess based on where the smoke was coming from.
To the right in my view was the huge dark presence of the Domino Sugar Refinery, which sits one block away, right on the East River. As the oldest industrial plant that's still in use in New York City, the 108-year-old building had been there since before "skyscraper" was even a word. You can imagine, with each major skyscraper that went up, a group of workers looking out across the river, saying things like: "What are the building now?" and "I heard it's going to be the tallest building in the world" and "How can they build something that tall without it falling over?"
A Japanese girl came up on the roof. She was staying in our building with a friend of hers, uncomfortable staying at home alone in her apartment a few blocks away. We had the same conversation everyone had had with everyone they had talked to - it turns out she had been at home sleeping when it all happened, and her mother had called from Japan to tell her what was going on. After about 10 or 15 minutes of talking about it, with the glowing cloud of smoke right across the river from us, she apologized and said she had to leave, and suddenly went downstairs - she was sick at her stomach, and was going to throw up. This didn't come as a surprise to me at all - everyone's stomach was just a huge knot.
Just after she went downstairs, I noticed a helicopter flying near the Williamsburg Bridge. It pointed a bright spotlight onto the bridge's roadway, and flew parallel down the length of it. I don't know anything about helicopters, but I could sense a hyper, almost reckless energy in the way it was moving - it was going faster than any helicopter I'd ever seen, and the front of the rotors' diameter was tipped down about 30 degrees lower than the front. It not only shined the spotlight on the road part of the bridge, but paused to point it up and down the bridge's trestles. It went back and forth like this for 7-8 minutes, and at one point as the helicopter circled around, the light hit my spot of the roof, blinding me for a second. Other people joined me on the roof, having seen the search light. Then a cop car pulled up onto the bridge, turned its lights on, and stopped on the part right even with us. Could this be an escaping suspect? A suspicious van or rental truck? We kept watching, but after a few minutes the helicopter and police car left. We'll never know what was going on - I guess this kind of stuff was happening all over the city.
9:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M., Thursday, 9/13/01:
There was no "Don't come to work" message on my voicemail this morning, so I headed into Manhattan. The trains were not running south of 14th Street, which is right where the L Train, the one I take to get to work, comes into Manhattan (it used to be called the "14th Street Line"). The L was running, though, and there were trains going up to Midtown, where I work, though my usual train wasn't running.
The Arab guys who work the city's thousands of coffee/donut carts weren't out there today. I should explain that if you ride in a taxi or by a coffee on the corner in New York, it's an Arab guy 90% of the time. The Arab guy who works the one inside the lobby was there, though. He asked if I'd heard about the guys the FBI had caught in Boston and on the Amtrak, who were supposedly linked to the attack. "THEY SHOULD HAVE SHOT THE MOTHERF***ERS RIGHT THEN AND THERE," he added. I felt lucky that I didn't have to constantly prove what side I was on. Not surprisingly, every yellow cab in the city was now adorned with an American flag.
Going to work was worthless. How were we supposed to care about what rating "Everybody Loves Raymond" gets in Minneapolis when the bloodiest scene in America since the Civil War was taking place 3 miles away? We all had gone into work trying to go along with what Giuliani had said about going back to work to prove they couldn't stop our city - going to work actually felt like a tough, defiant act for a while. But then, as my assistant put it, "we could only fake it for a few hours." The constant sirens passing by on Third Avenue didn't help. Neither did the bomb threats that caused nearby Grand Central Station and a rival advertising agency down the street to be evacuated. We watched the news and checked the internet all day.
5:00 P.M. - 8:00 P.M., Thursday, 9/13/01:
No trains were heading towards downtown now, or at least that was the latest report. So I walked down Lexington Avenue. Though I had heard about it, I had forgotten that the Armory on Lexington between 25th and 26th Streets was now set up as the place for people with missing family members to come try to identify them. "The mayor's office is asking family members to bring dental records to the Armory," the newscaster had said, not needing to explain why. As I got near the Armory, I started to see the "missing" signs. I put "missing" in quotes because after seeing thousands of the photocopied sheets, it hit me that the whole thing was delusional. These people weren't missing. Everyone knew exactly where they were. On one local news channel, a newscaster had been talking about the number feared to be dead, and another quickly corrected her, "we should say, those believed to be MISSING."
The signs looked like the signs you put up when you're missing your dog, but with pictures of people: women posing in wedding dresses; overweight guys smiling, beer in hand, at a 4th of July barbecue; photos from work functions with two guys' heads circled saying "both feared missing from WTC." There were Thompsons and there were Kristnamurthys. Guys who were security guards at the World Trade Center and guys who were CEO's. Near the Armory, the walls, posts, phone booths, and mailboxes started to be covered with the signs. Family members were walking around with missing signs taped to their shirts, and some were handing out the signs to everyone passing by. On a normal day in New York, you look away when people try to hand you something on the street - it's probably an ad for a clothing sale or a menu for a new restaurant. Today, you couldn't look away.
As I got to one intersection, I saw a huge crowd that was blocking the street. Someone said that Bill Clinton was over there. Sure enough I saw that unique head of white hair sticking up from the crowd. There were some guards there, but they let a crowd surround him, and get right up to him. Family members were going up to him and crying, showing him their missing signs. I don't know what you say when a sobbing woman comes up to you with a picture of her husband and says he's one of the 4,763. I thought to myself that was probably the first time Bill Clinton had absolutely nothing he could say to a beautiful young woman. But the crowd loved seeing him - it meant a lot to them. Everybody started chanting, "U. S. A., U. S. A." As I passed the cop who was responsible for directing traffic in the intersection, he shouted towards the crowd "Enough already!" He had a point - vehicles needed to get to the Armory.
The Armory had names of Civil War battlefields engraved into the stone walls - Bull Run, Gettysburg, Antietam. Antietam, I thought, wasn't that the bloodiest? 22,000 men in one day or something like that? The street outside the Armory was packed with family members, police, and military personnel. I asked where you volunteered, and they said they didn't need any more help today, but that if I gave them my number, they'd call me.
They said they need people with cars to move supplies, so I told them I probably could have access to an SUV tomorrow, and left a voicemail for a friend who had one. It was frustrating trying to volunteer to do something, but being unable to do anything at all. You couldn't even give blood - there hadn't really been any need for it yet. The big news of the day was that they'd rescued 5 firefighters. It was good news, obviously, but also bad news. A whole day of work, with thousands of people digging through the rubble, and only five people out of the 4,763?
Thursday night, 9/13/01:
This catastrophe brought out the patriotism in everybody. On the subway, a normal-looking 30-something black man wearing a baseball cap stood in the middle of the car, leaning against a pole. He had a 4 foot by 6 foot American flag tied around his neck, hanging down behind him like a cape. He was reading a Superman comic book, with Superman posing in his cape right on the front cover.
I got back to Brooklyn and went to some friends' place. We played Trivial Pursuit to try to get our minds off the craziness. One of the questions I got was "What is the largest office building in the world?" "The World Trade Center," I guessed, cringing. "No, the Pentagon."
-------------------------------------------------------------
See also "Totally terrorized": observations from 9/11/01, "We kept our masks on": observations from 9/12/01, and "This is the morgue": observations from 9/14/01.
posted at 11:11:00 PM | permalink
<< Home