Seeing Nothing (or, My WTC)

No one ever liked them, for all that time. Anyone who claims they did is a liar, like the people who used to claim they voted for Kennedy, went to Woodstock, or occupied the administration building at their college. Of the city’s more recent additions, you can love the Citicorp Building, the American Express Building, the new Conde Nast Building, but never those fraternal and sterile monstrosities.

“The two milk cartons”—that’s what my dad called them. They went up just in time to be part of the cyclorama behind my adolescence. The block where I waited to catch the bus home from my high school was one of the few places where you could see them, the Statue, and the Empire State Building clearly from the same spot on sea level. For four years, I swear I looked right through them, or past them. The mall underneath them was where I changed from the PATH to the 1, from the way out of New Jersey to the way up to the Theatre District. Clean, wellkept malls were what you had in the suburbs; Times Square, in all its sleazy late 70s glory, was so much more where I wanted to be. And so I ran through the mall as fast as I could to catch the first 1 could get. If the teenage me were more like who I am now, he might have had the good sense to catch an E up to W 4th St back in that era and then run south and east, but the point still holds. Move along now, nothing to see.

For nearly three decades, they wanted to be iconic, but it was rare that you actually looked at them. Yes, Philippe Petit made them visible for a few hours in ‘74, but two years later King Kong only made you remember the Empire State Building. They were characterless, made for pure function. They meant nothing.

On the day itself, I looked too close rather than too far. It was a Tuesday, a primary day, and I was taking the boys to see their first voting booth. (Yes, I really am that square.) Ash fell in their open stroller. I looked west down 3rd Street and saw a cloud of smoke that I just assumed, from the size of it, had to be coming from the Brooklyn waterfront. Jersey-bred as I am, I automatically wondered if it was arson. When I finally saw the Hudson River-side video of the planes hitting—shot from Frank Sinatra Drive in Hoboken, I’ve always assumed, although I wasted a lot of hours of research last year trying to prove that—I couldn’t make it fit with what I’d seen from Brooklyn. My adolescence was viewing Lower Manhattan through a telescope, my adulthood through a microscope, and I couldn’t collect myself sufficiently to see the middle distance. My clearest memory of that day isn’t sight. It’s smell: that burnt smell that impossibly made it all the way across the East River that night, and made me feel immeasurably worse than something as pesky as interrupted phone service.

Even after that, it was still absences, absences all the way. On Thursday the trains were running, but there were a half-dozen eerily empty stops we passed through downtown. It was good to ride over the Williamsburg Bridge and see the Brooklyn Bridge still standing, because that was a structure that I actually cared about. For weeks, when I stared down Broadway from Herald Square, there was a horizon point of traffic—first at 14th Street, then at Houston, then at Canal—past which there was no gridlock; a welcome absence in any other time, but not now.

After a while, the Chambers St station was open again, although they were already using the word “footprint” and there was an atheist confessional to record your memories of 9/11. By the fifth anniversary, I was passing through the “World Trade Center” station more regularly than I ever had in high school, still walking briskly, still in no mood to linger. Now I regressed: at the end of my schoolday, I took the 1 to the PATH, going back to Jersey as much as I could to visit my mom and then my dad in their final illnesses. When they first reopened the PATH station down there, they put up white banners with blue lettering on them, containing quotations about how exciting New York is, by everybody from Edgar Allan Poe to Gene Kelly to Frank O’Hara to Jackie Onassis. I loved those banners.  They, and Warren Zevon on my headphones, made me smile a lot of days when I sure didn’t feel like it. The historian in me hopes that they’re in a 9/11 archive somewhere, along with all the records of gloom and loss.

The last few years, I’ve had almost no reason to go down there. I don’t work downtown, as some of my friends do. I’ve only visited the site on purpose once, and that was with someone from out of town. To be perfectly honest, Kilmainham Gaol and Vimy Ridge have felt more like sacred ground to me, even though I didn’t know anybody who died at either of them. The hole downtown is a construction site now, a disaster site, not a battlefield. People complain about how long it’s been and there’s still no building. 

I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve spent most of my life seeing nothing down there. Ten years ago, though, I really saw it.