September 23, 2001, Sunday

NYC's Day of Prayer

I decide to go out. To walk where I have not yet gone, even though the eastern parts have opened to pedestrian traffic again. To go below Canal, to go south, to municipal, county and state and federal government areas, the Financial district, down to Fraunces Tavern. Down Broadway to see if I can view the site.

I hit the street about 1 p.m. Look south. The Cloud is there. And I can smell it too. The wind is blowing up from there today.

First time I've walked along Canal St. since the Event. The Holland Tunnel is still closed, thus the traffic is nearly non-existent. But pedestrian traffic for the designer clothing and accessory knock offs and bootlegged CDs and videos and discounted brand name perfumes and any other flotsam and jetsam you can imagine, and even what you cannot, is dense. Not quite as dense as might be on a previous last Sunday of summer when the weather's this lovely, but it's busy, and people are buying. They are all from Elsewhere, needless to say. I cross and keep going east, walking past the Baby Doll Lounge. It is steel-shuttered tight; not even the neon signs are there anymore. If you didn't know it was the Baby Doll you wouldn't have any idea. I wonder if it will ever re-open.

There's palpable haze down here today. Am thinking about an image from an article in the Times. Osama bin Laden riding out of his headquarters on the back of a beautiful black stallion, accompanied by 3 wive, numerous children and followers on the way to his hidden earths among the Afghanistan mountain caves. He's never been caught before; seems unlikely he'll be caught now, not as long as the Taliban and the tribes hold to their hospitality laws of millennia.

At Centre St. the Court House is entirely encircled by mesh fence. An armed guard, a member of the police force -- court officer -- is seated out front. I listen to him for a while. Three of his guys were lost that morning, having been on shift by 8 a.m. They ran out of the locker room to Ground Zero and got caught in the collapse. One of them was the guy he shares--shared--his locker with. I ask him if City Hall Park is open to the public. He doesn't know.

In the small park on the south side of the Court House (where I served on the jury for a very unpleasant criminal case this last spring for a couple of weeks) a group of young guys are just hanging. "Was he able to answers all your questions," the sharpest looking one asks me. "If you got any more questions I'm sure I can help you." He's Italian. They are all cops. In mufti, they're supposed to be offshift, they are unable to stay home. So they're just hanging and drinking can after can of coke.

I move further east toward City Hall. But by chance I find myself in China Town, at Columbus Park. Today there are prayer services for the families of the victims in the Fall of the Two Towers. The biggest one is at Yankee Stadium. But here's another one, much smaller, and far more humble. Mark Green's present. He's one of the Democratic mayoral candidates, the one who I would have voted for in the primary on the 11th if the Fall of the Towers hadn't happened. I go into the playground, closer to Green, who is addressing the crowd, hardly any of whom speak English. I ask a Chinese-heritage cop if this is Mark Green. I'm pretty sure I recognize his voice from the radio. Not having television I'm not so familiar with what the candidates look like. The cop has no idea who the silver-haired man in the 3-piece suit is. I get closer and closer to the stage. It is Green. He's giving a good speech, which isn't a campaign speech, which is being simultaneously translated into which dialect of Chinese I suppose is appropriate for this group. It's about how we all as Americans feel about what has happened. How our vote is our very best weapon against terrorism and repression of all kinds. I applaud that heartily.

When he finishes and steps off the stage, the Chinese Buddhist priest leads prayers. Green is respectfully behind the priest. When the hymns begin people are being brought by the community leaders to shake Green's hand. I get taken up to him too. His eyes get real wide when it's my turn. I told him that I appreciated his line about our vote very much, and that I'd planned to vote for him Before and that hadn't changed, and how happy I was to encounter him here so serendipitously. He says he noticed me from the stage--dead easy to do, as blonde as I am and so much taller than most of the other people around me. [Note, I did vote for Green in the rescheduled primary on September 25th, but then, after, Green, accepting Giuliani's poisoned political apple of agreeing to allow the mayor to stay on 3 months past the end of his administration has lost Green my vote in the October run-off.]

At Thomas Paine Park on Duane Street is Foley Square where is located the African Burial Ground memorial fountain-sculpture, "The Triumph of the Spirit." It had been falsely reported to the black SF/F community that the African burial ground had been destroyed by the Event, with bones sticking up all over, etc. As I said at the time this wasn't possible, being too far east. But I wanted to check it in person to back up my reassurances.

And City Hall Park is closed to the public. We'd only reclaimed it from the mayor's bunker mentality for such a short time . . . . The stench from the Site is really strong. My throat is getting more and more sore. I'm blowing my nose all the time. The haze is thicker.

From here on the pedestrian gets funneled back to Broadway without even noticing. Suddenly I'm in a crush of people, all shuffling very slowly through a police barricaded passageway. The very thing I most dislike. I'm walking carefully. Despite all the cleanup since the 11th, that horrible dust, evil color-sucking stuff, dominates all surfaces, vertical and horizonal. The cops' uniforms are muted as the haze settles on them during their shift. They repeat endlessly, "No stopping to look. No stopping for photos. Keep walking. Hurry up."

And I'm watching where I step, stepping carefully for there is still a lot of debris and lord knows what underfoot, and I can't see where I'm going because of the swirl of haze and smoke and the crush of the crowd.

And then, suddenly, a hole to my right opens in the crowd, at John and Cedar Streets. --And it freezes me in the crush. The scale of even the tiny bit of the destruction that I can see stops my whole system cold. Even from this distance, right here at Broadway and John, the Pile is enormous. The dust and smoke are brutal.

The cleanup astonishes me but nonetheless, that horrible crematoria ash sludge colors everything.

I get to Wall St. and the Federal Building. I only get to glimpse Trinity Church, as I only glimpsed the devastation.

I move on as quickly as possible. And though I can recognize nothing, I do know this area very well, and zig-zag my way east and south, always south, going to the Fraunces Tavern. I know it's just fine, but I want to see it for myself, and for the former Director. I get out of the crowd that continues to be a crush, that funnels itself into Wall Street. But I'm out of it. Going along William St., hang west to Delmonico's and then over to Pearl Street, and finally to the Fraunces Tavern Museum. I can breathe down here. Across the street the Goldman Sach building is as usual with its view wells into the past available. There's a sign on the FTM's locked front doors that indicates it a food and rest center for the people working at the Site. [I hear later in the week that the FTM re-opens.] Battery Park seems to have become a military campground and I'm not allowed there.

Head east again, along Water St. to the South Street Seaport. Tourists, not a lot, but some. Mostly Italian, German, Canadian and Australian it seems, from where I sit to rest for a while.

I visit a Victoria's Secret in the multi-story mall. Everything's on sale, even so, of course, I can't buy anything. The woman who offers me a free bra measurement is English. Perfect peaches and cream complexion, perfect blonde hair. Lovely, perfectly lovely. She lost her school in the Fall of the Towers, the reason she was here in NYC, the U.S. though what training the school was about I never could get straight. She was still pretty traumatized.

I head back north. Check out the Best Western Seaport Inn, a place I recall being checked out by Susan Spano, in her capacity as the then Times' Travel Section's "Frugal Traveler." It has very few guests.

But there are so many restaurants here now, since this area has become more residential throughout the 90's. Humanized, like so much of the area, and hit with serious body blows by the Event. I look at the Brooklyn Bridge for a while.

The residents of 33 Pearl St. are receiving their phone service still via a mobile Verizon phone truck. One of the Verizon switching stations is right there, and it's not back yet, evidently. It's also heavily barricaded with a lot of cops leaning on the blue police sawhorses. I'm writing descriptions of all this as quickly as I can in my notebook, making a big mess of it as I've got no surface to lean it on. I keep writing the entries over again, so that I can read them later. I keep looking up and around, to make sure I've the names right, and to decided where to walk next. It's after four by now.

A cop walks out from behind the barricades and asks me what I'm up to. I tell him. He keeps talking to me, asking me a series of questions that begin to seem quite odd. And then when he asks me what SoHo stands for, I get it, but can't believe how inept. If a person can answer that question correctly then he or she is supposed to be who s/he says, and does live there. Excuse me? Ah, the notebook. The camera. But--wouldn't a journalist have all those things? And then again, I'm not sure but that he's just using this as an excuse to come on to me. He's supposed to go on break. He offers to walk me back closer to the Site than I was able to go before.

And I go.

And it's Awe-full. And so, so, so horrible. The way the frames are still jutting up out of the rubble, around the pit, it makes me think of the ruins of the Roman Coliseum, but bigger, so much bigger. And that dust. I don't want to stay there at all.

It makes me so grateful I that I didn't see the planes hit, that I didn't see the Towers go down--and I could have, and should have, but just wasn't on the street at that time that day.

As it is, this sight is like Pound's "Usura," the usury that gets between every good thing, even the bride and her bridegroom.

Back toward home along Mulberry and China Town and Little Italy. Both areas are really busy, with people eating eating eating. This may be where at the Ground Zero sight-seers ended up.

Over to Broome, pit stop to use the bathroom in the Broome St. Bar, and say 'yo' to the staff. Broome. Entirely without traffic, late on a Sunday afternoon. This isn't ever the case. Two weeks now that the Holland Tunnel's been closed. Really changing the economy of SoHo, being as it is a destination spot, where the non-residents have out-numbered by about 10 to 1 the people who actually live here. Still no one in the bar-restaurants.

I'm still too hyper to stop, so I keep going past my own building. It smells pretty toxic up here too.

At the Playground I run into the maitre 'd of Lupe's East L.A. Restaurant with her best friend and roommate. Ileanna's gotten blonder and blonder while here (she's from Spain), and totally gorgeous, with that high-colored complexion that is so Spanish, seeming to have a few drops of North African coffee in it. Her boyfriend is a professional rescue worker. He's been down at the Site since the first night. He's not been having good dreams. Her novio's been taking photographs there lately, she says. She asks if I'm writing all this down. I say I try. She say, "You have to. We all have to remember this forever, so we don't keep doing what makes this happen."

I go back up beyond Bleecker St. again, into ye olde Walt Whitman territory on Sullivan. A nearly empty bar's bartender greets me on the sidewalk. Never saw each other before. She smokes. We flirt. She invites me in. My feet are getting torn up from the grit in the dust that's collected under my sandals' straps. I'm suddenly crashing really hard. The air here is better than in SoHo. I've passed this place hundreds of times. Never been inside. Never thought to. Order a diet coke. She puts that and a draft of Stella Artois in front of me. "It's on me," she says. "For a pretty woman with a big notebook who looks tired and sad."

So here I am, finishing the first draft account of this Sunday afternoon, that I wanted to share with those of you who have asked. I have been thinking of all of you all day. Trying to see for you. For some of you I've been trying to see particularly, like the former Director of the FTM. Here I am at the end of the last Sunday afternoon in the Summer of 2001, in a very old bar on Sullivan St. in the West Village. Another of my neighborhoods. My front yard, as the pier, the Promenade, Rockefeller Park, the World Financial Center's Plaza, etc, down to Battery Park, is my backyard. Was my backyard.

The bar gets more customers, all locals, some with kids, coming to watch the baseball game on the bar set. Cheering. Groaning. For baseball. Things are normal.

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