11/7/2001
Just got down to see the site for the first time. My plans to volunteer have come to nothing. Tonight I'm meeting someone in the village anyway--I'm waiting for him as I write--so in the spare time after work I went down to Chambers Street for the first time since spring.
In a way it's exactly what you'd expect, and exactly what you've seen on the news anyway, only in fragments you're obliged to stretch your neck for. One can't see the ground, the crater walled in with wreckage that we see on the news, photographed from above. There are fences of one stripe or another on every side. But you do see the wreckage of a couple of buildings high above, and four or five cranes towering over it, and a persistent flicker of steam and smoke and exhaust, hanging low and clinging like the clouds over the Smoky Mountains. At night the whole scene is washed out and a little unreal under blinding stadium lights.
From a distance I saw a crane lifting a dropping a steel weight on the remnant of a building, rattling all the twisted girders connected to it, sending a loud knock uptown to the barricade, more than a second after the ball hit. The crane shook and torqued as well, trying to pull its weight free, and apart from a good shake the wall didn't seem to have suffered much for it.
I walked clockwise, keeping as close as I was allowed, and sometimes unwittingly closer--security is pretty lax on the outer edges. From the east side I got a better look at the same demolition I'd been watching before, and could see that rather a lot of building was left, not just a wall, as it had appeared from the north side. The weight--not a ball but a cylinder with a conical top--how big was it? The height of a man? Of three? It was hard to judge but I'd think taller than a man, anyway. It would strike the girders and gush sparks, send dust and gravel cascading stories down through the wreckage, and occasionally a long twisted strip of metal would shake free and fall clattering to the ground; the bigger ones just swayed, disorderly. It all made such surprisingly high-pitched noise for such big stuff. Periodically, someone out of my line of sight hosed down some part of the building, though I never saw any evidence of fire there--it might be that the function was chiefly to quell a cloud of potentially toxic dust. On the southern side of the area another building, tall in any other context, stands covered with black netting except for the thirty-foot-deep gash, perfectly vertical, down the center of the near side--the path of some large chunk from the Towers.
I stood for quite a while there, waiting maybe to see a substantial beam loosened, watching the strategy of the crane's driver, breathing through my necktie (the first time one has ever been useful to me--the wind was gusty, and full of dust and grit, the smell isn't so bad at this point). In the end I realized I was mostly watching because there's something hypnotic about slow demolition, and very little of my brain was thinking about the attacks or any larger questions. I walked on, completing the circuit just to see what I could. On the south end, which looks like a cross between a construction site and a medieval thoroughfare, handmade signs are everywhere forbidding pictures or videos--I'm still not sure why. I saw two different men with cameras anyway. From here I could see the walls that you see on the news, the one remaining hollow corner of one of the Towers, and I realized the more substantial wreckage I'd watched the crane working on must be another building, maybe building seven. All cars and trucks leaving by the southern gate were hosed down.
Finally I wound around to the riverside, and found myself most unexpectedly in a place I recognized--the opulent plaza of the World Financial Center, and the little marina Jon and I used to go sit next to, empty of its yachts. One tiny touring boat sat moored there, with maybe thirty people in a line, holding candles. Above me, above the miraculously intact glass atrium, a corner of one of the clay-colored buildings was smashed; the rest seemed intact, though of course utterly dark. Everyone is quiet. Human, not uniformly somber, but quiet nevertheless.
Sitting now in a second-story window seat in the perpetually darkened "Cafe Dell' Artiste," which caters perhaps a little too self-consciously to the overly self-conscious. Here the desserts are hit or miss, but all extravagantly named, and my lovely sophomore waitress is forever teetering on the point of forgetting my presence entirely. Opposite me is a cadaverous German in his thirties, untouched by the sun, spectacles reflecting the screen of his stylish laptop. Most of New York carries on being New York, without much sign of effort. But Rebecca, working now at "the pier," where aid is dispensed to the staggeringly wide pool of people who have lost family, home or business to the attack, comes home every day with stories that seem unreachably foreign.
There's my friend Christopher in the street. Late. Enough for now; more news as I get it.