The day dawned different and stayed that way. Traffic was thin and sidewalks quiet. The stock exchange didn’t open, nor the airports, the schools, Broadway. People loaded up on bottled water, batteries, canoes. The law enforcement presence was intense: men with machine guns, gunboats circling the harbor.
Downtown, fires burned, smoke plumed. The odor stood.
It was a city humbled and scared, where the possibilities of destruction had been recalibrated. It was Sept. 12, 2001. The day after.So much has been said and written about what happened on 9/11. The following day is forgotten, just another dulled interlude in the aftermath of an incoherent morning.
But New Yorkers were introduced that day to irreducible presumptions about their wounded city that many believed would harden and become chiseled into the event’s enduring legacy.
New York would become a fortress city, choked by apprehension and resignation, forever patrolled by soldiers and submarines. Another attack was coming. And soon.
Tourists? Well, who would ever come again? Work in one of the city’s skyscrapers? Not likely. The Fire Department, gutted by 343 deaths, could never recuperate.
If a crippled downtown Manhattan were to have any chance of regeneration, ground zero had to be rebuilt quickly, a bricks and mortar nose-thumbing to terror.
Eight years later, those presumptions are cobwebbed memories that never came to pass. Indeed, glimpses into a few aspects of the city help measure the gap between what was predicted and what actually came to be.
You could start at one downtown street corner. The wisdom of the day after was that New York would never again bunch together important institutional nerve centers, binding them together in vulnerability.
On Sept. 11, American Express had its headquarters at the southwest corner of West and Vesey Streets. It is still there. Since then, Verizon has settled its headquarters into the northeast corner. Goldman Sachs has assumed the northwest. All that’s missing is the southeast corner. That will be filled by the tallest building in America.
The Times Square novelty man
David Cohen pointed out what the tourists like: replica taxicabs, “I Love New York” T-shirts and thimbles — any gewgaw inscribed with New York. “See this digital picture postcard?” he said. “Nice little item.”
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