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conuly
(Or not so loosely.)
Images of the WTC
A post on propaganda and 9/11 by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
liz_marcs
There are more Muslims entering the country now than directly after 9/11
More Muslims Arrive in U.S., After 9/11 Dip
By ANDREA ELLIOTT
America’s newest Muslims arrive in the afternoon crunch at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Their planes land from Dubai, Casablanca and Karachi. They stand in line, clasping documents. They emerge, sometimes hours later, steering their carts toward a flock of relatives, a stream of cabs, a new life.
This was the path for Nur Fatima, a Pakistani woman who moved to Brooklyn six months ago and promptly shed her hijab. Through the same doors walked Nora Elhainy, a Moroccan who sells electronics in Queens, and Ahmed Youssef, an Egyptian who settled in Jersey City, where he gives the call to prayer at a palatial mosque.
“I got freedom in this country,” said Ms. Fatima, 25. “Freedom of everything. Freedom of thought.”
The events of Sept. 11 transformed life for Muslims in the United States, and the flow of immigrants from countries like Egypt, Pakistan and Morocco thinned sharply.
But five years later, as the United States wrestles with questions of terrorism, civil liberties and immigration control, Muslims appear to be moving here again in surprising numbers, according to statistics collected by the Department of Homeland Security and the Census Bureau.
Immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia are planting new roots in states from Virginia to Texas to California.
In 2005, more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent United States residents — nearly 96,000 — than in any year in the previous two decades.
More than 40,000 of them were admitted last year, the highest annual number since the terrorist attacks, according to data on 22 countries provided by the Department of Homeland Security.
Many have made the journey unbowed by tales of immigrant hardship, and despite their own opposition to American policy in the Middle East. They come seeking the same promise that has drawn foreigners to the United States for many decades, according to a range of experts and immigrants: economic opportunity and political freedom.
Those lures, both powerful and familiar, have been enough to conquer fears that America is an inhospitable place for Muslims.
“America has always been the promised land for Muslims and non-Muslims,” said Behzad Yaghmaian, an Iranian exile and author of “Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West.” “Despite Muslims’ opposition to America’s foreign policy, they still come here because the United States offers what they’re missing at home.”
For Ms. Fatima, it was the freedom to dress as she chose and work as a security guard. For Mr. Youssef, it was the chance to earn a master’s degree.
He came in spite of the deep misgivings that he and many other Egyptians have about the war in Iraq and the Bush administration. In America, he said, one needs to distinguish between the government and the people.
“Who am I dealing with, Bush or the American public?” he said. “Am I dealing with my future in Egypt or my future here?”
Muslims have been settling in the United States in significant numbers since the mid-1960’s, after immigration quotas that favored Eastern Europeans were lifted. Spacious mosques opened in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York as a new, highly educated Muslim population took hold.
Over the next three decades, the story of Muslim migration to the United States was marked by growth and prosperity. A larger percentage of immigrants from Muslim countries have graduate degrees than other American residents, and their average salary is about 20 percent higher, according to census data.
But Sept. 11 altered the course of Muslim life in America. Mosques were vandalized. Hate crimes rose. Deportation proceedings began against thousands of men.
Some Muslims changed their names to avoid job discrimination, making Mohammed “Moe,” and Osama “Sam.” Scores of families left for Canada.
Yet this period also produced something strikingly positive, in the eyes of many Muslims: they began to mobilize politically and socially. Across the country, grass-roots groups expanded to educate Muslims on civil rights, register them to vote and lobby against new federal policies such as the Patriot Act.
“There was the option of becoming introverted or extroverted,” said Agha Saeed, national chairman of the American Muslim Task Force on Civil Rights and Elections, an umbrella organization in Newark, Calif. “We became extroverted.”
In some ways, new Muslim immigrants may be better off in the post-9/11 America they encounter today, say Muslim leaders: Islamic centers are more organized, and resources like English instruction and free legal help are more accessible.
But outside these newly organized mosques, life remains strained for many Muslims. To avoid taunts, women are often warned not to wear head scarves in public, as was Rubab Razvi, 21, a Pakistani who arrived in Brooklyn nine months ago. (She ignored the advice, even though people stare at her on the bus, she said.) Muslims continue to endure long waits at airports, where they are often tagged for questioning.
To some longtime immigrants, the life embraced by newcomers will never compare to the peaceful era that came before.
“They haven’t seen the America pre-9/11,” said Khwaja Mizan Hassan, 42, who left Bangladesh 30 years ago. He rose to become the president of Jamaica Muslim Center, a mosque in Queens, and has a comfortable job with the New York City Department of Probation.
But after Sept. 11, he was stopped at Kennedy Airport because his name matched one on a watch list.
A Drop, Then a Surge
Up to six million Muslims live in the United States, by some estimates. While the Census Bureau and the Department of Homeland Security do not track religion, both provide statistics on immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries. It is presumed that many of these immigrants are Muslim, but people of other faiths, such as Iraqi Chaldeans and Egyptian Copts, have also come in appreciable numbers.
Immigration from these regions slowed considerably after Sept. 11. Fewer people were issued green cards and nonimmigrant visas. By 2003, the number of immigrants arriving from 22 Muslim countries had declined by more than a third. For students, tourists and other nonimmigrants from these countries, the drop was even more dramatic, with total visits down by nearly half.
The falloff affected immigrants from across the post-9/11 world as America tightened its borders, but it was most pronounced among those moving here from Pakistan, Morocco, Iran and other Muslim nations.
Several factors might explain the drop: more visa applications were rejected due to heightened security procedures, said officials at the State Department and Department of Homeland Security; and fewer people applied for visas.
But starting in 2004, the numbers rebounded. The tally of people coming to live in the United States from Bangladesh, Turkey, Algeria and other Muslim countries rose by 20 percent, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data.
The uptick was also notable among foreigners with nonimmigrant visas. More than 55,000 Indonesians, for instance, were issued those visas last year, compared with roughly 36,000 in 2002.
The rise does not reflect relaxed security measures, but a higher number of visa applications and greater efficiency in processing them, said Chris Bentley, a spokesman for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of Homeland Security.
Like other immigrants, Muslims find their way to the United States in myriad ways: they come as refugees, or as students and tourists. Others arrive with immigrant visas secured by relatives here. A lucky few win the green-card lottery.
Ahmed Youssef, 29, never thought he would be among the winners. But in 2003, Mr. Youssef, who taught Arabic in Egypt, was one of 50,000 people randomly chosen from 9.5 million applicants around the world.
As he prepared to leave Benha, a city north of Cairo, some friends asked him how he could move to a country that is “killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he recalled. But others who had been to the United States encouraged him to go.
He arrived in May 2005, and he found work loading hot dog carts from sunrise to sundown. He shared an apartment in Washington Heights with other Egyptians, but for the first month, he never saw his neighborhood in daylight.
“I joked to my roommates, ‘When am I going to see America?’ ” said Mr. Youssef, a slight man with thinning black hair and an easy smile.
Only three months later, when he began selling hot dogs on Seventh Avenue, did Mr. Youssef discover his new country.
He missed hearing the call to prayer, and thought nothing of unrolling his prayer rug beside his cart until other vendors warned him against it. He could be mistaken for an extremist, they told him.
Eventually, Mr. Youssef found a job as the secretary of the Islamic Center of Jersey City. He plans to apply to a master’s program at Columbia University, specializing in Arabic. For now, he lives in a spare room above the mosque. Near his bed, he keeps a daily log of his prayers. If he makes them on time, he writes “Correct” in Arabic. “I am much better off here than selling hot dogs,” he said.
Awash in American Flags
Nur Fatima landed in Midwood, Brooklyn, at a propitious time. Had she come three years earlier, she would have seen a neighborhood in crisis.
Hundreds of Pakistani immigrants disappeared after being asked to register with the government. Thirty shops closed along a stretch of Coney Island Avenue known as Little Pakistan. The number of new Urdu-speaking pupils at the local elementary school, Public School 217, dropped by half in the 2002-3 school year.
But then Little Pakistan got organized. A local businessman, Moe Razvi, converted a former antique store into a community center offering legal advice, computer classes and English instruction. Local Muslim leaders began meeting with federal agents to soothe relations.
The annual Pakistan Independence Day parade is now awash in American flags.
It is a transformation seen in Muslim immigrant communities around the nation.
“They have to prove that they are living here as Muslim Americans rather than living as Pakistanis and Egyptians and other nationalities,” said Zahid H. Bukhari, the director of the American Muslim Studies Program at Georgetown University.
Ms. Fatima arrived in Brooklyn from Pakistan in March with an immigrant visa. She began by taking English classes at Mr. Razvi’s center, the Council of Peoples Organization.
She has heard stories of the neighborhood’s former plight but sees a different picture.
“This is a land of opportunity,” Ms. Fatima said. “There is equality for everyone.”
Five days after she came to Brooklyn, Ms. Fatima removed her head scarf, which she had been wearing since she was 10. She began to change her thinking, she said: She liked living in a country where people respected the privacy of others and did not interfere with their religious or social choices.
“I came to the United States because I want to improve myself,” she said. “This is a second birth for me.”
Old New Yorkers, Newer Ones, and a Line Etched by a Day of Disaster
Old New Yorkers, Newer Ones, and a Line Etched by a Day of Disaster
By MICHAEL BRICK
Five years ago, on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center. Downtown smelled like Coke cans and hair on fire. It was televised live.
In New York City, 2,749 people were killed. About eight million remained. Since that day, the numbers have changed.
The population grew by more than 134,000 from 2000 to 2005, the city’s latest Planning Department calculations show. In that time, 645,416 babies were born and 304,773 people died. A half-million more people came from other countries than departed for them, and 800,000 more people left for the 50 states than came wide-eyed from them.
The meaning in the math is that today a great many New Yorkers lack firsthand knowledge of the city’s critical modern moment.
Five years on, New York is a city of newcomers and survivors. And between them runs a line. The line makes for no conflict, no discernible tension; it works a quieter breach.
Borne of the routine comings and goings of urban life, of births and deaths, the line divides views of a singular moment. Across the line, consummately familiar events can appear contorted.
On one side, the newcomer side, a man seeks accounts of that day; on the other side a man withholds his account. On the newcomer side, a woman visits the absent towers to feel some connection; on the other side a woman feels connected, and then some.
On the side of those who lived in New York, you can share a sense of trauma both layered and ill-defined.
“It’s like someone who has been in a war zone,” said William Stockbridge, 50, a finance executive who was working downtown during the attack. “It’s different.”
On the other side, you can feel like the new boyfriend at your girlfriend’s family reunion the year somebody died — somebody young, somebody you never met.
“You feel like you’re on the outside,” said Matthew Molnar, 26, a waiter in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who lived in Middlesex County, N.J., in 2001. “You feel like you missed out on a little bit of history.”
Newcomers and survivors: those terms ring harsh and blunt only because the line is so often unspoken. It runs soundless and invisible down Broadway from Harlem over the Williamsburg Bridge out to Coney Island and to Fresh Kills, up past the airports across the Grand Concourse into Yankee Stadium, through the bleachers where you can’t drink beer anymore and up out of the park into the nighttime sky.
The line flashes into view on the city streets for moments at a time. When jet fighters buzz the skyscrapers for Fleet Week, some of the people below — the ones who were here on Sept. 11 — flinch. More frequently, though, the line operates beneath the surface of conversations, of interactions, of transactions, of life. The line controls small things, controls the way people react to the phrase “and then Sept. 11 happened,” as though a date on the calendar could “happen.”
The line’s contours emerge in conversations. Ask about the attack, and people will describe a sense of ownership.
“You either experienced it firsthand,” said Amanda Spielman, 30, a graphic designer from Jackson Heights, Queens, who was in the city, “or you didn’t.”
Others describe that sense differently, but draw the line in the same place.
“I think for the people that seen it on TV, it is more painful than for the people who saw it here,” said Paolo Gonzalez, 29, who manages a parking lot under the Brooklyn Bridge and who saw the attack. “For the other people it was real. If you was here, when the buildings came down the only thing you were thinking was, ‘Run.’ ”
Across the line, the new arrivals recognize that sense of ownership.
“I’ve been told that I just don’t get it and that I could never understand what it was like to be there in New York on Sept. 11,” said Laura Bassett, 27, who moved to the city from North Carolina after 2001. “I hate that five years later, people still debate which bystander is allowed to be more upset, the New Yorker or the American.”
The line emerges perhaps most powerfully around the fallen towers, 2.06 acres of concrete known as ground zero. Because of the line, the site is a paradox, an emotional contradiction, a mass grave and a tourist attraction.
Some people feel so strongly about the place they cannot agree on an arrangement for listing the names of the dead; others feel so strongly about the place that they make sure to visit between Radio City Music Hall and the Statue of Liberty. Between those emotional poles is a middle ground, and the line runs through its center.
“People who moved to New York, everyone wanted to go down and see it,” said Dede Minor, 51, a real estate broker who was in her office in Midtown on the day of the attack. “For New Yorkers, it was too real.”
Jose Martias, 57, a construction worker who was drinking coffee near the East River when the attack began, said he knew why the newcomers visit the site.
“They don’t understand it so they go down there to see the hole,” Mr. Martias said. “It’s an attraction to them, like going to the circus.”
But across the line there is genuine emotional curiosity, a feeling that people in less cynical times used to call empathy.
“I’d didn’t think I’d be that affected,” said Leah Hamilton, 24, a logistics consultant who moved to Manhattan from Washington State last year. “But when I went to ground zero, it was the first time I’ve felt an emotional reaction like that to something I wasn’t a part of. You feel the energy and you could feel the sadness.”
The line can reach into the future, forging perceptions of New York and its destiny. Some new arrivals speak of the attack as a reason to come to the city.
“We felt like there was a lot of energy here,” said Meg Glasser, 26, a student who moved to the East Village from Boston this year. “We wanted to be a part of it in some way.”
But across the line, that sense of energy is tempered by standards for comparison.
“I know people who have been here a year or two, and they find New York fantastic,” said Father Bernard, 67, a Roman Catholic monk who was born in Brooklyn and who goes by only that name. “They’re right, but they didn’t know the New York before.”
The line reaches into the past as well, dividing memories. Each generation tells the next where they were when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, when the Kennedys and Martin Luther King were killed or when a space shuttle exploded, but a major act of destruction in a major American city creates more firsthand accounts.
Psychological studies suggest those accounts have played a role in drawing the line. After the attack, a group of academic researchers interviewed 1,500 people, including 550 in New York City, to gauge memories of detail, said Elizabeth Phelps, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. Proximity to Lower Manhattan during the attack, Dr. Phelps said, “increases your confidence in your memories, and your accuracy as well.”
In a separate study, the researchers measured activity in parts of the brain connected to memory. With verbal cues, subjects were asked to conjure visions of the terror attack and of personal events from the summer of 2001. Only half registered a difference in neural activity.
“Those who did show a difference were, on average, in Washington Square Park,” Dr. Phelps said. “Those who didn’t were, on average, in Midtown.”
Among those who have come to the city since 2001, the line dividing memories is undisputed.
“I had been there as a tourist to the World Trade Center, so I have memories,” said Marielle Solan, 22, a photographer who moved to the city from Delaware this year. “But obviously I can’t have any sense of what it was like. Every Sept, 11, you get a sense of fear and depression, but in terms of actual visceral reactions, I don’t really have that.”
The new arrivals have found a conspicuous void of shared memory.
“I’m amazed because it was such a big event, and people never mention it,” said Deenah Vollmer, 20, who moved to the city last year. “When you do mention it, everyone has these crazy intense stories.”
Across the line, many of those who lived in the city hold their memories close.
“The people I already knew know my stories from that day, so there’s no need to repeat them,” said Ms. Spielman, the graphic designer. “The new people I’ve met don’t ask me. It’s not something I bring up.”
But each year the calendar brings it up. Alexandria Lambert, 28, who works as an administrative assistant, sees the line run through the center of her office. Each year, a co-worker who witnessed the attack asks for the day off, and each year a boss who did not declines the request.
“His point of view is, ‘Don’t let it get you down,’ ” Ms. Lambert said, “but she just doesn’t want to be here.”
9/11 Polls Find Lingering Fears in New York
9/11 Polls Find Lingering Fears in New York
By ROBIN TONER and MARJORIE CONNELLY
Five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, two-thirds of New Yorkers say they are still “very concerned” about another attack on their city, a level of apprehension only slightly reduced from the fall of 2001, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News polls of the nation and New York City.
Nearly a third of New Yorkers said they thought about Sept. 11 every day. Nearly a third said that they had not gone back to pre-Sept. 11 routines and that they were still dealing with changes caused by the attacks.
Outside New York, however, Americans, in many ways, have adjusted to the “new normal” of the post-Sept. 11 era, the national survey suggests.
In contrast to the frantic fall of 2001, their fears of another attack seem less acute and personal. Only 22 percent in the national poll said they were still “very concerned” about an attack where they live, down from 39 percent five years ago. Three-fourths said daily life had largely returned to normal.
New Yorkers were more likely to say that they felt uneasy about the prospect of terrorist attacks. City residents said they believed that the air quality in Lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11 attacks was more dangerous than officials said at the time. [Page B4.]
And they were less likely to say the federal government had done all that “could reasonably be expected” to protect the United States from future terrorist attacks. Seventy-two percent of New Yorkers said the government could do more, compared with 58 percent in the national survey.
Nearly 6 in 10 New Yorkers said they would not be willing to work on a high floor in a new building at the World Trade Center site. Forty percent said they still felt nervous and edgy because of the attacks.
“I don’t feel safe,” said Elizabeth Vinas, 43, a receptionist from Brooklyn, interviewed in a follow-up to the poll. “I don’t know when there will be another attack, I just think they will try again.”
Gwendolyn Branch, 50, a Manhattan homemaker, said, “I just have a feeling that something is going to happen.”
The national poll found that Americans’ personal sense of security, to a large extent, revolved around where they live. Nearly a third of those who lived in big cities said they were “personally very concerned” about an attack where they live; only 13 percent of the people in small towns or rural areas felt that way. More than half of the suburbanites said they felt safe from terrorism, compared with fewer than half of those who lived in cities.
Donna Howlett, a retired beauty salon manager who lives in San Jose, Calif., said: “I think that from now on out, we’re living under the fear of being attacked. They’re planning things all the time.”
A majority of Midwesterners felt safe; residents of the Northeast were evenly divided.
The findings point to a political paradox. Mr. Bush, who has made the campaign against terrorism the centerpiece of his presidency, has some of his lowest approval ratings in areas that are most concerned with another attack. New York City, which is overwhelmingly Democratic, gave Mr. Bush a 25 percent approval rating in a Quinnipiac University Poll.
The New York Times/CBS News polls were conducted by telephone in August, and each has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. The national poll was conducted Aug 17-21 with 1,206 adults, and the poll of New York City was conducted Aug. 23-27 with 838 adults.
The surveys found Americans almost resigned to the continuing struggle against terrorism. The proportion of those who said they thought a terrorist attack on the United States in the next few months was “very” or “somewhat” likely has dropped substantially in the past five years, but it still amounted to more than half in the national survey.
In New York, 69 percent said they were “very concerned” about another attack there, compared with 74 percent in October 2001.
Nationally, 4 in 10 thought the threat of terrorism against the United States had, if anything, increased since 2001, and 81 percent said they thought Americans would always have to live with the threat.
But a big part of the “new normal,” a term used by a Republican pollster, Bill McInturff, is the resurgence of political divisions on national security questions. The extraordinary national unity recorded in the fall of 2001, when Mr. Bush’s approval rating reached 89 percent (79 percent in New York City) and Americans’ trust in government soared, has given way to deeply partisan views over Mr. Bush’s conduct of the war on terror and in Iraq. The survey found that Republicans and Democrats disagreed on a wide range of national security issues, from the wisdom of the war in Iraq to whether the nation had done enough to protect airports.
In general, 83 percent of the Republicans said they thought the United States’ campaign against terrorism was going “very” or “somewhat” well, compared with 43 percent of the Democrats and 55 percent of the independents. When asked if the government had done “all it could reasonably be expected to do” to protect the nation against another attack, 56 percent of Republicans said yes; nearly two-thirds of the Democrats and independents said no.
Similar divisions were apparent when Americans were asked if they believed the United States was “adequately prepared for another terrorist attack.” Three years ago, a majority of Republicans, independents and Democrats said they believed the government was ready. In the latest poll, only a majority of Republicans felt that way; independents were evenly divided.
A majority of those surveyed nationally still gave Mr. Bush positive marks for his handling of the campaign against terrorism — 55 percent approved, down from the high of 90 percent approval in December 2001. But on many security-related questions, he has lost the support of the vast majority of Democrats and many independents as well.
In general, the polls found a distinct skepticism toward government at all levels. Only 13 percent of New Yorkers said they thought the city was adequately prepared to deal with a chemical or biological attack. Nationwide, 39 percent said they thought their state and local governments were adequately prepared for an attack in general, while 52 percent said they were not. Similar views were reflected among New Yorkers.
In another measure of the confidence gap, 6 in 10 New Yorkers said they would not trust the government to tell them the truth about dangers like contaminated air or water in the event of another terrorist attack. A major study released this week, after the poll was completed, by Mount Sinai Medical Center found that the health impact of working at ground zero was more widespread and persistent than previously thought.
Women, in general, were more likely to say they still felt nervous about the threat of terrorism and less likely to say they felt confident in the government’s ability to handle another attack.
Nationwide, 58 percent of the men said the United States was prepared for another attack, but just 42 percent of the women.
James Vollintine, a 35-year-old firefighter from Topeka, Kan., argued that government preparation could go only so far. “You can only be so proactive,” Mr. Vollintine said in a follow-up interview. “You can only think of so many scenarios.”
But Sandy Jackson, 47, a homemaker in Aberdeen, Md., said, “When the planes hit the Pentagon, I thought it was war, and I rushed to get my daughters out of school.” Ms. Jackson added: “I’m still nervous because we can’t put our guard down. I think they’re looking to do us harm.”
Twin Beams to Light Sky Again. But After 2008?
Twin Beams to Light Sky Again. But After 2008?
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
As twilight falls on Monday, the skies over Lower Manhattan will once again be pierced by the twin beams of the Tribute in Light.
Beginning in 2002 as a catch-as-catch-can improvisation, this one-night event has become something of a civic tradition. It is the celestial, silent taps that brings a day of remembrance to a close, a shared experience open simultaneously to almost anyone around the city.
Its future seems assured for the next two years. But after that?
“I’d say there’s a question mark,” said Kent L. Barwick, the president of the Municipal Art Society, the organizers of the Tribute in Light.
For one thing, the project may run out of money after 2008. For another, it may lose its current staging area atop the Battery Garage, six blocks south of ground zero; a rare expanse of secure open space downtown. A long-range redevelopment plan for the nearby area, known as Greenwich Street South, calls for demolishing the garage, though this is not on the immediate horizon.
And there is no guarantee that it will have a permanent home at the World Trade Center memorial, which is to open in 2009. “I haven’t heard anybody say, ‘Let’s forget about this,’ ” Mr. Barwick said yesterday. “At the same time, it has to be addressed.”
The Tribute in Light was first illuminated on March 11, 2002, six months after the terrorist attack. It was designed by John Bennett, Gustavo Bonevardi, Richard Nash Gould, Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, working with Paul Marantz, a lighting designer, and Michael Ahern, an event producer. It ran for a month.
Sept. 11, 2003, marked its next appearance. It has been illuminated for one night on each anniversary since.
In 2004, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation authorized $3.5 million to run the tribute through 2008. That allowed the Municipal Art Society to purchase 88 Space Cannon searchlights, each four feet tall, with a 7,000-watt xenon bulb. They sit inside boxy steel frames, allowing them to be stacked for storage.
The fixtures, powered by temporary generators, are set out on the garage roof in two 50-by-50-foot squares, offset from each other as the twin towers were, though covering only 6 percent of the towers’ area. The array is as ungainly to behold at close range as it is ethereal to see from afar.
“The art is in what they produce,” said Frank E. Sanchis III, the senior vice president of the society. “It’s never been about the light fixtures, it’s been about the beacons. In a permanent installation, you’d have to worry about what it looks like.” That is only one hurdle to placing the lights in the permanent memorial.
But its creators believe the Tribute in Light has an enduring value, in part because its silence and simplicity permit viewers to invest it with their own meaning or message. “One of the best things about this is that it is what it is,” Mr. Ahern said. “There are no speeches attendant to it.”
I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow. I usually go to BPC and join in the preschool program there, and I told somebody I'd meet her there, but it occurs to me that maybe I don't want to be hanging around Lower Manhattan tomorrow. There's going to be cops and all on the boats, and helicopters overhead, and it just won't be pleasant there and back. I don't know.
Images of the WTC
A post on propaganda and 9/11 by
liz_marcsThere are more Muslims entering the country now than directly after 9/11
More Muslims Arrive in U.S., After 9/11 Dip
By ANDREA ELLIOTT
America’s newest Muslims arrive in the afternoon crunch at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Their planes land from Dubai, Casablanca and Karachi. They stand in line, clasping documents. They emerge, sometimes hours later, steering their carts toward a flock of relatives, a stream of cabs, a new life.
This was the path for Nur Fatima, a Pakistani woman who moved to Brooklyn six months ago and promptly shed her hijab. Through the same doors walked Nora Elhainy, a Moroccan who sells electronics in Queens, and Ahmed Youssef, an Egyptian who settled in Jersey City, where he gives the call to prayer at a palatial mosque.
“I got freedom in this country,” said Ms. Fatima, 25. “Freedom of everything. Freedom of thought.”
The events of Sept. 11 transformed life for Muslims in the United States, and the flow of immigrants from countries like Egypt, Pakistan and Morocco thinned sharply.
But five years later, as the United States wrestles with questions of terrorism, civil liberties and immigration control, Muslims appear to be moving here again in surprising numbers, according to statistics collected by the Department of Homeland Security and the Census Bureau.
Immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia are planting new roots in states from Virginia to Texas to California.
In 2005, more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent United States residents — nearly 96,000 — than in any year in the previous two decades.
More than 40,000 of them were admitted last year, the highest annual number since the terrorist attacks, according to data on 22 countries provided by the Department of Homeland Security.
Many have made the journey unbowed by tales of immigrant hardship, and despite their own opposition to American policy in the Middle East. They come seeking the same promise that has drawn foreigners to the United States for many decades, according to a range of experts and immigrants: economic opportunity and political freedom.
Those lures, both powerful and familiar, have been enough to conquer fears that America is an inhospitable place for Muslims.
“America has always been the promised land for Muslims and non-Muslims,” said Behzad Yaghmaian, an Iranian exile and author of “Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West.” “Despite Muslims’ opposition to America’s foreign policy, they still come here because the United States offers what they’re missing at home.”
For Ms. Fatima, it was the freedom to dress as she chose and work as a security guard. For Mr. Youssef, it was the chance to earn a master’s degree.
He came in spite of the deep misgivings that he and many other Egyptians have about the war in Iraq and the Bush administration. In America, he said, one needs to distinguish between the government and the people.
“Who am I dealing with, Bush or the American public?” he said. “Am I dealing with my future in Egypt or my future here?”
Muslims have been settling in the United States in significant numbers since the mid-1960’s, after immigration quotas that favored Eastern Europeans were lifted. Spacious mosques opened in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York as a new, highly educated Muslim population took hold.
Over the next three decades, the story of Muslim migration to the United States was marked by growth and prosperity. A larger percentage of immigrants from Muslim countries have graduate degrees than other American residents, and their average salary is about 20 percent higher, according to census data.
But Sept. 11 altered the course of Muslim life in America. Mosques were vandalized. Hate crimes rose. Deportation proceedings began against thousands of men.
Some Muslims changed their names to avoid job discrimination, making Mohammed “Moe,” and Osama “Sam.” Scores of families left for Canada.
Yet this period also produced something strikingly positive, in the eyes of many Muslims: they began to mobilize politically and socially. Across the country, grass-roots groups expanded to educate Muslims on civil rights, register them to vote and lobby against new federal policies such as the Patriot Act.
“There was the option of becoming introverted or extroverted,” said Agha Saeed, national chairman of the American Muslim Task Force on Civil Rights and Elections, an umbrella organization in Newark, Calif. “We became extroverted.”
In some ways, new Muslim immigrants may be better off in the post-9/11 America they encounter today, say Muslim leaders: Islamic centers are more organized, and resources like English instruction and free legal help are more accessible.
But outside these newly organized mosques, life remains strained for many Muslims. To avoid taunts, women are often warned not to wear head scarves in public, as was Rubab Razvi, 21, a Pakistani who arrived in Brooklyn nine months ago. (She ignored the advice, even though people stare at her on the bus, she said.) Muslims continue to endure long waits at airports, where they are often tagged for questioning.
To some longtime immigrants, the life embraced by newcomers will never compare to the peaceful era that came before.
“They haven’t seen the America pre-9/11,” said Khwaja Mizan Hassan, 42, who left Bangladesh 30 years ago. He rose to become the president of Jamaica Muslim Center, a mosque in Queens, and has a comfortable job with the New York City Department of Probation.
But after Sept. 11, he was stopped at Kennedy Airport because his name matched one on a watch list.
A Drop, Then a Surge
Up to six million Muslims live in the United States, by some estimates. While the Census Bureau and the Department of Homeland Security do not track religion, both provide statistics on immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries. It is presumed that many of these immigrants are Muslim, but people of other faiths, such as Iraqi Chaldeans and Egyptian Copts, have also come in appreciable numbers.
Immigration from these regions slowed considerably after Sept. 11. Fewer people were issued green cards and nonimmigrant visas. By 2003, the number of immigrants arriving from 22 Muslim countries had declined by more than a third. For students, tourists and other nonimmigrants from these countries, the drop was even more dramatic, with total visits down by nearly half.
The falloff affected immigrants from across the post-9/11 world as America tightened its borders, but it was most pronounced among those moving here from Pakistan, Morocco, Iran and other Muslim nations.
Several factors might explain the drop: more visa applications were rejected due to heightened security procedures, said officials at the State Department and Department of Homeland Security; and fewer people applied for visas.
But starting in 2004, the numbers rebounded. The tally of people coming to live in the United States from Bangladesh, Turkey, Algeria and other Muslim countries rose by 20 percent, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data.
The uptick was also notable among foreigners with nonimmigrant visas. More than 55,000 Indonesians, for instance, were issued those visas last year, compared with roughly 36,000 in 2002.
The rise does not reflect relaxed security measures, but a higher number of visa applications and greater efficiency in processing them, said Chris Bentley, a spokesman for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of Homeland Security.
Like other immigrants, Muslims find their way to the United States in myriad ways: they come as refugees, or as students and tourists. Others arrive with immigrant visas secured by relatives here. A lucky few win the green-card lottery.
Ahmed Youssef, 29, never thought he would be among the winners. But in 2003, Mr. Youssef, who taught Arabic in Egypt, was one of 50,000 people randomly chosen from 9.5 million applicants around the world.
As he prepared to leave Benha, a city north of Cairo, some friends asked him how he could move to a country that is “killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he recalled. But others who had been to the United States encouraged him to go.
He arrived in May 2005, and he found work loading hot dog carts from sunrise to sundown. He shared an apartment in Washington Heights with other Egyptians, but for the first month, he never saw his neighborhood in daylight.
“I joked to my roommates, ‘When am I going to see America?’ ” said Mr. Youssef, a slight man with thinning black hair and an easy smile.
Only three months later, when he began selling hot dogs on Seventh Avenue, did Mr. Youssef discover his new country.
He missed hearing the call to prayer, and thought nothing of unrolling his prayer rug beside his cart until other vendors warned him against it. He could be mistaken for an extremist, they told him.
Eventually, Mr. Youssef found a job as the secretary of the Islamic Center of Jersey City. He plans to apply to a master’s program at Columbia University, specializing in Arabic. For now, he lives in a spare room above the mosque. Near his bed, he keeps a daily log of his prayers. If he makes them on time, he writes “Correct” in Arabic. “I am much better off here than selling hot dogs,” he said.
Awash in American Flags
Nur Fatima landed in Midwood, Brooklyn, at a propitious time. Had she come three years earlier, she would have seen a neighborhood in crisis.
Hundreds of Pakistani immigrants disappeared after being asked to register with the government. Thirty shops closed along a stretch of Coney Island Avenue known as Little Pakistan. The number of new Urdu-speaking pupils at the local elementary school, Public School 217, dropped by half in the 2002-3 school year.
But then Little Pakistan got organized. A local businessman, Moe Razvi, converted a former antique store into a community center offering legal advice, computer classes and English instruction. Local Muslim leaders began meeting with federal agents to soothe relations.
The annual Pakistan Independence Day parade is now awash in American flags.
It is a transformation seen in Muslim immigrant communities around the nation.
“They have to prove that they are living here as Muslim Americans rather than living as Pakistanis and Egyptians and other nationalities,” said Zahid H. Bukhari, the director of the American Muslim Studies Program at Georgetown University.
Ms. Fatima arrived in Brooklyn from Pakistan in March with an immigrant visa. She began by taking English classes at Mr. Razvi’s center, the Council of Peoples Organization.
She has heard stories of the neighborhood’s former plight but sees a different picture.
“This is a land of opportunity,” Ms. Fatima said. “There is equality for everyone.”
Five days after she came to Brooklyn, Ms. Fatima removed her head scarf, which she had been wearing since she was 10. She began to change her thinking, she said: She liked living in a country where people respected the privacy of others and did not interfere with their religious or social choices.
“I came to the United States because I want to improve myself,” she said. “This is a second birth for me.”
Old New Yorkers, Newer Ones, and a Line Etched by a Day of Disaster
Old New Yorkers, Newer Ones, and a Line Etched by a Day of Disaster
By MICHAEL BRICK
Five years ago, on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center. Downtown smelled like Coke cans and hair on fire. It was televised live.
In New York City, 2,749 people were killed. About eight million remained. Since that day, the numbers have changed.
The population grew by more than 134,000 from 2000 to 2005, the city’s latest Planning Department calculations show. In that time, 645,416 babies were born and 304,773 people died. A half-million more people came from other countries than departed for them, and 800,000 more people left for the 50 states than came wide-eyed from them.
The meaning in the math is that today a great many New Yorkers lack firsthand knowledge of the city’s critical modern moment.
Five years on, New York is a city of newcomers and survivors. And between them runs a line. The line makes for no conflict, no discernible tension; it works a quieter breach.
Borne of the routine comings and goings of urban life, of births and deaths, the line divides views of a singular moment. Across the line, consummately familiar events can appear contorted.
On one side, the newcomer side, a man seeks accounts of that day; on the other side a man withholds his account. On the newcomer side, a woman visits the absent towers to feel some connection; on the other side a woman feels connected, and then some.
On the side of those who lived in New York, you can share a sense of trauma both layered and ill-defined.
“It’s like someone who has been in a war zone,” said William Stockbridge, 50, a finance executive who was working downtown during the attack. “It’s different.”
On the other side, you can feel like the new boyfriend at your girlfriend’s family reunion the year somebody died — somebody young, somebody you never met.
“You feel like you’re on the outside,” said Matthew Molnar, 26, a waiter in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who lived in Middlesex County, N.J., in 2001. “You feel like you missed out on a little bit of history.”
Newcomers and survivors: those terms ring harsh and blunt only because the line is so often unspoken. It runs soundless and invisible down Broadway from Harlem over the Williamsburg Bridge out to Coney Island and to Fresh Kills, up past the airports across the Grand Concourse into Yankee Stadium, through the bleachers where you can’t drink beer anymore and up out of the park into the nighttime sky.
The line flashes into view on the city streets for moments at a time. When jet fighters buzz the skyscrapers for Fleet Week, some of the people below — the ones who were here on Sept. 11 — flinch. More frequently, though, the line operates beneath the surface of conversations, of interactions, of transactions, of life. The line controls small things, controls the way people react to the phrase “and then Sept. 11 happened,” as though a date on the calendar could “happen.”
The line’s contours emerge in conversations. Ask about the attack, and people will describe a sense of ownership.
“You either experienced it firsthand,” said Amanda Spielman, 30, a graphic designer from Jackson Heights, Queens, who was in the city, “or you didn’t.”
Others describe that sense differently, but draw the line in the same place.
“I think for the people that seen it on TV, it is more painful than for the people who saw it here,” said Paolo Gonzalez, 29, who manages a parking lot under the Brooklyn Bridge and who saw the attack. “For the other people it was real. If you was here, when the buildings came down the only thing you were thinking was, ‘Run.’ ”
Across the line, the new arrivals recognize that sense of ownership.
“I’ve been told that I just don’t get it and that I could never understand what it was like to be there in New York on Sept. 11,” said Laura Bassett, 27, who moved to the city from North Carolina after 2001. “I hate that five years later, people still debate which bystander is allowed to be more upset, the New Yorker or the American.”
The line emerges perhaps most powerfully around the fallen towers, 2.06 acres of concrete known as ground zero. Because of the line, the site is a paradox, an emotional contradiction, a mass grave and a tourist attraction.
Some people feel so strongly about the place they cannot agree on an arrangement for listing the names of the dead; others feel so strongly about the place that they make sure to visit between Radio City Music Hall and the Statue of Liberty. Between those emotional poles is a middle ground, and the line runs through its center.
“People who moved to New York, everyone wanted to go down and see it,” said Dede Minor, 51, a real estate broker who was in her office in Midtown on the day of the attack. “For New Yorkers, it was too real.”
Jose Martias, 57, a construction worker who was drinking coffee near the East River when the attack began, said he knew why the newcomers visit the site.
“They don’t understand it so they go down there to see the hole,” Mr. Martias said. “It’s an attraction to them, like going to the circus.”
But across the line there is genuine emotional curiosity, a feeling that people in less cynical times used to call empathy.
“I’d didn’t think I’d be that affected,” said Leah Hamilton, 24, a logistics consultant who moved to Manhattan from Washington State last year. “But when I went to ground zero, it was the first time I’ve felt an emotional reaction like that to something I wasn’t a part of. You feel the energy and you could feel the sadness.”
The line can reach into the future, forging perceptions of New York and its destiny. Some new arrivals speak of the attack as a reason to come to the city.
“We felt like there was a lot of energy here,” said Meg Glasser, 26, a student who moved to the East Village from Boston this year. “We wanted to be a part of it in some way.”
But across the line, that sense of energy is tempered by standards for comparison.
“I know people who have been here a year or two, and they find New York fantastic,” said Father Bernard, 67, a Roman Catholic monk who was born in Brooklyn and who goes by only that name. “They’re right, but they didn’t know the New York before.”
The line reaches into the past as well, dividing memories. Each generation tells the next where they were when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, when the Kennedys and Martin Luther King were killed or when a space shuttle exploded, but a major act of destruction in a major American city creates more firsthand accounts.
Psychological studies suggest those accounts have played a role in drawing the line. After the attack, a group of academic researchers interviewed 1,500 people, including 550 in New York City, to gauge memories of detail, said Elizabeth Phelps, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. Proximity to Lower Manhattan during the attack, Dr. Phelps said, “increases your confidence in your memories, and your accuracy as well.”
In a separate study, the researchers measured activity in parts of the brain connected to memory. With verbal cues, subjects were asked to conjure visions of the terror attack and of personal events from the summer of 2001. Only half registered a difference in neural activity.
“Those who did show a difference were, on average, in Washington Square Park,” Dr. Phelps said. “Those who didn’t were, on average, in Midtown.”
Among those who have come to the city since 2001, the line dividing memories is undisputed.
“I had been there as a tourist to the World Trade Center, so I have memories,” said Marielle Solan, 22, a photographer who moved to the city from Delaware this year. “But obviously I can’t have any sense of what it was like. Every Sept, 11, you get a sense of fear and depression, but in terms of actual visceral reactions, I don’t really have that.”
The new arrivals have found a conspicuous void of shared memory.
“I’m amazed because it was such a big event, and people never mention it,” said Deenah Vollmer, 20, who moved to the city last year. “When you do mention it, everyone has these crazy intense stories.”
Across the line, many of those who lived in the city hold their memories close.
“The people I already knew know my stories from that day, so there’s no need to repeat them,” said Ms. Spielman, the graphic designer. “The new people I’ve met don’t ask me. It’s not something I bring up.”
But each year the calendar brings it up. Alexandria Lambert, 28, who works as an administrative assistant, sees the line run through the center of her office. Each year, a co-worker who witnessed the attack asks for the day off, and each year a boss who did not declines the request.
“His point of view is, ‘Don’t let it get you down,’ ” Ms. Lambert said, “but she just doesn’t want to be here.”
9/11 Polls Find Lingering Fears in New York
9/11 Polls Find Lingering Fears in New York
By ROBIN TONER and MARJORIE CONNELLY
Five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, two-thirds of New Yorkers say they are still “very concerned” about another attack on their city, a level of apprehension only slightly reduced from the fall of 2001, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News polls of the nation and New York City.
Nearly a third of New Yorkers said they thought about Sept. 11 every day. Nearly a third said that they had not gone back to pre-Sept. 11 routines and that they were still dealing with changes caused by the attacks.
Outside New York, however, Americans, in many ways, have adjusted to the “new normal” of the post-Sept. 11 era, the national survey suggests.
In contrast to the frantic fall of 2001, their fears of another attack seem less acute and personal. Only 22 percent in the national poll said they were still “very concerned” about an attack where they live, down from 39 percent five years ago. Three-fourths said daily life had largely returned to normal.
New Yorkers were more likely to say that they felt uneasy about the prospect of terrorist attacks. City residents said they believed that the air quality in Lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11 attacks was more dangerous than officials said at the time. [Page B4.]
And they were less likely to say the federal government had done all that “could reasonably be expected” to protect the United States from future terrorist attacks. Seventy-two percent of New Yorkers said the government could do more, compared with 58 percent in the national survey.
Nearly 6 in 10 New Yorkers said they would not be willing to work on a high floor in a new building at the World Trade Center site. Forty percent said they still felt nervous and edgy because of the attacks.
“I don’t feel safe,” said Elizabeth Vinas, 43, a receptionist from Brooklyn, interviewed in a follow-up to the poll. “I don’t know when there will be another attack, I just think they will try again.”
Gwendolyn Branch, 50, a Manhattan homemaker, said, “I just have a feeling that something is going to happen.”
The national poll found that Americans’ personal sense of security, to a large extent, revolved around where they live. Nearly a third of those who lived in big cities said they were “personally very concerned” about an attack where they live; only 13 percent of the people in small towns or rural areas felt that way. More than half of the suburbanites said they felt safe from terrorism, compared with fewer than half of those who lived in cities.
Donna Howlett, a retired beauty salon manager who lives in San Jose, Calif., said: “I think that from now on out, we’re living under the fear of being attacked. They’re planning things all the time.”
A majority of Midwesterners felt safe; residents of the Northeast were evenly divided.
The findings point to a political paradox. Mr. Bush, who has made the campaign against terrorism the centerpiece of his presidency, has some of his lowest approval ratings in areas that are most concerned with another attack. New York City, which is overwhelmingly Democratic, gave Mr. Bush a 25 percent approval rating in a Quinnipiac University Poll.
The New York Times/CBS News polls were conducted by telephone in August, and each has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. The national poll was conducted Aug 17-21 with 1,206 adults, and the poll of New York City was conducted Aug. 23-27 with 838 adults.
The surveys found Americans almost resigned to the continuing struggle against terrorism. The proportion of those who said they thought a terrorist attack on the United States in the next few months was “very” or “somewhat” likely has dropped substantially in the past five years, but it still amounted to more than half in the national survey.
In New York, 69 percent said they were “very concerned” about another attack there, compared with 74 percent in October 2001.
Nationally, 4 in 10 thought the threat of terrorism against the United States had, if anything, increased since 2001, and 81 percent said they thought Americans would always have to live with the threat.
But a big part of the “new normal,” a term used by a Republican pollster, Bill McInturff, is the resurgence of political divisions on national security questions. The extraordinary national unity recorded in the fall of 2001, when Mr. Bush’s approval rating reached 89 percent (79 percent in New York City) and Americans’ trust in government soared, has given way to deeply partisan views over Mr. Bush’s conduct of the war on terror and in Iraq. The survey found that Republicans and Democrats disagreed on a wide range of national security issues, from the wisdom of the war in Iraq to whether the nation had done enough to protect airports.
In general, 83 percent of the Republicans said they thought the United States’ campaign against terrorism was going “very” or “somewhat” well, compared with 43 percent of the Democrats and 55 percent of the independents. When asked if the government had done “all it could reasonably be expected to do” to protect the nation against another attack, 56 percent of Republicans said yes; nearly two-thirds of the Democrats and independents said no.
Similar divisions were apparent when Americans were asked if they believed the United States was “adequately prepared for another terrorist attack.” Three years ago, a majority of Republicans, independents and Democrats said they believed the government was ready. In the latest poll, only a majority of Republicans felt that way; independents were evenly divided.
A majority of those surveyed nationally still gave Mr. Bush positive marks for his handling of the campaign against terrorism — 55 percent approved, down from the high of 90 percent approval in December 2001. But on many security-related questions, he has lost the support of the vast majority of Democrats and many independents as well.
In general, the polls found a distinct skepticism toward government at all levels. Only 13 percent of New Yorkers said they thought the city was adequately prepared to deal with a chemical or biological attack. Nationwide, 39 percent said they thought their state and local governments were adequately prepared for an attack in general, while 52 percent said they were not. Similar views were reflected among New Yorkers.
In another measure of the confidence gap, 6 in 10 New Yorkers said they would not trust the government to tell them the truth about dangers like contaminated air or water in the event of another terrorist attack. A major study released this week, after the poll was completed, by Mount Sinai Medical Center found that the health impact of working at ground zero was more widespread and persistent than previously thought.
Women, in general, were more likely to say they still felt nervous about the threat of terrorism and less likely to say they felt confident in the government’s ability to handle another attack.
Nationwide, 58 percent of the men said the United States was prepared for another attack, but just 42 percent of the women.
James Vollintine, a 35-year-old firefighter from Topeka, Kan., argued that government preparation could go only so far. “You can only be so proactive,” Mr. Vollintine said in a follow-up interview. “You can only think of so many scenarios.”
But Sandy Jackson, 47, a homemaker in Aberdeen, Md., said, “When the planes hit the Pentagon, I thought it was war, and I rushed to get my daughters out of school.” Ms. Jackson added: “I’m still nervous because we can’t put our guard down. I think they’re looking to do us harm.”
Twin Beams to Light Sky Again. But After 2008?
Twin Beams to Light Sky Again. But After 2008?
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
As twilight falls on Monday, the skies over Lower Manhattan will once again be pierced by the twin beams of the Tribute in Light.
Beginning in 2002 as a catch-as-catch-can improvisation, this one-night event has become something of a civic tradition. It is the celestial, silent taps that brings a day of remembrance to a close, a shared experience open simultaneously to almost anyone around the city.
Its future seems assured for the next two years. But after that?
“I’d say there’s a question mark,” said Kent L. Barwick, the president of the Municipal Art Society, the organizers of the Tribute in Light.
For one thing, the project may run out of money after 2008. For another, it may lose its current staging area atop the Battery Garage, six blocks south of ground zero; a rare expanse of secure open space downtown. A long-range redevelopment plan for the nearby area, known as Greenwich Street South, calls for demolishing the garage, though this is not on the immediate horizon.
And there is no guarantee that it will have a permanent home at the World Trade Center memorial, which is to open in 2009. “I haven’t heard anybody say, ‘Let’s forget about this,’ ” Mr. Barwick said yesterday. “At the same time, it has to be addressed.”
The Tribute in Light was first illuminated on March 11, 2002, six months after the terrorist attack. It was designed by John Bennett, Gustavo Bonevardi, Richard Nash Gould, Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, working with Paul Marantz, a lighting designer, and Michael Ahern, an event producer. It ran for a month.
Sept. 11, 2003, marked its next appearance. It has been illuminated for one night on each anniversary since.
In 2004, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation authorized $3.5 million to run the tribute through 2008. That allowed the Municipal Art Society to purchase 88 Space Cannon searchlights, each four feet tall, with a 7,000-watt xenon bulb. They sit inside boxy steel frames, allowing them to be stacked for storage.
The fixtures, powered by temporary generators, are set out on the garage roof in two 50-by-50-foot squares, offset from each other as the twin towers were, though covering only 6 percent of the towers’ area. The array is as ungainly to behold at close range as it is ethereal to see from afar.
“The art is in what they produce,” said Frank E. Sanchis III, the senior vice president of the society. “It’s never been about the light fixtures, it’s been about the beacons. In a permanent installation, you’d have to worry about what it looks like.” That is only one hurdle to placing the lights in the permanent memorial.
But its creators believe the Tribute in Light has an enduring value, in part because its silence and simplicity permit viewers to invest it with their own meaning or message. “One of the best things about this is that it is what it is,” Mr. Ahern said. “There are no speeches attendant to it.”
I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow. I usually go to BPC and join in the preschool program there, and I told somebody I'd meet her there, but it occurs to me that maybe I don't want to be hanging around Lower Manhattan tomorrow. There's going to be cops and all on the boats, and helicopters overhead, and it just won't be pleasant there and back. I don't know.
