Some more NYTimes articles....
Sep. 11th, 2005 12:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Another article on hurricane survivors
For Storm Survivors, a Mosaic of Impressions
By KIRK JOHNSON
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 10 - For the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, there is no shared moment to put one's finger on, no clock-stopping space-holder of history as there was on Nov. 22, 1963, or on Sept. 11 to remind them: this was where we were and what we were doing when it all came down.
The disaster was incremental rather than cataclysmic. Instead of a crystalline moment of memory, there are infinite numbers, each with its own marker: a long journey, a recurring noise, the last words of a dear relative. Depending on where people were, what decisions they made in the blur of the crisis and how the authorities responded, every portrait of the storm is different, like a jigsaw puzzle in which no two pieces are alike.
For Robert Newman Jr., a 32-year-old resident of St. Bernard Parish, about seven miles south of New Orleans, the thing that sticks in his head about the storm is a chorus of screams. People in Mr. Newman's community, one of the most devastated areas in Hurricane Katrina's path, watched for days in growing rage and frustration as helicopter after helicopter raced overhead, bound north for New Orleans with no acknowledgment of the stranded, beleaguered people below. He came to understand, he said, how a person could go crazy enough to shoot at a helicopter, if only from the unbearable stress and anxiety of being ignored for days on a roof without water and food.
"People are just screaming and screaming on every roof," he said, sitting on the couch in his cousin's apartment here in Baton Rouge where he and other family members have taken up temporary residence. "But who do you help?"
Mr. Newman and his brother Paul, 24, eventually managed to find a boat, and rescued as many people as they could, including an elderly couple who were standing side by side, neck deep in a swamp surrounded by snakes. They almost passed the old couple by, until the woman managed to reach up and wave.
But the rescue they both wanted to talk about most because it was the most serendipitous and unlikely came when they were trying to siphon gas from the engine of an empty boat that they had captured. Their own motor was turned off, and that is the only reason they heard the tapping sound from a roof nearby. They hacked through the shingles with a machete and found an elderly woman under the eaves with her little dog.
The strange thing was, they said, that the woman had a hatchet in her hand. They took her and the dog and the hatchet and chugged off into the neighborhood.
Some people, like Stephen Stearns, 20, of St. Bernard Parish, have been thinking about decisions that altered the course of events, for better or for worse. Mr. Stearns's mother, Marion Stearns, 54, insisted on riding out Hurricane Katrina at home, as she had every hurricane before.
But this was not every hurricane before.
On Monday, Aug. 29, with almost no warning, the floodwaters surged in St. Bernard Parish, smashing down the front door of their house, Mr. Stearns said. He managed to get outside, but his mother and his father, Arthur Stearns, were trapped.
They got separated by the raging waters, as the furniture banged and careened through the house. Arthur Stearns dived repeatedly searching for his wife, and finally saved himself by smashing a fist through the ceiling and pushing his head through the hole into the attic to breathe.
Mrs. Stearns didn't make it and drowned.
Her last words to her husband were about their son: "Make sure Stephen gets out," Stephen Stearns said.
Margaret Chopin's family was piling together in their cars on the Sunday before the storm to head north out of New Orleans across the Lake Pontchartrain for higher ground and safety.
At the last second, her younger brother, Roy Joseph Jr., 54, stepped out of the car. His phobia of crossing over water, he told the family, was too much. He could not face the trip and would stay in town.
"We talked to him Monday night," said Ms. Chopin, who is 55, as she stood by the family's cots at a Baton Rouge shelter this week. "He said his car had been crushed by a tree and was underwater, but that he was all right. We haven't heard from him since."
People who specialize in the rich oral history and folklore of Louisiana say that Hurricane Katrina's stories must be saved and that plans are already being put together for a more organized and formal accounting of what hundreds of thousands of people did and thought during the storm. The first interviews could begin as early as this week.
"We want to create a central database for all the different organizations that are collecting stories," said Jocelyn Donlon, co-executive director of the Center for Cultural Resources, a nonprofit group based here. "We want to focus on how these stories might influence future public policy."
Some people came together in support and self-defense, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, in picaresque, improbable journeys that framed the experience through bonds of friendship.
"We called ourselves the Band," said Greg Lupo, a tourist from Ohio who walked out of New Orleans across the Mississippi River with his girlfriend, Cathi Pentella, and three New Orleans residents who all met one another waiting for a rescue bus that never came.
Mr. Lupo, a 45-year-old drummer and cable television lineman, armed himself with an eight-foot long steel rod to protect the group. But nothing happened. The gangs that he saw breaking windows and smashing cars along the way let the Band pass.
Netanya Watts Hart, a coordinator for the Institute of Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University, described the journey from her shattered New Orleans neighborhood on the afternoon of Aug. 31 in tones that almost sound like a parable from the Bible.
"We eventually walked out of the Ninth Ward in about five feet of water and we put all the children - 14 children - we put them in a flatboat along with a woman with one leg and walked a mile in the water," she said. "Then the water went down enough, and we walked about two more miles and all the children were holding hands, singing gospel songs two by two."
Ms. Hart, her husband, her two stepchildren, the woman with one leg and about 25 other people - relatives, neighbors and members of her church - were eventually taken to safety across the Mississippi River, not unlike Michael's mythic ferry across the Jordan, though in this case by a Coast Guard crew. And the group was all still together this week in a shelter near Houston.
Neliska Calloway, a 911 dispatcher with the New Orleans Police Department, said she has thought of the people she could not help. She worked for 48 hours straight through the height of the storm, taking call after call from desperate, frightened people. The call that has stayed in her mind came from a woman who said she was in labor with twins. She had fled to her attic and the waters were still rising.
"It was so emotional taking those phone calls," Ms. Calloway said. "It was scary. You can't imagine what somebody is going through, knowing that they're trapped in a house, surrounded by water and there's no where to go. I just talked to them as much as I could."
Ms. Calloway said that emergency workers reached the woman. She said she heard that one of the twins had died.
In some cases, though, people took command as the crisis descended. Michael Brown, 24, credited good leadership with getting the 25 members of his extended family out of New Orleans. Mr. Brown said his uncle, Jesse Brown II, became a general. Bags were ordered packed in 15 minutes. A rendezvous point was established in front of the house of Michael Brown's grandmother, Emma Brown.
Everything went according to plan except for one thing, the strapping down of their luggage on the roof of the car, which did not hold. Several suitcases of clothing blew off as they drove out of the city, but there was no time to stop.
Charles Vigee, 46, was also a handy man to have around as the storm struck his house in New Orleans. When water started surging up over the porch and in through the front door, his inspiration was to take the doors off their hinges.
There were four people in the house, said Mr. Vigee, who works in construction, so his idea was to fashion a raft, one person per door, and lash them together. The lashing, with a cord ripped from the vacuum cleaner and other lengths of wire he could find in the watery mess, was wholly inadequate, he said. But the tipping point, literally, came when his mother-in-law, Carolyn Johnson, started to teeter on her door just down the street from their flooded home.
"Please Miss Carolyn, please don't fall off the door," Mr. Vigee said he remembered saying or at least thinking. "But she fell off the door."
Mr. Vigee, sitting in a Baton Rouge shelter surrounded by about 4,500 other people rendered homeless and destitute by the hurricane, laughed.
"But I was not laughing then," he said.
Serendipity intervened, he said, in what could have become a crisis. A person floating by on an air mattress helped pull Ms. Johnson back onto her door, and eventually the family made it to a highway where they were all evacuated by helicopter.
And Michael Cryer and Elvera Boatner fell in love.
They met, indirectly, because the roof of Mr. Cryer's apartment building in New Orleans blew off. But they both speak about that now, interviewed sitting on their side-by-side cots in a downtown Baton Rouge shelter, as a small detail, even on some level a happy turn of events because of where things led from there.
Mr. Cryer, 29, a sheetrock worker, said he hid in his closet behind a mattress when water began coming in through the ceiling.
"When I came out, I was like, dang, the whole ceiling was gone," he said. "I could see the sky and rain was coming through."
So he went looking for an uncle a mile or so away, who happened to live in Ms. Boatner's building.
They got out of the city together and have been together since.
"I love him," said Ms. Boatner, who is 24, "and I wouldn't have ever met him."
On things left undone on 9/11
The Eleventh of Never
By PAUL VITELLO
Among the few certain truths of Sept. 11, 2001, is one that applies to every day that dawns. That there is no guarantee of tomorrow, or the next five minutes. This is the central provision of all contracts between people and their lives. No plans, large or small, are exempt.
The impact of 9/11 on the world's large plans has been well documented. Its impact on the smaller ones has been chronicled mainly and rightfully in the stories of those who died or witnessed the terror attacks up close, physically and emotionally.
But what about the rest of the many millions whose relatively small plans for an ordinary Tuesday were bent or swallowed completely that day, like light waves passing too close to a black hole?
The day that never was, to give it a name, would be a day that exists not in history but in the memory-store people keep for the things that pass them by. There are millions of such people, at the same time deeply affected and only tangentially touched by the terror attacks, who can instinctively conjure the outlines of that lost day.
"You can never go back and pick up where you left off," said the Rev. Daniel Paul Matthews, the retired rector of Trinity Church-St. Paul's Chapel in Lower Manhattan. "Such an enormous event doesn't just postpone or divert things; it upsets everything kind of forever. It's as if life starts all over."
The chronicle of such dislocation is for the most part a chronicle of intangibles, an example being Father Matthews's own day. He had invited a group of distinguished clergy members and scholars to Trinity for a taped discussion with the Rev. Rowan Williams, who was then the archbishop of Wales and was soon to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. All were present when the first tower collapsed, covering the church in debris, and all escaped safely.
"But here were all these men of the spirit, gathered for a discussion of spirituality," he said, a dark joke in his voice as he encapsulated the moment, though the joke was never quite spoken, "and they end up running for their lives."
Or take the most literal and municipal example of these intangible losses. Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials were supposed to hold meetings that day. Among the big items on the agenda was the long-stalled Second Avenue subway. When the authority resumed meetings in the following weeks, needless to say, the subject of the subway was gone. It would not come back for years.
That lost day would be the sum total of all the meetings canceled, all the chance encounters unplugged, the planned celebrations and telephone calls that might have led a million people in a million different directions and that just never happened, or that turned into something else.
It's a day that inhabits the imaginary, woodsy territory of Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken," where the protagonist says, "Knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back," but overlaid on a 21st century urban landscape of hubbub, commerce, multi-tasking, politics, and finally, terror.
That day, Mark Green had just voted for himself in the mayoral primary and was readying for an election night he had spent two years preparing for by reminding voters that "we're going to change this city on Sept. 11!" There would be changes on Sept. 11, but there would be no election night.
Jack Welch, the retired General Electric chairman, appeared on the "Today" show to promote what was advertised as the biggest publishing event of the day, his book, "Jack: Straight From the Gut," but it would not be the biggest publishing event of the day. That distinction would go to the nation's newspapers, which published hundreds of extra editions, with copies numbering in the millions.
Patrick Huang, a Queens real estate agent, was marshaling his forces for the 10th annual march of the Committee for Admitting Taiwan to the United Nations. It was to proceed from the Taiwan consulate to the United Nations, beginning as soon as the 50 members of the group, which he founded, arrived via the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway with their loudspeakers, platforms, flags of Taiwan and military-band marching drum rented for the occasion. There would be no march; and becoming confused in the human tidal wave, several officials who had traveled from Taiwan for the occasion would be lost until the next day. "There was a very panic situation," Mr. Huang said.
The sun rose that day on the kind of bright blue sky that people who love New York love best in New York, the day after a night of thunderstorms that rained out a game at Yankee Stadium. Roger Clemens, who was a game away from some pitching record - you could look it up; it doesn't matter much in this context - had been scheduled to pitch that night, and now was supposed to try for his record in a game on Tuesday.
When he set his record a week later, Mr. Clemens seemed to speak for many others like himself whose lives went on more or less unchanged in the aftermath, but whose view of the world and relationship to it had subtly shifted.
"Right now, it doesn't have the same feeling it would have had a couple of days ago," he said of his record. "After this past week, you realize: 'This is what I do, and what we do. But it's not who I am.'"
Mary Ellen Mannino tried every way she could, but could not get into Manhattan to be with the remains of her father, Joseph Gambino, who had died at age 70 on Sunday, Sept. 9 after a nine-month bout with lung cancer. His wake was scheduled for Monday and Tuesday at Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home in Manhattan. No one in his Bensonhurst family could reach him. "I know he was dead, but you felt like you were leaving him there," said Mrs. Mannino. "It was like, the whole city was in shock, and my father was alone, and we couldn't be with him. We were in a cloud of grief."
The president of the Borough of Manhattan Community College, Antonio Perez, walked from his office on Chambers Street that morning to his school's newly renovated, 15-story satellite building, Fiterman Hall, just south of the World Trade Center. He had chosen Tuesday to conduct a final inspection of the building, which had been renovated at a cost of $65 million over several years. Opening ceremonies were planned for October.
By the end of the day, Fiterman Hall was buried to the third floor in the debris of the 47-story building next door, 7 World Trade Center. The hall remains shuttered today. "We're hoping to start demolition in January," Mr. Perez said.
That morning, Felicia Fields, a 19-year-old woman described by her lawyer as mildly retarded, was making whatever adjustments she could to the fact that she would be sentenced to a prison term for the murder of a livery cab driver named Saro Manuel Lopez, a father of three shot down in a holdup in East New York, Brooklyn. For the sentencing scheduled that morning, Mr. Lopez's widow was en route to the courthouse, as was Ms. Fields, shackled in a van from Riker's Island, and her father, who was pleading in interviews with reporters for mercy from the court; and the head of a livery cab drivers' union, who was pleading for stern justice.
In the upside down world of crime and punishment, the suspension of everything that day gave Ms. Fields and her family two extra weeks of the generous visiting privileges at Rikers Island. Then she was sentenced to a term of 25 years-to-life in a prison, upstate.
The dislocation, of course, was not just local. Eighty couples were scheduled to be married that day at the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel, in Las Vegas. All but a few canceled, and as far as the proprietor, Ron DeCar, knows, "because most people come here to do something crazy," very few of them ever came back.
The mayor of Los Angeles was headed to Washington to ask for help with air traffic congestion. John Ashcroft, the attorney general at the time, was headed to Milwaukee to address fifth graders at the Doerfler Elementary School.
A girl named Dahlia Gruen was supposed to have her 10th birthday party that night in Newton, Mass., but as it turned out, she said, "it wasn't so exciting;" and worse, "I didn't really understand it at the time, but it was changing my birthday for the rest of my life."
On a Web site known as Everything2, a girl calling herself Kaytay described meeting a boy while waiting for her first class to begin at New York University that day. They planned to meet for coffee after class. Then everything changed and everyone scattered, including the boy.
Almost everyone who shares a story of the lost day brackets it with apologies. It is nothing, they say, compared with those who lost their lives, or those who lost family. "I had a friend who lost loved ones, and suffered more than anyone can imagine, so I've never spoken about the impact of 9/11 on me, because it seems so trivial," said Mr. Green, the Democratic mayoral candidate.
Yet before the attack changed the political chemistry of the city, and the nation, he was given a better than even chance of winning the mayoralty.
And though Matt Yates, a Brooklyn port operator, had only modest expectations for that day - he was hoping for 10 seconds of free publicity for the dying stevedore industry when he invited the media to watch as "two giant cranes, the size of small skyscrapers" were moved into place on a pier at the end of Atlantic Avenue - he lost something, too, that day, he said: a sense of purpose. A sense of being able to influence the direction of his city.
It would be the same feeling of loss among the musicians and singers of the New York City Opera, who had been scheduled to open their season that night with a new production of Wagner's "Flying Dutchman." The opera was to be followed by a gala dinner dance for donors, honoring Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.
"It was all so huge, and everyone in the company was wondering about what their role was in the world at a time like this," said Susan Woelzl, a spokeswoman for the City Opera. Mr. Giuliani answered the question for them, urging the opera to start its season as soon as possible, which it did on Saturday.
If you check the listings of concerts, sports events and performances that were scheduled throughout the country on Sept. 11, 2001, almost all were canceled in the throes of the national shock. One of the few exceptions was a show by the quintessential New York musician and performance artist, Laurie Anderson, who went on stage in Chicago as planned.
"The promoter called and said, 'What should we do?' People were calling to say they were sure it was canceled, but I thought that to have a public event that night would be a good idea," said Ms. Anderson, who lives in Greenwich Village.
She leaves the lights on during her shows as a rule, and remembers the faces in the audience that night as looking "stunned." She dedicated the performance to those who had died, and closed the show with a song she wrote in 1994, "Love Among the Sailors," which includes the line, "There is no pure land now, no safe place."
There was no statement intended in anything she did that night except "to play music and be with people," she said. It was not a coherent moment in her life as a performer, she said. "I just wanted to be there."
On memorials
Comes with a slideshow
9/11: The Enduring Salute
By JEROME CHARYN
MOST New Yorkers have a jolting memory of where they were on 9/11, when the twin towers tumbled, leaving Lower Manhattan in a black void for 10 minutes until the smoke and dust clouds began to clear.
I couldn't witness the smoke, the dust, the debris. I was sitting in my lawyer's office on the Avenue Henri-Martin, in Paris, when his sister called from the States and told us about the attack. We turned on the television in time to see a jetliner swivel around the second tower as if it were performing a strange ballet.
When I returned to Manhattan two weeks later, one of the first things I saw was a bulletin board as big as a wall, covered with leaflets, letters and fliers, on the south side of St. Vincent's Hospital. The fliers made a lot of sense. St. Vincent's, at Seventh Avenue and West 11th Street, was the comprehensive trauma center closest to ground zero, and 17 percent of the injured were treated at St. Vincent's network of seven hospitals.
In those hours and days after the attack, people streamed to the hospital, some looking for their loved ones, others offering to give blood - tragically not needed - or help in other ways. The bulletin board became a natural depository for pictures of those who had been trapped in the towers and were still missing, along with little notes about whom to contact.
Over the following weeks, the bulletin board expanded like a miraculous tree, with prayers, flowers, poems and children's drawings posted alongside pictures of the missing. This gathering of mementos allowed the community near the hospital to express its feelings at a time when the city itself was wounded, when a senseless attack seemed to challenge the very notion of community. New Yorkers clung to bulletin boards, as if they were learning a cave language after their own power of speech had become twisted and broken like the gigantic metal shards that rose out of the rubble.
The cave language on the far side of St. Vincent's was hardly unique; messages and posters of the missing could be found on lampposts, subway entrances, fire hydrants, restaurant windows, phone booths, bus shelters, brick walls, anywhere with some kind of surface to accommodate them.
Most of these bulletin boards, the first testimonials to 9/11 that helped the city through a period of terror and shock and allowed New Yorkers to grieve in a primitive way, are long gone. But that wall of missing people at St. Vincent's, now encased in panels of hard plastic, is still there, four years later.
IT has evolved from a vibrant, freewheeling message board to a shrine, from cave art to a full-blown memorial that is genuinely moving: graduation photos, names of the missing, each with its own strange pull - "Jupiter," "Arkady," "Kalyan," "Sita" - a scarf stuck to the wall with tape, a missing man on his girlfriend's lap, a firefighter from Ladder Company 101, all weather-worn from the time when there was no plastic cover.
"The wall is part of our mission," said Sister Miriam Kevin Phillips, a senior vice president at St. Vincent's in charge of efforts to serve and protect the community. Sister Kevin, as she is called, has become her own kind of archivist. It was with her help that the plastic panels were put up in 2002 to guard the wall and, as she puts it, "preserve it as a memorial."
Sister Kevin is hardly the only one involved in preserving the memory of 9/11. While the vast majority of the memorials - the candles, the tattered photos, the forgotten bouquets - are long gone, a multitude of others, large and small, makeshift or elaborate, has risen up across the city.
One such memorial is right across the street from St. Vincent's, at the cusp of Greenwich and Seventh Avenues. The chain-link fence of a Metropolitan Transportation Authority parking lot has been turned into a work of art in progress, a whole fence of tiles dedicated to 9/11 and known as "Tiles for America." This gathering was the brainchild of Lorrie Veasey, the former owner of Our Name Is Mud, a make-your-own pottery store around the corner.
"When I'm disturbed by something," Ms. Veasey said recently, while explaining the origin of her project, "I work with my hands. What everybody really wanted to do was dig that day. I wanted to rescue people. I couldn't dig, so I decided to work with clay."
Ms. Veasey began by making a little band of angels, each with a particular mission, to "rescue" the four hijacked planes, for example, or a fire truck in danger of destruction. She fired her angels at a studio in Chelsea, and the first was hung four days after 9/11. In the weeks and months that followed, friends and coworkers began to make their own tiles and hang them on the fence with wires. Then people began to attach other items to the fence: found objects, flowers, combs, ribbons. The resulting collage became, as she put it, "a public force."
Ms. Veasey provided the bisque, or unglazed tile, to customers without charge, and after a tile was completed, she fired and glazed it and added it to the fence; customers also made small contributions to the Firemen's Widows and Children's Association. "Many people came in who had lost friends and family members," she said, noting that the tiles became the only tangible markers they had.
Tiles arrived from other cities, other countries, other pottery stores. A boy of 6 painted a fireman in a red cape; another child drew pillars of smoke atop a tilting tower. The most original was a mosaic painted by the staff at an animal hospital in St. Petersburg, Fla., depicting a panorama of dogs and dedicated to all the search-and-rescue animals at ground zero "who gave their noses and hearts to soothe the wound of a nation."
Ms. Veasey worried that 9/11 was beginning to fall out of our dreams: "My fear is that people have forgotten too much."
Perhaps it was also neglect. One sign of this was the fate of "Forever Tall," a mural of the Manhattan skyline with the World Trade Center resurrected as boxlike bouquets of flowers. The mural, which had become a local landmark, had been painted on the side wall of Dolphins, a restaurant at Cooper Square and East Sixth Street. But Dolphins is gone, and so is the mural, replaced by three little splashes of red, white, and blue paint.
Even when memorials to 9/11 haven't been erased, they are often extremely hard to find, as is the case with the window display at the Bed Bug Club at Smith and Third Streets in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. The Bed Bug Club seems to be a junk shop-cum-neighborhood hangout with a potpourri of images on its window, which is both message board and memorial: faded clippings of ground zero, a photo of firefighters digging in the debris, another of the mass exodus across the Brooklyn Bridge, a picture of the 1936 New York Yankees championship club, with Joe DiMaggio in the middle, like some somber saint who might have served us on 9/11.
Perhaps the most unlikely memorial is a bakery in Greenwich Village that opened six months after the attack. Called Mary's off Jane, it is run by Mary Arda, 47, a Cuban exile who spent her childhood in Havana, where she learned how to bake a killer pineapple upside-down cake before she was 9. Ms. Arda moved from Miami to Manhattan in 1982, with the dream of becoming an actress. "I was going to be on Broadway," she said, "but being a Latina wasn't in vogue in the early 80's." Instead, she went to work on Wall Street. A month before 9/11, realizing she was going to be "downsized," she took a little time off.
Ms. Arda was standing on the Avenue of the Americas the morning of 9/11 when she saw "a flash of smoke in the first tower," then heard the second plane hit. She was in a daze for weeks. But, she said: "the city bonded like nothing I had ever seen. We were a community of neighbors, a community of friends."
Having a little bit of cash, she wanted to open up something in the neighborhood. She still loved to bake, but she had a specific sort of place in mind.
"Most bakeries don't offer you a place to sit down," she said. "They're very Betty Crocker, very generic. I decided that when I created my own bakery, I would give people a place to come to where they could sit down, be social, and have a little slice of something that would give them comfort." She also wanted to create a place where people could munch on cake and commune in a room of second-hand tables and chairs that suggest a small primitive chapel.
The city is home to another memorial that is even more hidden than Mary's, and it is in the most public of places: the lobby of the American Express corporate headquarters at 3 World Financial Center. On a recent visit, I discovered no crowd of tourists, not one curious soul in front of "Eleven Tears," a highly original work of art dedicated to the 11 American Express employees who lost their lives in the terrorist attack.
"Eleven Tears" was designed by Ken Smith, a 52-year-old landscape architect who lives and works in the former "frozen zone," the area bordering ground zero that was evacuated right after 9/11. The installation consists of an 11-sided, 600-pound piece of natural Brazilian quartz that resembles a gigantic tear. This "tear" is set in a steel ring suspended from a 35-foot-high ceiling by 11 cables, and hovers over an 11-sided black granite fountain with the names of the employees cut into the 11 corners.
The reflection of the 600-pound crystal in that dark pool of water is stunning; it resembles a crystal cone rising out of the depths. Even more remarkable are the 11 drops of water - 11 invisible tears - that fall at random intervals from the ceiling into the pool, creating ripples that expand and intersect in the water.
"The thing I had been obsessing about was the sky and ground," Mr. Smith said. "I wanted to unite sky and ground, the ceiling and floor, heaven and earth. Water seemed an obvious way to make the connection." The notion of 11 tears came quickly: "Each ripple was really a person; tears and ripples merged together."
OSAMA BIN LADEN attacked the twin towers in the name of religion, but in one of the ironies that he himself couldn't predict, religious images were among the most powerful of those born in the debris.
One of the first to witness this was the Rev. Kevin Divine, a priest at the Church of the Good Shepherd on Isham Street, in the Inwood section of Manhattan. Father Divine, who worked the midnight shift at the morgue within ground zero right after 9/11, recalled "the segment of steel in the form of a cross" that was found in the rubble.
He felt that this cross "was not merely a Christian symbol, but belonged to the whole human family." And it was with this belief that he worked to have a piece of ground zero delivered to his parish, although he had to wait until "another remnant was found in the form of a cross."
Father Divine received the steel in February 2002. "I had to get engineers to design the base, to sink the cross into concrete with iron and steel intermeshing rods that could withstand a 100-mile-an-hour wind," he recalled. Today the cross stands in a memorial garden at Good Shepherd that honors the 20 parishioners who died on 9/11.
A different kind of parish, a parish of rescue and recovery workers at St. Paul's Chapel, played a critical part in the mythology that grew up around 9/11. Because St. Paul's is situated at the very edge of ground zero, on Church Street, it quickly became both a sanctuary and an emergency rescue center, where diggers could emerge from the rubble and seek refuge; cots were arranged along the perimeter of the chapel, and volunteers placed stuffed animals on the pillows, to make the beds feel a little more comforting.
Enormous bundles of letters began to arrive from children around the world, many of them containing poems and drawings, and volunteers taped them on walls and pews until the chapel was a sea of paper. Volunteers also encouraged rescue workers to keep some of the letters: diggers tucked them under their helmets as they returned to the debris. Many were off-duty firemen who worked 12- to 18-hour shifts in what quickly became known as the "pit."
There's a small bronze "Bell of Hope" in the churchyard, given to St. Paul's on the first anniversary of 9/11 by the people of London, but this bell is nowhere as compelling as a makeshift memorial inside the chapel: children's letters hanging on a little gate, letters addressed to firefighters and other rescuers, with prayers and thanks "for being brave."
IT was difficult to forget the image of firefighters on 9/11 rushing toward their doom while everyone else was fleeing from the towers. They'd arrived with their helmets and their hooks, and disappeared into the black smoke; 343 of them never returned. "We lost 4,000 years of experience," one Manhattan firefighter said, "everyone from a chief to a probie."
Entire companies were wiped out, but the most poignant of all 9/11 memorials were the placards and scrolls and bronze bas-reliefs outside every firehouse that had lost even a single man, often with the words "Still Riding" above the names and pictures of dead firefighters, as if they had a palpable presence on board every truck.
Some of the displays - the wreaths, ribbons and photographs - are long gone. But at firehouses throughout the city are smaller reminders of the day: the decals that were put on engines and ladder trucks of companies that had lost men, often designed by someone in the company, with the company logo and the names of the dead; or the table and little red wagon filled with flowers outside Engine Company 226, on State Street, in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, a simple shrine to the company's four lost men, where members of the community can put poems, a plastic angel or a little toy dog in a fireman's helmet.
Peter Culkin, a young lieutenant at Engine 226, began to keep a diary after 9/11. "I recorded dreams, wacky dreams," he said one day recently. "Next I'd write about the eleventh. It's hard to transcribe what the average guy can do about what he saw, what he felt, but it still helped me through."
Engine 226 was the last company to put up a memorial. The firehouse waited a full year, but its memorial was more detailed than many others. It included the coats and helmets of its four lost men, and pieces of steel "recovered from the collapse site," a cross and an image of the towers "cut by Port Authority steel workers."
One tower had "a tear in the metal, like a piece of paper," said Lieutenant Culkin, as if he understood his own fragility and the fragility of all things. But despite this fragility, firemen continue to climb into their trucks, still riding with their own fallen men.
On lost cities
Vanished, Under Force of Time and an Inconstant Earth
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Nothing lasts forever.
Just ask Ozymandias, or Nate Fisher.
Only the wind inhabits the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado, birds and vines the pyramids of the Maya. Sand and silence have swallowed the clamors of frankincense traders and camels in the old desert center of Ubar. Troy was buried for centuries before it was uncovered. Parts of the Great Library of Alexandria, center of learning in the ancient world, might be sleeping with the fishes, off Egypt's coast in the Mediterranean.
"Cities rise and fall depending on what made them go in the first place," said Peirce Lewis, an expert on the history of New Orleans and an emeritus professor of geography at Pennsylvania State University.
Changes in climate can make a friendly place less welcoming. Catastrophes like volcanoes or giant earthquakes can kill a city quickly. Political or economic shifts can strand what was once a thriving metropolis in a slow death of irrelevance. After the Mississippi River flood of 1993, the residents of Valmeyer, Ill., voted to move their entire town two miles east to higher ground.
What will happen to New Orleans now, in the wake of floods and death and violence, is hard to know. But watching the city fill up like a bathtub, with half a million people forced to leave, it has been hard not to think of other places that have fallen to time and the inconstant earth.
Some of them have grown larger in death than they ever were in life.
Take the library in Alexandria. If anyplace might have had justifiable pretensions of permanence it would have been the library, founded sometime around 300 B.C. It grew under the early Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt into an enduring symbol of culture and knowledge before disappearing into the sand and sea less than 1,000 years later.
"This was the library," said Roger Bagnall, a historian at Columbia. "It influenced everybody who ever thought about building a library."
Nobody, Dr. Bagnall complains, knows how large it was - estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 scrolls - or what was actually in it. The library's demise is equally shrouded in myth. One legend says the books burned during Caesar's conquest of Alexandria in 47 B.C., but the library was still around in the fourth century, according to historical accounts.
Dr. Bagnall thinks that simple neglect killed the library. "Books rot," even acid-free papyruses, he said, noting that there are no records of any investment in maintaining the library after the early Ptolemies.
By the time Christian mobs sacked the library and museum at the end of the century as a pagan institution, there was probably little left to destroy. "The palace quarter was pretty well wrecked by that point. Whatever had survived the rotting didn't make it past that," Dr. Bagnall said.
Later, in 642, the Arabs moved Egypt's capital to the Cairo region and Alexandria shrank into obscurity.
On the other side of the globe, in the Caroline Islands of Micronesia, a stony silence relieved only by the lapping of waves envelops the empty city of Nan Madol. It consists of almost 100 islands, built by humans and constructed of columns of basalt 15 feet long and weighing 5 tons, stacked log cabin style to make walls 25 feet high.
Local legend says that you will die if you spend the night there. But once this was home to the nobles and priests of the Saudeleur dynasty, which ruled Pohnpei's 30,000 inhabitants up until about 500 years ago, according to William S. Ayres, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon.
Dr. Ayres said that Nan Madol was constructed out on the reef, starting about 1,500 years ago, partly because people had been living out there for hundreds of years to have easy access to the sea, and, perhaps more important, to better commune with ocean deities.
The columns for the walls were quarried on Pohnpei, he said, and floated out to the reef on rafts, about 500,000 tons in all over the 1,000 years of construction, Dr. Ayres has estimated. While most of the islands were living quarters for priests, others were given over to special purposes like making canoes, preparing coconut oil or, most grandly, burying royalty in tombs with courtyards surrounded by 25-foot walls.
Nan Madol's end was simple. When the last of the Saudeleurs was overthrown, the island was divided into smaller chiefdoms, "which exist up to the present day," Dr. Ayres said. The city was abandoned to its sleeping kings and its cold stone logs.
The dry, desert silence in Mesa Verde tells a more complex tale.
Archaeologists say that in the middle of the 12th century, some 20,000 people were living in the picturesque cliff dwellings and surrounding areas in southwestern Colorado, growing maize, squash and beans, raising turkeys, and apparently fighting with their enemies (thus the cliff houses, which were easier to defend than mesa-top villages).
By 1300, these Anasazi, or "ancient ones," were all gone.
That crash was due to a combination of climatic, political and environmental factors, according to Tim Kohler, an anthropologist at Washington State University, who along with Mark Varien of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colo., has been studying the history of pueblo populations.
One culprit was climate change. According to classic tree-ring studies by Andrew Ellicott Douglas of the University of Arizona, the years 1275 to 1295 were abnormally dry.
Recent work using bristlecone pine tree rings has established that it got cold, as well, during that period, lowering the maize production even more, Dr. Kohler said.
At the same time, the deer population seems to have declined significantly. As a result they needed the turkeys for protein.
And what were they feeding the turkeys? Corn.
"If something happens to the maize, the system collapses," Dr. Kohler said.
And so it did. Adding to the pressure, apparently, was war, which meant that the people of Mesa Verde were penned in. They didn't or couldn't spread out to less protected areas. Instead they simply left. The green table had turned brown, and perhaps red.
The most famous lost city of all is one that probably never really existed, Atlantis, the fabulous island civilization swallowed by the sea, which was referred to by Plato.
Some scholars think he might have been inspired by one or more real events. Among them is the destruction of Helike, a city on the Corinthian coast, which was swallowed by an earthquake and a tsunami one winter night in 373 B.C., during Plato's lifetime.
"For the sea was raised by an earthquake," wrote the Greek geographer Strabo, "and it submerged Helike and the Helikonian Poseidon." The city went down like the Titanic with its entire population on board. An expeditionary force sent from a nearby town the next day found no survivors and no bodies to recover.
Though not the seat of empire like fabled Atlantis, Helike was a significant and prosperous city. It was the head of a confederacy of 12 Greek city states, the First Achaean League, whose successor, the Second Achaean League, was recommended as a model of federalism by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in their Federalist Papers. It minted its own coins.
Lured by the prospect of an underwater time capsule, archaeologists have long sought the remains of the sunken city.
Five years ago, after a dozen years of searching, a team of archaeologists led by Dora Katsonopoulou of the Ancient Helike Society in Aigion, Greece, and Steven Soter, a geophysicist with New York University's Center for Ancient Studies, said they had found the lost city - not in the sea but on the coastal plain next to it, near Aigion, about 45 miles northwest of Corinth. It may have been gradually raised by seismic activity, said Dr. Soter.
Moreover, he said, three rivers feeding the coastal plain deposit sediment that helps build it up.
In expeditions every summer, Dr. Soter and his colleagues have uncovered more and more of the city, including a road that goes almost a mile across the plain, walls, buildings, coins, pottery and a cemetery, although they have not found the center of the city yet.
Recently they have found a whole new and unknown city, dating from 2200 B.C., the early Bronze Age, near Helike. The sediments of this ruin contain marine and lagoonal microfauna, Dr. Soter said, suggesting that it too, may have been swallowed by an earthquake and a tidal wave like Helike, but 2,000 years earlier, only to rise again.
It may be, he said, that there have been recurrent floods and abandonments on the plain, the land rising and sinking, cities blooming out of the reborn mud.
"Good agricultural land tends to be reoccupied after catastrophes," Dr. Soter said, echoing Dr. Lewis's statement. "People will live there and take their chances."
There is in the picture a kind of immortality for the dead, as well as for the perennials blooming on the flood plain. If Helike can give rise to the vision of an Atlantis, a collection of scrolls can forever change our concept of learning and memory and empty stones can inspire us to reveries, what can we expect from jazz, gumbo and soft air at one of the trading crossroads of the world, so blessed and cursed with water?
New Orleans will never die. It is already larger than life.
On our refugees
No Fixed Address
By JAMES DAO
WASHINGTON — The images of starving, exhausted, flood-bedraggled people fleeing New Orleans and southern Mississippi over the last two weeks have scandalized many Americans long accustomed to seeing such scenes only in faraway storm-tossed or war-ravaged places like Kosovo, Sudan or Banda Aceh.
But Hurricane Katrina delivered America its own refugee crisis, arguably the worst since Sherman's army burned its way across the South. And though the word "refugee" is offensive to some, and not accurate according to international law, it conveys a fundamental truth: these are people who will be unable to return home for months, possibly years. Many almost certainly will make new homes in new places.
It is not the first time the United States has faced a mass internal migration: think of the "Okies" who fled the drought-ravaged Dust Bowl for fertile California in the 1930's, or Southern blacks who took the Delta blues to Chicago in the first half of the last century.
But the wreckage wrought by Katrina across the Gulf Coast is probably unprecedented in American history. No storm has matched the depth and breadth of its devastation. And the two disasters that demolished major cities - the Chicago fire of 1871 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 - occurred when the federal government lacked the resources and agencies to help the displaced. They offer few clues about how to aid and comfort Katrina's victims.
For that reason, many experts say, the federal government should look for long-term strategies among the groups that have resettled millions of refugees from those faraway storm-tossed or war-ravaged places - two million of them here in the United States since 1975.
"These groups have a different way of seeing the problem: that it's not just short-term emergency relief," said Roberta Cohen, an expert on refugees at the Brookings Institution who helped write guidelines on aiding internally displaced people for the United Nations.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has welcomed some help from agencies that specialize in disaster relief overseas, including the United Nations and the United States Agency for International Development.
But despite Katrina's magnitude, FEMA officials say their approach to resettling evacuees is not likely to differ significantly from the approach here to past disasters. They have ordered 100,000 trailers and mobile homes that will be placed in "trailer cities" in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. They have begun finding short-term apartments in Houston and Baton Rouge. And the Red Cross and other aid groups plan to provide psychological counseling and housing assistance at its temporary shelters.
"This is larger, but the process is the same," said James McIntyre, a FEMA spokesman.
Experts in refugee resettlement say the old ways might not be enough. Thousands of the New Orleans evacuees were poor or elderly; many were on welfare or have limited job skills. Many have been sent far from family and friends. Meeting their needs, and rebuilding the shattered Gulf Coast cities, will take a far more long-term and comprehensive plan, those experts say.
"The approach now is very ad hoc," said Mark Franken, executive director of migration and refugee services for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. "They are moving people from one temporary environment to another."
Mr. Franken said nine resettlement organizations had proposed re-creating their refugee services for evacuees: finding jobs and long-term independent housing, acclimating people to new communities and providing careful case management that lasts months. The Bush administration is still reviewing that proposal, he said. The administration, he added, said groups should be prepared to care for half a million evacuees.
Other experts contend that the federal government should create a large-scale public works program to employ evacuees, possibly in rebuilding New Orleans itself. Gene Dewey, who retired in June as the assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, said one model, as far-fetched as it sounds, might be the Afghan Civilian Conservation Corps - named after the Depression-era program started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt - that the Bush administration created in Afghanistan in 2003. By paying returnees to build roads, plant trees and restore schools, the program provided dignity as well as money, Mr. Dewey said.
"This is a time when you need that kind of Franklin Roosevelt thinking," he said.
Hugh Parmer, who worked for the United States Agency for International Development in the 1990's and who has advised federal officials on a post-Katrina strategy, said the Kosovo crisis of 1999 taught him that the most humane way to resettle refugees was to avoid placing them in large shelters or camps.
Mr. Parmer added that the organization he currently leads, the American Refugee Committee International, plans to open mobile health clinics in Louisiana this week. It will be the first time the group, founded in 1979 to assist Southeast Asian refugees, has done work inside the United States.
"We run six mobile clinics in Darfur, and we've been joking that we're going to move the Sudan model to southern Louisiana," Mr. Parmer said.
Julia Taft, who directed a Ford administration task force that oversaw the resettlement of 131,000 Southeast Asian refugees in the United States in 1975, said religious groups and private relief agencies were able to resettle those refugees in nine months because they had a vast network of volunteers, churches and synagogues.
"What we need to do is treat them like refugees," Ms. Taft said of the hurricane's victims. "We've got to recognize that they are going to be displaced for a significant period of time."
Some people, most prominently the Rev. Jesse Jackson, have objected to calling the storm victims refugees, asserting that the word is inappropriate and even racist. Under international law, refugees are defined as people who cross national borders to flee persecution.
Ms. Cohen of the Brookings Institution said the evacuees from the Gulf Coast fit neatly into a newer category: "internally displaced persons." In the 1990's, when the end of the cold war and the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to ethnic strife and civil war across the Balkans and sub-Saharan Africa, the term was popularized by aid workers who contended that Western nations should intervene, with force if necessary, when governments failed to help large numbers of displaced people.
The United States, thanks to its resources, has largely been spared such dislocations. But not completely. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 may have displaced more than half a million people. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 displaced more than 200,000 people. The Chicago fire of 1871 left 100,000 residents, a third of the city, homeless.
Donald L. Miller, professor of history at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and author of "City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America," said the 1871 fire, like Katrina, had a sudden and catastrophic impact, particularly on poor Irish immigrants.
The federal government dispatched troops to keep order, but offered little direct assistance to victims. Churches, charities and business groups tried to fill the vacuum, but most of the displaced drifted into tent cities and shantytowns to fend for themselves, Professor Miller said.
But if the fire offers few clear tips on how government should respond to Katrina, he said, it is instructive in one way: many of the evacuees stayed close to Chicago and helped rebuild it. By the late 1880's, it was the fifth-largest city in the world, a commercial hub and birthplace of a new, more muscular - and more fireproof - architecture.
"I don't understand the despair regarding New Orleans," he said. "We rebuilt Chicago. We rebuilt Berlin and Tokyo. We can do it again."
On a wedding four years ago
Another Anniversary
By RAYCHUL GOLDENBERG-BIVENS as told to SARA IVRY
We were going to be married during the weekend of Sept. 15, 2001. It was going to be a small, family thing, with a few friends, and there was a state park where we wanted to have it. Our dog was going to be in the wedding. We're not the most traditional people.
We were living in North Carolina and had been engaged for almost a year. Jeff is in the Coast Guard and was going to be transferred to Florida in October. Sept. 11 was his last day on the job before his leave kicked in; we had planned time off for the wedding and the move. He left for an overnight trip to Virginia on the 10th, transporting a boat for the Coast Guard.
I was working as a vocational counselor, and on the morning of the 11th, I was taking applications at a high school. Someone came in around 9 a.m. and said a plane had hit one of the towers. It sounded like a freak accident. I finished at the school, and by the time I got back to my office, I found out about the second plane. We watched a small television that was brought out from somebody's office. It had terrible reception. I remember people putting tinfoil ears on it, trying to get a better picture. Then we heard about the plane that hit the Pentagon and the one that went down in Pennsylvania.
I was antsy, concerned, but I didn't have a way to reach Jeff. He called me around 11:15, on the road back from Virginia, and said that the Coast Guard had recalled everybody's leave. He had to report for duty on the morning of the 12th.
I was taken aback. I didn't know how he could be affected; maybe he would end up in the line of fire. As we talked, he put the pieces together: we didn't know when flights would start again, when he would be home again or for how long. It would be devastating if something happened to him. There was a sense of urgency. Jeff's a really even guy, but his speech was halting when the conversation started going this way, and he asked if I wanted to marry that night.
I had conflicted feelings. Who does this on this kind of day? But we also talked about how right it felt, to do something loving on a day they meant to be so obliterating.
We decided to go through with it. Jeff called the magistrate's office to make sure it was open. I had been trying to call my sister in New York and wasn't able to get through; one of my parents reached me and told me she was O.K. I don't want people to think we ignored what was happening. Everyone was in a daze. My mom tells me that I called her in the early afternoon to say we were going to be married. I don't remember calling.
I got off work at 4 p.m., went home and started to get ready. Jeff got home after I did. We rushed to get changed; he wore a shirt and tie, and I wore a dress, a cranberry-colored dress.
On the way to the courthouse, we stopped at a pharmacy so I could buy pantyhose; I felt I needed them for some ridiculous reason, and I wriggled into them in the car. It was a whirlwind. In reality, the magistrate's office was open 24 hours a day. It doesn't make any sense now why we felt so rushed, but it seemed to at the time.
Jeff and I had called coworkers to get two witnesses. We met Jeff's in the parking lot, but my friend didn't show up. We found a guy mopping floors, but he couldn't speak English. And then a police officer agreed to do it. The magistrate said something like, This is the last thing I thought I'd be doing today. He didn't say it in a negative way, but he wasn't overly jovial either.
It was a very short ceremony. My ring wasn't ready. Jeff had his. I was hoping we would read our vows at the magistrate's, but it was like, boom, over.
Afterward, we went to Bistro by the Sea, where we had planned to go with our families after the wedding. There were televisions with the news on. I remember feeling somber. We didn't tell anybody; there weren't that many people there. We read our vows during dinner - I had three drafts, and I read parts off of different sheets of paper. We had cake, something chocolate, and we tried to tune out the television. When we got home, we stood in front of the computer and took pictures with the little camera on the computer. They came out really dark.
We had done something for ourselves. We weren't sure how people were going to react to the news. I sent out a big group e-mail message the next day and specifically said that we had done this not to be disrespectful, but to do a good thing on an incomprehensibly bad day. And I remember from the e-mail messages I got back from people that this resonated with them.
We live in Virginia now; Jeff is stationed in Portsmouth. We've had three anniversaries, and he has been home for only one. We're not sure he'll be home this year. But every year, we end up feeling that even if Jeff had been available on, say, the 13th, we still would have married on the 11th. I admit it's a little bit sad not to have pictures, not to have had a cake, not to have had loved ones there. But what are pictures compared with people's lives? Or what everybody else had to go through? Nothing. Those things are insignificant.
On living in Lower Manhattan
The Secret Life of Hanover Square
By MARK CALDWELL
NEW YORK at night is a city of low-key voyeurs and discreet exhibitionists. Not droolers and flashers, but more or less lawful strollers like me, looking for the curtainless window whose occupant pursues some puzzling activity, or by the passing diorama show of apartment and brownstone interiors. In Manhattan this is a pleasure abetted by the tacit cooperation of residents who keep their windows clean and their shades up, affording a view to passers-by even when they don't enjoy one themselves.
Congested high-rise avenues, over- windowed and overpowered by street glare, make poor territory for such louche but ultimately harmless gawking. Far better are the toylike scale of the West Village, or the grander but still manageable brownstones of side streets in Chelsea and Murray Hill.
And over the last few years, despite Sept. 11, a new spy-friendly neighborhood has materialized downtown in the moldering lanes west of Broadway, between City Hall and the ferries. Increasingly, people live here. And increasingly, if you choose the right time and have a patient eye, you can spy on them.
On a warm Sunday night last month, with most of New York supposedly decamped for upstate or the East End, I walked along Ann Street, just below City Hall. At first glance it resembled a Lower East Side block unflattened by chic: tenements, 1800's-vintage factories inscrutable as to what they once made, and three-story brick row houses, all seemingly held up only by newer commercial structures offering them a shoulder. It's poorly lighted here, sometimes pitch dark, channeling a mean street from the 1970's, and waiting like a stage set for the appearance of a mugger's ghost.
But the first people to materialize were obviously alive and steps from home: an old man and a small girl of 5 or 6, tethered to a pair of bounding greyhounds, which hauled them out from under a razor-wired plywood scaffold, then dragged them joyously into Theater Alley (a cluttered lane that opens off Ann and once ran behind the old Park Theater, the city's leading venue in the early 1800's).
The members of this quartet weren't anomalies, as I've come to realize after a year or so of noticing the block's increasingly numerous and visible residents. In the daytime their lighted windows collapse into anonymous facades and their apartments seem to hide from the office workers and tourists milling below. But at night - though still uncommon, at most one or two to a building - they're unmistakable.
A living space never looks like an office or a workroom, even if its second-story ceiling displays to the sidewalk a ghastly fluorescent ring and the lumpy grime of an ancient paint job. In one row-house window on Ann Street, the telltale was a filled-up bookcase and the top of an occupied Aeron chair arching over a buzzing air-conditioner whose drips banged on the steel sidewalk hatchway.
Commercial buildings are being colonized, too, and that helps hide the neighborhood's homes, as with the co-op at 3 Hanover Square. By day you can't tell it from the office block it once was; its lobby remains as stark as a bank vault. But after dark the lights in its tall upper windows open them to the sidewalk and show that they, in fact, belong to duplexes that overlook the torn-up park in the square and offer a glimpse of the East River.
People seem to materialize, giving no clue where they came from or where they're headed - a gay couple, for instance, suddenly appearing with bags from the semi-mythical 24-hour neighborhood grocery I've been told about but which nobody I've spoken to can locate.
Far downtown's deceptive appearances and still-evolving social composition can often leave you baffled as to the meaning of what or whom you're looking at even when you're vouchsafed a view. Turning the corner at Pearl Street into Coenties Slip, I saw a silhouette, sitting at a desk or table behind a second-story window. It bowed down till its head disappeared, lurched bolt upright, then repeated the cycle five times. Eating off the table? Snorting cocaine? Peering at a spreadsheet? Who knows?
Just below Hanover Square, Stone Street, cobbled, closed to traffic, lined with outdoor tables belonging to a row of bars and restaurants, has become the town square to this emerging neighborhood. On workday evenings the community ambiance disappears under hordes of blue-shirted business types, out for an after-hours drink. But on Sunday the scene quiets, and the few people inside or out are clearly locals - a father sharing French fries with his two young sons, a man sitting alone with a Guinness and the paper.
Ulysses', on Stone opposite Mill Lane, is a wildly popular singles pub, especially on Thursday nights. But its staff has adjusted to the slower weekend pace, and has noted, too, the demographic shift. Karen Hansen, the Sunday-night floor manager, says the residents seem to be a mix without a profile: retired people, couples in their 20's, middle-aged professionals. She has talked to a rising number of prospective home-hunters looking for a neighborhood restaurant in a quarter that at first doesn't seem to have any.
In that respect, residential Wall Street is like no other recent urban resurrection, wary of engineered coolness and the publicity juggernaut that always seems to follow. Its old brick and old wood (like the red clapboards on the 1794 building at the corner of Water and Dover Streets, far below the arch of the Brooklyn Bridge and now housing a low-key cafe) qualify it as desirable, but have so far avoided the blandness of perfect remodeling.
EVEN a few happily vulgar glass apartment-tower invaders, looking like refugees from the Upper East Side or even Fort Lee, dilute what otherwise might be an overdose of antiquity. In sunlight these towers are nearly indistinguishable from offices or hotels. But later in the day, the doormen in the lobbies become visible and the residents, many apparently transients working temporarily for a financial o
For Storm Survivors, a Mosaic of Impressions
By KIRK JOHNSON
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 10 - For the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, there is no shared moment to put one's finger on, no clock-stopping space-holder of history as there was on Nov. 22, 1963, or on Sept. 11 to remind them: this was where we were and what we were doing when it all came down.
The disaster was incremental rather than cataclysmic. Instead of a crystalline moment of memory, there are infinite numbers, each with its own marker: a long journey, a recurring noise, the last words of a dear relative. Depending on where people were, what decisions they made in the blur of the crisis and how the authorities responded, every portrait of the storm is different, like a jigsaw puzzle in which no two pieces are alike.
For Robert Newman Jr., a 32-year-old resident of St. Bernard Parish, about seven miles south of New Orleans, the thing that sticks in his head about the storm is a chorus of screams. People in Mr. Newman's community, one of the most devastated areas in Hurricane Katrina's path, watched for days in growing rage and frustration as helicopter after helicopter raced overhead, bound north for New Orleans with no acknowledgment of the stranded, beleaguered people below. He came to understand, he said, how a person could go crazy enough to shoot at a helicopter, if only from the unbearable stress and anxiety of being ignored for days on a roof without water and food.
"People are just screaming and screaming on every roof," he said, sitting on the couch in his cousin's apartment here in Baton Rouge where he and other family members have taken up temporary residence. "But who do you help?"
Mr. Newman and his brother Paul, 24, eventually managed to find a boat, and rescued as many people as they could, including an elderly couple who were standing side by side, neck deep in a swamp surrounded by snakes. They almost passed the old couple by, until the woman managed to reach up and wave.
But the rescue they both wanted to talk about most because it was the most serendipitous and unlikely came when they were trying to siphon gas from the engine of an empty boat that they had captured. Their own motor was turned off, and that is the only reason they heard the tapping sound from a roof nearby. They hacked through the shingles with a machete and found an elderly woman under the eaves with her little dog.
The strange thing was, they said, that the woman had a hatchet in her hand. They took her and the dog and the hatchet and chugged off into the neighborhood.
Some people, like Stephen Stearns, 20, of St. Bernard Parish, have been thinking about decisions that altered the course of events, for better or for worse. Mr. Stearns's mother, Marion Stearns, 54, insisted on riding out Hurricane Katrina at home, as she had every hurricane before.
But this was not every hurricane before.
On Monday, Aug. 29, with almost no warning, the floodwaters surged in St. Bernard Parish, smashing down the front door of their house, Mr. Stearns said. He managed to get outside, but his mother and his father, Arthur Stearns, were trapped.
They got separated by the raging waters, as the furniture banged and careened through the house. Arthur Stearns dived repeatedly searching for his wife, and finally saved himself by smashing a fist through the ceiling and pushing his head through the hole into the attic to breathe.
Mrs. Stearns didn't make it and drowned.
Her last words to her husband were about their son: "Make sure Stephen gets out," Stephen Stearns said.
Margaret Chopin's family was piling together in their cars on the Sunday before the storm to head north out of New Orleans across the Lake Pontchartrain for higher ground and safety.
At the last second, her younger brother, Roy Joseph Jr., 54, stepped out of the car. His phobia of crossing over water, he told the family, was too much. He could not face the trip and would stay in town.
"We talked to him Monday night," said Ms. Chopin, who is 55, as she stood by the family's cots at a Baton Rouge shelter this week. "He said his car had been crushed by a tree and was underwater, but that he was all right. We haven't heard from him since."
People who specialize in the rich oral history and folklore of Louisiana say that Hurricane Katrina's stories must be saved and that plans are already being put together for a more organized and formal accounting of what hundreds of thousands of people did and thought during the storm. The first interviews could begin as early as this week.
"We want to create a central database for all the different organizations that are collecting stories," said Jocelyn Donlon, co-executive director of the Center for Cultural Resources, a nonprofit group based here. "We want to focus on how these stories might influence future public policy."
Some people came together in support and self-defense, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, in picaresque, improbable journeys that framed the experience through bonds of friendship.
"We called ourselves the Band," said Greg Lupo, a tourist from Ohio who walked out of New Orleans across the Mississippi River with his girlfriend, Cathi Pentella, and three New Orleans residents who all met one another waiting for a rescue bus that never came.
Mr. Lupo, a 45-year-old drummer and cable television lineman, armed himself with an eight-foot long steel rod to protect the group. But nothing happened. The gangs that he saw breaking windows and smashing cars along the way let the Band pass.
Netanya Watts Hart, a coordinator for the Institute of Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University, described the journey from her shattered New Orleans neighborhood on the afternoon of Aug. 31 in tones that almost sound like a parable from the Bible.
"We eventually walked out of the Ninth Ward in about five feet of water and we put all the children - 14 children - we put them in a flatboat along with a woman with one leg and walked a mile in the water," she said. "Then the water went down enough, and we walked about two more miles and all the children were holding hands, singing gospel songs two by two."
Ms. Hart, her husband, her two stepchildren, the woman with one leg and about 25 other people - relatives, neighbors and members of her church - were eventually taken to safety across the Mississippi River, not unlike Michael's mythic ferry across the Jordan, though in this case by a Coast Guard crew. And the group was all still together this week in a shelter near Houston.
Neliska Calloway, a 911 dispatcher with the New Orleans Police Department, said she has thought of the people she could not help. She worked for 48 hours straight through the height of the storm, taking call after call from desperate, frightened people. The call that has stayed in her mind came from a woman who said she was in labor with twins. She had fled to her attic and the waters were still rising.
"It was so emotional taking those phone calls," Ms. Calloway said. "It was scary. You can't imagine what somebody is going through, knowing that they're trapped in a house, surrounded by water and there's no where to go. I just talked to them as much as I could."
Ms. Calloway said that emergency workers reached the woman. She said she heard that one of the twins had died.
In some cases, though, people took command as the crisis descended. Michael Brown, 24, credited good leadership with getting the 25 members of his extended family out of New Orleans. Mr. Brown said his uncle, Jesse Brown II, became a general. Bags were ordered packed in 15 minutes. A rendezvous point was established in front of the house of Michael Brown's grandmother, Emma Brown.
Everything went according to plan except for one thing, the strapping down of their luggage on the roof of the car, which did not hold. Several suitcases of clothing blew off as they drove out of the city, but there was no time to stop.
Charles Vigee, 46, was also a handy man to have around as the storm struck his house in New Orleans. When water started surging up over the porch and in through the front door, his inspiration was to take the doors off their hinges.
There were four people in the house, said Mr. Vigee, who works in construction, so his idea was to fashion a raft, one person per door, and lash them together. The lashing, with a cord ripped from the vacuum cleaner and other lengths of wire he could find in the watery mess, was wholly inadequate, he said. But the tipping point, literally, came when his mother-in-law, Carolyn Johnson, started to teeter on her door just down the street from their flooded home.
"Please Miss Carolyn, please don't fall off the door," Mr. Vigee said he remembered saying or at least thinking. "But she fell off the door."
Mr. Vigee, sitting in a Baton Rouge shelter surrounded by about 4,500 other people rendered homeless and destitute by the hurricane, laughed.
"But I was not laughing then," he said.
Serendipity intervened, he said, in what could have become a crisis. A person floating by on an air mattress helped pull Ms. Johnson back onto her door, and eventually the family made it to a highway where they were all evacuated by helicopter.
And Michael Cryer and Elvera Boatner fell in love.
They met, indirectly, because the roof of Mr. Cryer's apartment building in New Orleans blew off. But they both speak about that now, interviewed sitting on their side-by-side cots in a downtown Baton Rouge shelter, as a small detail, even on some level a happy turn of events because of where things led from there.
Mr. Cryer, 29, a sheetrock worker, said he hid in his closet behind a mattress when water began coming in through the ceiling.
"When I came out, I was like, dang, the whole ceiling was gone," he said. "I could see the sky and rain was coming through."
So he went looking for an uncle a mile or so away, who happened to live in Ms. Boatner's building.
They got out of the city together and have been together since.
"I love him," said Ms. Boatner, who is 24, "and I wouldn't have ever met him."
On things left undone on 9/11
The Eleventh of Never
By PAUL VITELLO
Among the few certain truths of Sept. 11, 2001, is one that applies to every day that dawns. That there is no guarantee of tomorrow, or the next five minutes. This is the central provision of all contracts between people and their lives. No plans, large or small, are exempt.
The impact of 9/11 on the world's large plans has been well documented. Its impact on the smaller ones has been chronicled mainly and rightfully in the stories of those who died or witnessed the terror attacks up close, physically and emotionally.
But what about the rest of the many millions whose relatively small plans for an ordinary Tuesday were bent or swallowed completely that day, like light waves passing too close to a black hole?
The day that never was, to give it a name, would be a day that exists not in history but in the memory-store people keep for the things that pass them by. There are millions of such people, at the same time deeply affected and only tangentially touched by the terror attacks, who can instinctively conjure the outlines of that lost day.
"You can never go back and pick up where you left off," said the Rev. Daniel Paul Matthews, the retired rector of Trinity Church-St. Paul's Chapel in Lower Manhattan. "Such an enormous event doesn't just postpone or divert things; it upsets everything kind of forever. It's as if life starts all over."
The chronicle of such dislocation is for the most part a chronicle of intangibles, an example being Father Matthews's own day. He had invited a group of distinguished clergy members and scholars to Trinity for a taped discussion with the Rev. Rowan Williams, who was then the archbishop of Wales and was soon to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. All were present when the first tower collapsed, covering the church in debris, and all escaped safely.
"But here were all these men of the spirit, gathered for a discussion of spirituality," he said, a dark joke in his voice as he encapsulated the moment, though the joke was never quite spoken, "and they end up running for their lives."
Or take the most literal and municipal example of these intangible losses. Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials were supposed to hold meetings that day. Among the big items on the agenda was the long-stalled Second Avenue subway. When the authority resumed meetings in the following weeks, needless to say, the subject of the subway was gone. It would not come back for years.
That lost day would be the sum total of all the meetings canceled, all the chance encounters unplugged, the planned celebrations and telephone calls that might have led a million people in a million different directions and that just never happened, or that turned into something else.
It's a day that inhabits the imaginary, woodsy territory of Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken," where the protagonist says, "Knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back," but overlaid on a 21st century urban landscape of hubbub, commerce, multi-tasking, politics, and finally, terror.
That day, Mark Green had just voted for himself in the mayoral primary and was readying for an election night he had spent two years preparing for by reminding voters that "we're going to change this city on Sept. 11!" There would be changes on Sept. 11, but there would be no election night.
Jack Welch, the retired General Electric chairman, appeared on the "Today" show to promote what was advertised as the biggest publishing event of the day, his book, "Jack: Straight From the Gut," but it would not be the biggest publishing event of the day. That distinction would go to the nation's newspapers, which published hundreds of extra editions, with copies numbering in the millions.
Patrick Huang, a Queens real estate agent, was marshaling his forces for the 10th annual march of the Committee for Admitting Taiwan to the United Nations. It was to proceed from the Taiwan consulate to the United Nations, beginning as soon as the 50 members of the group, which he founded, arrived via the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway with their loudspeakers, platforms, flags of Taiwan and military-band marching drum rented for the occasion. There would be no march; and becoming confused in the human tidal wave, several officials who had traveled from Taiwan for the occasion would be lost until the next day. "There was a very panic situation," Mr. Huang said.
The sun rose that day on the kind of bright blue sky that people who love New York love best in New York, the day after a night of thunderstorms that rained out a game at Yankee Stadium. Roger Clemens, who was a game away from some pitching record - you could look it up; it doesn't matter much in this context - had been scheduled to pitch that night, and now was supposed to try for his record in a game on Tuesday.
When he set his record a week later, Mr. Clemens seemed to speak for many others like himself whose lives went on more or less unchanged in the aftermath, but whose view of the world and relationship to it had subtly shifted.
"Right now, it doesn't have the same feeling it would have had a couple of days ago," he said of his record. "After this past week, you realize: 'This is what I do, and what we do. But it's not who I am.'"
Mary Ellen Mannino tried every way she could, but could not get into Manhattan to be with the remains of her father, Joseph Gambino, who had died at age 70 on Sunday, Sept. 9 after a nine-month bout with lung cancer. His wake was scheduled for Monday and Tuesday at Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home in Manhattan. No one in his Bensonhurst family could reach him. "I know he was dead, but you felt like you were leaving him there," said Mrs. Mannino. "It was like, the whole city was in shock, and my father was alone, and we couldn't be with him. We were in a cloud of grief."
The president of the Borough of Manhattan Community College, Antonio Perez, walked from his office on Chambers Street that morning to his school's newly renovated, 15-story satellite building, Fiterman Hall, just south of the World Trade Center. He had chosen Tuesday to conduct a final inspection of the building, which had been renovated at a cost of $65 million over several years. Opening ceremonies were planned for October.
By the end of the day, Fiterman Hall was buried to the third floor in the debris of the 47-story building next door, 7 World Trade Center. The hall remains shuttered today. "We're hoping to start demolition in January," Mr. Perez said.
That morning, Felicia Fields, a 19-year-old woman described by her lawyer as mildly retarded, was making whatever adjustments she could to the fact that she would be sentenced to a prison term for the murder of a livery cab driver named Saro Manuel Lopez, a father of three shot down in a holdup in East New York, Brooklyn. For the sentencing scheduled that morning, Mr. Lopez's widow was en route to the courthouse, as was Ms. Fields, shackled in a van from Riker's Island, and her father, who was pleading in interviews with reporters for mercy from the court; and the head of a livery cab drivers' union, who was pleading for stern justice.
In the upside down world of crime and punishment, the suspension of everything that day gave Ms. Fields and her family two extra weeks of the generous visiting privileges at Rikers Island. Then she was sentenced to a term of 25 years-to-life in a prison, upstate.
The dislocation, of course, was not just local. Eighty couples were scheduled to be married that day at the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel, in Las Vegas. All but a few canceled, and as far as the proprietor, Ron DeCar, knows, "because most people come here to do something crazy," very few of them ever came back.
The mayor of Los Angeles was headed to Washington to ask for help with air traffic congestion. John Ashcroft, the attorney general at the time, was headed to Milwaukee to address fifth graders at the Doerfler Elementary School.
A girl named Dahlia Gruen was supposed to have her 10th birthday party that night in Newton, Mass., but as it turned out, she said, "it wasn't so exciting;" and worse, "I didn't really understand it at the time, but it was changing my birthday for the rest of my life."
On a Web site known as Everything2, a girl calling herself Kaytay described meeting a boy while waiting for her first class to begin at New York University that day. They planned to meet for coffee after class. Then everything changed and everyone scattered, including the boy.
Almost everyone who shares a story of the lost day brackets it with apologies. It is nothing, they say, compared with those who lost their lives, or those who lost family. "I had a friend who lost loved ones, and suffered more than anyone can imagine, so I've never spoken about the impact of 9/11 on me, because it seems so trivial," said Mr. Green, the Democratic mayoral candidate.
Yet before the attack changed the political chemistry of the city, and the nation, he was given a better than even chance of winning the mayoralty.
And though Matt Yates, a Brooklyn port operator, had only modest expectations for that day - he was hoping for 10 seconds of free publicity for the dying stevedore industry when he invited the media to watch as "two giant cranes, the size of small skyscrapers" were moved into place on a pier at the end of Atlantic Avenue - he lost something, too, that day, he said: a sense of purpose. A sense of being able to influence the direction of his city.
It would be the same feeling of loss among the musicians and singers of the New York City Opera, who had been scheduled to open their season that night with a new production of Wagner's "Flying Dutchman." The opera was to be followed by a gala dinner dance for donors, honoring Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.
"It was all so huge, and everyone in the company was wondering about what their role was in the world at a time like this," said Susan Woelzl, a spokeswoman for the City Opera. Mr. Giuliani answered the question for them, urging the opera to start its season as soon as possible, which it did on Saturday.
If you check the listings of concerts, sports events and performances that were scheduled throughout the country on Sept. 11, 2001, almost all were canceled in the throes of the national shock. One of the few exceptions was a show by the quintessential New York musician and performance artist, Laurie Anderson, who went on stage in Chicago as planned.
"The promoter called and said, 'What should we do?' People were calling to say they were sure it was canceled, but I thought that to have a public event that night would be a good idea," said Ms. Anderson, who lives in Greenwich Village.
She leaves the lights on during her shows as a rule, and remembers the faces in the audience that night as looking "stunned." She dedicated the performance to those who had died, and closed the show with a song she wrote in 1994, "Love Among the Sailors," which includes the line, "There is no pure land now, no safe place."
There was no statement intended in anything she did that night except "to play music and be with people," she said. It was not a coherent moment in her life as a performer, she said. "I just wanted to be there."
On memorials
Comes with a slideshow
9/11: The Enduring Salute
By JEROME CHARYN
MOST New Yorkers have a jolting memory of where they were on 9/11, when the twin towers tumbled, leaving Lower Manhattan in a black void for 10 minutes until the smoke and dust clouds began to clear.
I couldn't witness the smoke, the dust, the debris. I was sitting in my lawyer's office on the Avenue Henri-Martin, in Paris, when his sister called from the States and told us about the attack. We turned on the television in time to see a jetliner swivel around the second tower as if it were performing a strange ballet.
When I returned to Manhattan two weeks later, one of the first things I saw was a bulletin board as big as a wall, covered with leaflets, letters and fliers, on the south side of St. Vincent's Hospital. The fliers made a lot of sense. St. Vincent's, at Seventh Avenue and West 11th Street, was the comprehensive trauma center closest to ground zero, and 17 percent of the injured were treated at St. Vincent's network of seven hospitals.
In those hours and days after the attack, people streamed to the hospital, some looking for their loved ones, others offering to give blood - tragically not needed - or help in other ways. The bulletin board became a natural depository for pictures of those who had been trapped in the towers and were still missing, along with little notes about whom to contact.
Over the following weeks, the bulletin board expanded like a miraculous tree, with prayers, flowers, poems and children's drawings posted alongside pictures of the missing. This gathering of mementos allowed the community near the hospital to express its feelings at a time when the city itself was wounded, when a senseless attack seemed to challenge the very notion of community. New Yorkers clung to bulletin boards, as if they were learning a cave language after their own power of speech had become twisted and broken like the gigantic metal shards that rose out of the rubble.
The cave language on the far side of St. Vincent's was hardly unique; messages and posters of the missing could be found on lampposts, subway entrances, fire hydrants, restaurant windows, phone booths, bus shelters, brick walls, anywhere with some kind of surface to accommodate them.
Most of these bulletin boards, the first testimonials to 9/11 that helped the city through a period of terror and shock and allowed New Yorkers to grieve in a primitive way, are long gone. But that wall of missing people at St. Vincent's, now encased in panels of hard plastic, is still there, four years later.
IT has evolved from a vibrant, freewheeling message board to a shrine, from cave art to a full-blown memorial that is genuinely moving: graduation photos, names of the missing, each with its own strange pull - "Jupiter," "Arkady," "Kalyan," "Sita" - a scarf stuck to the wall with tape, a missing man on his girlfriend's lap, a firefighter from Ladder Company 101, all weather-worn from the time when there was no plastic cover.
"The wall is part of our mission," said Sister Miriam Kevin Phillips, a senior vice president at St. Vincent's in charge of efforts to serve and protect the community. Sister Kevin, as she is called, has become her own kind of archivist. It was with her help that the plastic panels were put up in 2002 to guard the wall and, as she puts it, "preserve it as a memorial."
Sister Kevin is hardly the only one involved in preserving the memory of 9/11. While the vast majority of the memorials - the candles, the tattered photos, the forgotten bouquets - are long gone, a multitude of others, large and small, makeshift or elaborate, has risen up across the city.
One such memorial is right across the street from St. Vincent's, at the cusp of Greenwich and Seventh Avenues. The chain-link fence of a Metropolitan Transportation Authority parking lot has been turned into a work of art in progress, a whole fence of tiles dedicated to 9/11 and known as "Tiles for America." This gathering was the brainchild of Lorrie Veasey, the former owner of Our Name Is Mud, a make-your-own pottery store around the corner.
"When I'm disturbed by something," Ms. Veasey said recently, while explaining the origin of her project, "I work with my hands. What everybody really wanted to do was dig that day. I wanted to rescue people. I couldn't dig, so I decided to work with clay."
Ms. Veasey began by making a little band of angels, each with a particular mission, to "rescue" the four hijacked planes, for example, or a fire truck in danger of destruction. She fired her angels at a studio in Chelsea, and the first was hung four days after 9/11. In the weeks and months that followed, friends and coworkers began to make their own tiles and hang them on the fence with wires. Then people began to attach other items to the fence: found objects, flowers, combs, ribbons. The resulting collage became, as she put it, "a public force."
Ms. Veasey provided the bisque, or unglazed tile, to customers without charge, and after a tile was completed, she fired and glazed it and added it to the fence; customers also made small contributions to the Firemen's Widows and Children's Association. "Many people came in who had lost friends and family members," she said, noting that the tiles became the only tangible markers they had.
Tiles arrived from other cities, other countries, other pottery stores. A boy of 6 painted a fireman in a red cape; another child drew pillars of smoke atop a tilting tower. The most original was a mosaic painted by the staff at an animal hospital in St. Petersburg, Fla., depicting a panorama of dogs and dedicated to all the search-and-rescue animals at ground zero "who gave their noses and hearts to soothe the wound of a nation."
Ms. Veasey worried that 9/11 was beginning to fall out of our dreams: "My fear is that people have forgotten too much."
Perhaps it was also neglect. One sign of this was the fate of "Forever Tall," a mural of the Manhattan skyline with the World Trade Center resurrected as boxlike bouquets of flowers. The mural, which had become a local landmark, had been painted on the side wall of Dolphins, a restaurant at Cooper Square and East Sixth Street. But Dolphins is gone, and so is the mural, replaced by three little splashes of red, white, and blue paint.
Even when memorials to 9/11 haven't been erased, they are often extremely hard to find, as is the case with the window display at the Bed Bug Club at Smith and Third Streets in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. The Bed Bug Club seems to be a junk shop-cum-neighborhood hangout with a potpourri of images on its window, which is both message board and memorial: faded clippings of ground zero, a photo of firefighters digging in the debris, another of the mass exodus across the Brooklyn Bridge, a picture of the 1936 New York Yankees championship club, with Joe DiMaggio in the middle, like some somber saint who might have served us on 9/11.
Perhaps the most unlikely memorial is a bakery in Greenwich Village that opened six months after the attack. Called Mary's off Jane, it is run by Mary Arda, 47, a Cuban exile who spent her childhood in Havana, where she learned how to bake a killer pineapple upside-down cake before she was 9. Ms. Arda moved from Miami to Manhattan in 1982, with the dream of becoming an actress. "I was going to be on Broadway," she said, "but being a Latina wasn't in vogue in the early 80's." Instead, she went to work on Wall Street. A month before 9/11, realizing she was going to be "downsized," she took a little time off.
Ms. Arda was standing on the Avenue of the Americas the morning of 9/11 when she saw "a flash of smoke in the first tower," then heard the second plane hit. She was in a daze for weeks. But, she said: "the city bonded like nothing I had ever seen. We were a community of neighbors, a community of friends."
Having a little bit of cash, she wanted to open up something in the neighborhood. She still loved to bake, but she had a specific sort of place in mind.
"Most bakeries don't offer you a place to sit down," she said. "They're very Betty Crocker, very generic. I decided that when I created my own bakery, I would give people a place to come to where they could sit down, be social, and have a little slice of something that would give them comfort." She also wanted to create a place where people could munch on cake and commune in a room of second-hand tables and chairs that suggest a small primitive chapel.
The city is home to another memorial that is even more hidden than Mary's, and it is in the most public of places: the lobby of the American Express corporate headquarters at 3 World Financial Center. On a recent visit, I discovered no crowd of tourists, not one curious soul in front of "Eleven Tears," a highly original work of art dedicated to the 11 American Express employees who lost their lives in the terrorist attack.
"Eleven Tears" was designed by Ken Smith, a 52-year-old landscape architect who lives and works in the former "frozen zone," the area bordering ground zero that was evacuated right after 9/11. The installation consists of an 11-sided, 600-pound piece of natural Brazilian quartz that resembles a gigantic tear. This "tear" is set in a steel ring suspended from a 35-foot-high ceiling by 11 cables, and hovers over an 11-sided black granite fountain with the names of the employees cut into the 11 corners.
The reflection of the 600-pound crystal in that dark pool of water is stunning; it resembles a crystal cone rising out of the depths. Even more remarkable are the 11 drops of water - 11 invisible tears - that fall at random intervals from the ceiling into the pool, creating ripples that expand and intersect in the water.
"The thing I had been obsessing about was the sky and ground," Mr. Smith said. "I wanted to unite sky and ground, the ceiling and floor, heaven and earth. Water seemed an obvious way to make the connection." The notion of 11 tears came quickly: "Each ripple was really a person; tears and ripples merged together."
OSAMA BIN LADEN attacked the twin towers in the name of religion, but in one of the ironies that he himself couldn't predict, religious images were among the most powerful of those born in the debris.
One of the first to witness this was the Rev. Kevin Divine, a priest at the Church of the Good Shepherd on Isham Street, in the Inwood section of Manhattan. Father Divine, who worked the midnight shift at the morgue within ground zero right after 9/11, recalled "the segment of steel in the form of a cross" that was found in the rubble.
He felt that this cross "was not merely a Christian symbol, but belonged to the whole human family." And it was with this belief that he worked to have a piece of ground zero delivered to his parish, although he had to wait until "another remnant was found in the form of a cross."
Father Divine received the steel in February 2002. "I had to get engineers to design the base, to sink the cross into concrete with iron and steel intermeshing rods that could withstand a 100-mile-an-hour wind," he recalled. Today the cross stands in a memorial garden at Good Shepherd that honors the 20 parishioners who died on 9/11.
A different kind of parish, a parish of rescue and recovery workers at St. Paul's Chapel, played a critical part in the mythology that grew up around 9/11. Because St. Paul's is situated at the very edge of ground zero, on Church Street, it quickly became both a sanctuary and an emergency rescue center, where diggers could emerge from the rubble and seek refuge; cots were arranged along the perimeter of the chapel, and volunteers placed stuffed animals on the pillows, to make the beds feel a little more comforting.
Enormous bundles of letters began to arrive from children around the world, many of them containing poems and drawings, and volunteers taped them on walls and pews until the chapel was a sea of paper. Volunteers also encouraged rescue workers to keep some of the letters: diggers tucked them under their helmets as they returned to the debris. Many were off-duty firemen who worked 12- to 18-hour shifts in what quickly became known as the "pit."
There's a small bronze "Bell of Hope" in the churchyard, given to St. Paul's on the first anniversary of 9/11 by the people of London, but this bell is nowhere as compelling as a makeshift memorial inside the chapel: children's letters hanging on a little gate, letters addressed to firefighters and other rescuers, with prayers and thanks "for being brave."
IT was difficult to forget the image of firefighters on 9/11 rushing toward their doom while everyone else was fleeing from the towers. They'd arrived with their helmets and their hooks, and disappeared into the black smoke; 343 of them never returned. "We lost 4,000 years of experience," one Manhattan firefighter said, "everyone from a chief to a probie."
Entire companies were wiped out, but the most poignant of all 9/11 memorials were the placards and scrolls and bronze bas-reliefs outside every firehouse that had lost even a single man, often with the words "Still Riding" above the names and pictures of dead firefighters, as if they had a palpable presence on board every truck.
Some of the displays - the wreaths, ribbons and photographs - are long gone. But at firehouses throughout the city are smaller reminders of the day: the decals that were put on engines and ladder trucks of companies that had lost men, often designed by someone in the company, with the company logo and the names of the dead; or the table and little red wagon filled with flowers outside Engine Company 226, on State Street, in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, a simple shrine to the company's four lost men, where members of the community can put poems, a plastic angel or a little toy dog in a fireman's helmet.
Peter Culkin, a young lieutenant at Engine 226, began to keep a diary after 9/11. "I recorded dreams, wacky dreams," he said one day recently. "Next I'd write about the eleventh. It's hard to transcribe what the average guy can do about what he saw, what he felt, but it still helped me through."
Engine 226 was the last company to put up a memorial. The firehouse waited a full year, but its memorial was more detailed than many others. It included the coats and helmets of its four lost men, and pieces of steel "recovered from the collapse site," a cross and an image of the towers "cut by Port Authority steel workers."
One tower had "a tear in the metal, like a piece of paper," said Lieutenant Culkin, as if he understood his own fragility and the fragility of all things. But despite this fragility, firemen continue to climb into their trucks, still riding with their own fallen men.
On lost cities
Vanished, Under Force of Time and an Inconstant Earth
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Nothing lasts forever.
Just ask Ozymandias, or Nate Fisher.
Only the wind inhabits the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado, birds and vines the pyramids of the Maya. Sand and silence have swallowed the clamors of frankincense traders and camels in the old desert center of Ubar. Troy was buried for centuries before it was uncovered. Parts of the Great Library of Alexandria, center of learning in the ancient world, might be sleeping with the fishes, off Egypt's coast in the Mediterranean.
"Cities rise and fall depending on what made them go in the first place," said Peirce Lewis, an expert on the history of New Orleans and an emeritus professor of geography at Pennsylvania State University.
Changes in climate can make a friendly place less welcoming. Catastrophes like volcanoes or giant earthquakes can kill a city quickly. Political or economic shifts can strand what was once a thriving metropolis in a slow death of irrelevance. After the Mississippi River flood of 1993, the residents of Valmeyer, Ill., voted to move their entire town two miles east to higher ground.
What will happen to New Orleans now, in the wake of floods and death and violence, is hard to know. But watching the city fill up like a bathtub, with half a million people forced to leave, it has been hard not to think of other places that have fallen to time and the inconstant earth.
Some of them have grown larger in death than they ever were in life.
Take the library in Alexandria. If anyplace might have had justifiable pretensions of permanence it would have been the library, founded sometime around 300 B.C. It grew under the early Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt into an enduring symbol of culture and knowledge before disappearing into the sand and sea less than 1,000 years later.
"This was the library," said Roger Bagnall, a historian at Columbia. "It influenced everybody who ever thought about building a library."
Nobody, Dr. Bagnall complains, knows how large it was - estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 scrolls - or what was actually in it. The library's demise is equally shrouded in myth. One legend says the books burned during Caesar's conquest of Alexandria in 47 B.C., but the library was still around in the fourth century, according to historical accounts.
Dr. Bagnall thinks that simple neglect killed the library. "Books rot," even acid-free papyruses, he said, noting that there are no records of any investment in maintaining the library after the early Ptolemies.
By the time Christian mobs sacked the library and museum at the end of the century as a pagan institution, there was probably little left to destroy. "The palace quarter was pretty well wrecked by that point. Whatever had survived the rotting didn't make it past that," Dr. Bagnall said.
Later, in 642, the Arabs moved Egypt's capital to the Cairo region and Alexandria shrank into obscurity.
On the other side of the globe, in the Caroline Islands of Micronesia, a stony silence relieved only by the lapping of waves envelops the empty city of Nan Madol. It consists of almost 100 islands, built by humans and constructed of columns of basalt 15 feet long and weighing 5 tons, stacked log cabin style to make walls 25 feet high.
Local legend says that you will die if you spend the night there. But once this was home to the nobles and priests of the Saudeleur dynasty, which ruled Pohnpei's 30,000 inhabitants up until about 500 years ago, according to William S. Ayres, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon.
Dr. Ayres said that Nan Madol was constructed out on the reef, starting about 1,500 years ago, partly because people had been living out there for hundreds of years to have easy access to the sea, and, perhaps more important, to better commune with ocean deities.
The columns for the walls were quarried on Pohnpei, he said, and floated out to the reef on rafts, about 500,000 tons in all over the 1,000 years of construction, Dr. Ayres has estimated. While most of the islands were living quarters for priests, others were given over to special purposes like making canoes, preparing coconut oil or, most grandly, burying royalty in tombs with courtyards surrounded by 25-foot walls.
Nan Madol's end was simple. When the last of the Saudeleurs was overthrown, the island was divided into smaller chiefdoms, "which exist up to the present day," Dr. Ayres said. The city was abandoned to its sleeping kings and its cold stone logs.
The dry, desert silence in Mesa Verde tells a more complex tale.
Archaeologists say that in the middle of the 12th century, some 20,000 people were living in the picturesque cliff dwellings and surrounding areas in southwestern Colorado, growing maize, squash and beans, raising turkeys, and apparently fighting with their enemies (thus the cliff houses, which were easier to defend than mesa-top villages).
By 1300, these Anasazi, or "ancient ones," were all gone.
That crash was due to a combination of climatic, political and environmental factors, according to Tim Kohler, an anthropologist at Washington State University, who along with Mark Varien of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colo., has been studying the history of pueblo populations.
One culprit was climate change. According to classic tree-ring studies by Andrew Ellicott Douglas of the University of Arizona, the years 1275 to 1295 were abnormally dry.
Recent work using bristlecone pine tree rings has established that it got cold, as well, during that period, lowering the maize production even more, Dr. Kohler said.
At the same time, the deer population seems to have declined significantly. As a result they needed the turkeys for protein.
And what were they feeding the turkeys? Corn.
"If something happens to the maize, the system collapses," Dr. Kohler said.
And so it did. Adding to the pressure, apparently, was war, which meant that the people of Mesa Verde were penned in. They didn't or couldn't spread out to less protected areas. Instead they simply left. The green table had turned brown, and perhaps red.
The most famous lost city of all is one that probably never really existed, Atlantis, the fabulous island civilization swallowed by the sea, which was referred to by Plato.
Some scholars think he might have been inspired by one or more real events. Among them is the destruction of Helike, a city on the Corinthian coast, which was swallowed by an earthquake and a tsunami one winter night in 373 B.C., during Plato's lifetime.
"For the sea was raised by an earthquake," wrote the Greek geographer Strabo, "and it submerged Helike and the Helikonian Poseidon." The city went down like the Titanic with its entire population on board. An expeditionary force sent from a nearby town the next day found no survivors and no bodies to recover.
Though not the seat of empire like fabled Atlantis, Helike was a significant and prosperous city. It was the head of a confederacy of 12 Greek city states, the First Achaean League, whose successor, the Second Achaean League, was recommended as a model of federalism by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in their Federalist Papers. It minted its own coins.
Lured by the prospect of an underwater time capsule, archaeologists have long sought the remains of the sunken city.
Five years ago, after a dozen years of searching, a team of archaeologists led by Dora Katsonopoulou of the Ancient Helike Society in Aigion, Greece, and Steven Soter, a geophysicist with New York University's Center for Ancient Studies, said they had found the lost city - not in the sea but on the coastal plain next to it, near Aigion, about 45 miles northwest of Corinth. It may have been gradually raised by seismic activity, said Dr. Soter.
Moreover, he said, three rivers feeding the coastal plain deposit sediment that helps build it up.
In expeditions every summer, Dr. Soter and his colleagues have uncovered more and more of the city, including a road that goes almost a mile across the plain, walls, buildings, coins, pottery and a cemetery, although they have not found the center of the city yet.
Recently they have found a whole new and unknown city, dating from 2200 B.C., the early Bronze Age, near Helike. The sediments of this ruin contain marine and lagoonal microfauna, Dr. Soter said, suggesting that it too, may have been swallowed by an earthquake and a tidal wave like Helike, but 2,000 years earlier, only to rise again.
It may be, he said, that there have been recurrent floods and abandonments on the plain, the land rising and sinking, cities blooming out of the reborn mud.
"Good agricultural land tends to be reoccupied after catastrophes," Dr. Soter said, echoing Dr. Lewis's statement. "People will live there and take their chances."
There is in the picture a kind of immortality for the dead, as well as for the perennials blooming on the flood plain. If Helike can give rise to the vision of an Atlantis, a collection of scrolls can forever change our concept of learning and memory and empty stones can inspire us to reveries, what can we expect from jazz, gumbo and soft air at one of the trading crossroads of the world, so blessed and cursed with water?
New Orleans will never die. It is already larger than life.
On our refugees
No Fixed Address
By JAMES DAO
WASHINGTON — The images of starving, exhausted, flood-bedraggled people fleeing New Orleans and southern Mississippi over the last two weeks have scandalized many Americans long accustomed to seeing such scenes only in faraway storm-tossed or war-ravaged places like Kosovo, Sudan or Banda Aceh.
But Hurricane Katrina delivered America its own refugee crisis, arguably the worst since Sherman's army burned its way across the South. And though the word "refugee" is offensive to some, and not accurate according to international law, it conveys a fundamental truth: these are people who will be unable to return home for months, possibly years. Many almost certainly will make new homes in new places.
It is not the first time the United States has faced a mass internal migration: think of the "Okies" who fled the drought-ravaged Dust Bowl for fertile California in the 1930's, or Southern blacks who took the Delta blues to Chicago in the first half of the last century.
But the wreckage wrought by Katrina across the Gulf Coast is probably unprecedented in American history. No storm has matched the depth and breadth of its devastation. And the two disasters that demolished major cities - the Chicago fire of 1871 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 - occurred when the federal government lacked the resources and agencies to help the displaced. They offer few clues about how to aid and comfort Katrina's victims.
For that reason, many experts say, the federal government should look for long-term strategies among the groups that have resettled millions of refugees from those faraway storm-tossed or war-ravaged places - two million of them here in the United States since 1975.
"These groups have a different way of seeing the problem: that it's not just short-term emergency relief," said Roberta Cohen, an expert on refugees at the Brookings Institution who helped write guidelines on aiding internally displaced people for the United Nations.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has welcomed some help from agencies that specialize in disaster relief overseas, including the United Nations and the United States Agency for International Development.
But despite Katrina's magnitude, FEMA officials say their approach to resettling evacuees is not likely to differ significantly from the approach here to past disasters. They have ordered 100,000 trailers and mobile homes that will be placed in "trailer cities" in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. They have begun finding short-term apartments in Houston and Baton Rouge. And the Red Cross and other aid groups plan to provide psychological counseling and housing assistance at its temporary shelters.
"This is larger, but the process is the same," said James McIntyre, a FEMA spokesman.
Experts in refugee resettlement say the old ways might not be enough. Thousands of the New Orleans evacuees were poor or elderly; many were on welfare or have limited job skills. Many have been sent far from family and friends. Meeting their needs, and rebuilding the shattered Gulf Coast cities, will take a far more long-term and comprehensive plan, those experts say.
"The approach now is very ad hoc," said Mark Franken, executive director of migration and refugee services for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. "They are moving people from one temporary environment to another."
Mr. Franken said nine resettlement organizations had proposed re-creating their refugee services for evacuees: finding jobs and long-term independent housing, acclimating people to new communities and providing careful case management that lasts months. The Bush administration is still reviewing that proposal, he said. The administration, he added, said groups should be prepared to care for half a million evacuees.
Other experts contend that the federal government should create a large-scale public works program to employ evacuees, possibly in rebuilding New Orleans itself. Gene Dewey, who retired in June as the assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, said one model, as far-fetched as it sounds, might be the Afghan Civilian Conservation Corps - named after the Depression-era program started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt - that the Bush administration created in Afghanistan in 2003. By paying returnees to build roads, plant trees and restore schools, the program provided dignity as well as money, Mr. Dewey said.
"This is a time when you need that kind of Franklin Roosevelt thinking," he said.
Hugh Parmer, who worked for the United States Agency for International Development in the 1990's and who has advised federal officials on a post-Katrina strategy, said the Kosovo crisis of 1999 taught him that the most humane way to resettle refugees was to avoid placing them in large shelters or camps.
Mr. Parmer added that the organization he currently leads, the American Refugee Committee International, plans to open mobile health clinics in Louisiana this week. It will be the first time the group, founded in 1979 to assist Southeast Asian refugees, has done work inside the United States.
"We run six mobile clinics in Darfur, and we've been joking that we're going to move the Sudan model to southern Louisiana," Mr. Parmer said.
Julia Taft, who directed a Ford administration task force that oversaw the resettlement of 131,000 Southeast Asian refugees in the United States in 1975, said religious groups and private relief agencies were able to resettle those refugees in nine months because they had a vast network of volunteers, churches and synagogues.
"What we need to do is treat them like refugees," Ms. Taft said of the hurricane's victims. "We've got to recognize that they are going to be displaced for a significant period of time."
Some people, most prominently the Rev. Jesse Jackson, have objected to calling the storm victims refugees, asserting that the word is inappropriate and even racist. Under international law, refugees are defined as people who cross national borders to flee persecution.
Ms. Cohen of the Brookings Institution said the evacuees from the Gulf Coast fit neatly into a newer category: "internally displaced persons." In the 1990's, when the end of the cold war and the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to ethnic strife and civil war across the Balkans and sub-Saharan Africa, the term was popularized by aid workers who contended that Western nations should intervene, with force if necessary, when governments failed to help large numbers of displaced people.
The United States, thanks to its resources, has largely been spared such dislocations. But not completely. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 may have displaced more than half a million people. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 displaced more than 200,000 people. The Chicago fire of 1871 left 100,000 residents, a third of the city, homeless.
Donald L. Miller, professor of history at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and author of "City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America," said the 1871 fire, like Katrina, had a sudden and catastrophic impact, particularly on poor Irish immigrants.
The federal government dispatched troops to keep order, but offered little direct assistance to victims. Churches, charities and business groups tried to fill the vacuum, but most of the displaced drifted into tent cities and shantytowns to fend for themselves, Professor Miller said.
But if the fire offers few clear tips on how government should respond to Katrina, he said, it is instructive in one way: many of the evacuees stayed close to Chicago and helped rebuild it. By the late 1880's, it was the fifth-largest city in the world, a commercial hub and birthplace of a new, more muscular - and more fireproof - architecture.
"I don't understand the despair regarding New Orleans," he said. "We rebuilt Chicago. We rebuilt Berlin and Tokyo. We can do it again."
On a wedding four years ago
Another Anniversary
By RAYCHUL GOLDENBERG-BIVENS as told to SARA IVRY
We were going to be married during the weekend of Sept. 15, 2001. It was going to be a small, family thing, with a few friends, and there was a state park where we wanted to have it. Our dog was going to be in the wedding. We're not the most traditional people.
We were living in North Carolina and had been engaged for almost a year. Jeff is in the Coast Guard and was going to be transferred to Florida in October. Sept. 11 was his last day on the job before his leave kicked in; we had planned time off for the wedding and the move. He left for an overnight trip to Virginia on the 10th, transporting a boat for the Coast Guard.
I was working as a vocational counselor, and on the morning of the 11th, I was taking applications at a high school. Someone came in around 9 a.m. and said a plane had hit one of the towers. It sounded like a freak accident. I finished at the school, and by the time I got back to my office, I found out about the second plane. We watched a small television that was brought out from somebody's office. It had terrible reception. I remember people putting tinfoil ears on it, trying to get a better picture. Then we heard about the plane that hit the Pentagon and the one that went down in Pennsylvania.
I was antsy, concerned, but I didn't have a way to reach Jeff. He called me around 11:15, on the road back from Virginia, and said that the Coast Guard had recalled everybody's leave. He had to report for duty on the morning of the 12th.
I was taken aback. I didn't know how he could be affected; maybe he would end up in the line of fire. As we talked, he put the pieces together: we didn't know when flights would start again, when he would be home again or for how long. It would be devastating if something happened to him. There was a sense of urgency. Jeff's a really even guy, but his speech was halting when the conversation started going this way, and he asked if I wanted to marry that night.
I had conflicted feelings. Who does this on this kind of day? But we also talked about how right it felt, to do something loving on a day they meant to be so obliterating.
We decided to go through with it. Jeff called the magistrate's office to make sure it was open. I had been trying to call my sister in New York and wasn't able to get through; one of my parents reached me and told me she was O.K. I don't want people to think we ignored what was happening. Everyone was in a daze. My mom tells me that I called her in the early afternoon to say we were going to be married. I don't remember calling.
I got off work at 4 p.m., went home and started to get ready. Jeff got home after I did. We rushed to get changed; he wore a shirt and tie, and I wore a dress, a cranberry-colored dress.
On the way to the courthouse, we stopped at a pharmacy so I could buy pantyhose; I felt I needed them for some ridiculous reason, and I wriggled into them in the car. It was a whirlwind. In reality, the magistrate's office was open 24 hours a day. It doesn't make any sense now why we felt so rushed, but it seemed to at the time.
Jeff and I had called coworkers to get two witnesses. We met Jeff's in the parking lot, but my friend didn't show up. We found a guy mopping floors, but he couldn't speak English. And then a police officer agreed to do it. The magistrate said something like, This is the last thing I thought I'd be doing today. He didn't say it in a negative way, but he wasn't overly jovial either.
It was a very short ceremony. My ring wasn't ready. Jeff had his. I was hoping we would read our vows at the magistrate's, but it was like, boom, over.
Afterward, we went to Bistro by the Sea, where we had planned to go with our families after the wedding. There were televisions with the news on. I remember feeling somber. We didn't tell anybody; there weren't that many people there. We read our vows during dinner - I had three drafts, and I read parts off of different sheets of paper. We had cake, something chocolate, and we tried to tune out the television. When we got home, we stood in front of the computer and took pictures with the little camera on the computer. They came out really dark.
We had done something for ourselves. We weren't sure how people were going to react to the news. I sent out a big group e-mail message the next day and specifically said that we had done this not to be disrespectful, but to do a good thing on an incomprehensibly bad day. And I remember from the e-mail messages I got back from people that this resonated with them.
We live in Virginia now; Jeff is stationed in Portsmouth. We've had three anniversaries, and he has been home for only one. We're not sure he'll be home this year. But every year, we end up feeling that even if Jeff had been available on, say, the 13th, we still would have married on the 11th. I admit it's a little bit sad not to have pictures, not to have had a cake, not to have had loved ones there. But what are pictures compared with people's lives? Or what everybody else had to go through? Nothing. Those things are insignificant.
On living in Lower Manhattan
The Secret Life of Hanover Square
By MARK CALDWELL
NEW YORK at night is a city of low-key voyeurs and discreet exhibitionists. Not droolers and flashers, but more or less lawful strollers like me, looking for the curtainless window whose occupant pursues some puzzling activity, or by the passing diorama show of apartment and brownstone interiors. In Manhattan this is a pleasure abetted by the tacit cooperation of residents who keep their windows clean and their shades up, affording a view to passers-by even when they don't enjoy one themselves.
Congested high-rise avenues, over- windowed and overpowered by street glare, make poor territory for such louche but ultimately harmless gawking. Far better are the toylike scale of the West Village, or the grander but still manageable brownstones of side streets in Chelsea and Murray Hill.
And over the last few years, despite Sept. 11, a new spy-friendly neighborhood has materialized downtown in the moldering lanes west of Broadway, between City Hall and the ferries. Increasingly, people live here. And increasingly, if you choose the right time and have a patient eye, you can spy on them.
On a warm Sunday night last month, with most of New York supposedly decamped for upstate or the East End, I walked along Ann Street, just below City Hall. At first glance it resembled a Lower East Side block unflattened by chic: tenements, 1800's-vintage factories inscrutable as to what they once made, and three-story brick row houses, all seemingly held up only by newer commercial structures offering them a shoulder. It's poorly lighted here, sometimes pitch dark, channeling a mean street from the 1970's, and waiting like a stage set for the appearance of a mugger's ghost.
But the first people to materialize were obviously alive and steps from home: an old man and a small girl of 5 or 6, tethered to a pair of bounding greyhounds, which hauled them out from under a razor-wired plywood scaffold, then dragged them joyously into Theater Alley (a cluttered lane that opens off Ann and once ran behind the old Park Theater, the city's leading venue in the early 1800's).
The members of this quartet weren't anomalies, as I've come to realize after a year or so of noticing the block's increasingly numerous and visible residents. In the daytime their lighted windows collapse into anonymous facades and their apartments seem to hide from the office workers and tourists milling below. But at night - though still uncommon, at most one or two to a building - they're unmistakable.
A living space never looks like an office or a workroom, even if its second-story ceiling displays to the sidewalk a ghastly fluorescent ring and the lumpy grime of an ancient paint job. In one row-house window on Ann Street, the telltale was a filled-up bookcase and the top of an occupied Aeron chair arching over a buzzing air-conditioner whose drips banged on the steel sidewalk hatchway.
Commercial buildings are being colonized, too, and that helps hide the neighborhood's homes, as with the co-op at 3 Hanover Square. By day you can't tell it from the office block it once was; its lobby remains as stark as a bank vault. But after dark the lights in its tall upper windows open them to the sidewalk and show that they, in fact, belong to duplexes that overlook the torn-up park in the square and offer a glimpse of the East River.
People seem to materialize, giving no clue where they came from or where they're headed - a gay couple, for instance, suddenly appearing with bags from the semi-mythical 24-hour neighborhood grocery I've been told about but which nobody I've spoken to can locate.
Far downtown's deceptive appearances and still-evolving social composition can often leave you baffled as to the meaning of what or whom you're looking at even when you're vouchsafed a view. Turning the corner at Pearl Street into Coenties Slip, I saw a silhouette, sitting at a desk or table behind a second-story window. It bowed down till its head disappeared, lurched bolt upright, then repeated the cycle five times. Eating off the table? Snorting cocaine? Peering at a spreadsheet? Who knows?
Just below Hanover Square, Stone Street, cobbled, closed to traffic, lined with outdoor tables belonging to a row of bars and restaurants, has become the town square to this emerging neighborhood. On workday evenings the community ambiance disappears under hordes of blue-shirted business types, out for an after-hours drink. But on Sunday the scene quiets, and the few people inside or out are clearly locals - a father sharing French fries with his two young sons, a man sitting alone with a Guinness and the paper.
Ulysses', on Stone opposite Mill Lane, is a wildly popular singles pub, especially on Thursday nights. But its staff has adjusted to the slower weekend pace, and has noted, too, the demographic shift. Karen Hansen, the Sunday-night floor manager, says the residents seem to be a mix without a profile: retired people, couples in their 20's, middle-aged professionals. She has talked to a rising number of prospective home-hunters looking for a neighborhood restaurant in a quarter that at first doesn't seem to have any.
In that respect, residential Wall Street is like no other recent urban resurrection, wary of engineered coolness and the publicity juggernaut that always seems to follow. Its old brick and old wood (like the red clapboards on the 1794 building at the corner of Water and Dover Streets, far below the arch of the Brooklyn Bridge and now housing a low-key cafe) qualify it as desirable, but have so far avoided the blandness of perfect remodeling.
EVEN a few happily vulgar glass apartment-tower invaders, looking like refugees from the Upper East Side or even Fort Lee, dilute what otherwise might be an overdose of antiquity. In sunlight these towers are nearly indistinguishable from offices or hotels. But later in the day, the doormen in the lobbies become visible and the residents, many apparently transients working temporarily for a financial o
no subject
Date: 2005-09-11 05:13 pm (UTC)This is a time when you need that kind of Franklin Roosevelt thinking.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-11 05:13 pm (UTC)This is a time when you need that kind of Franklin Roosevelt thinking.