Stunned NYC deeply active in its grieving and recovery

“Diary of a Tragedy” is a column written by New York City residents with Maine ties who have been sharing their experiences of the World Trade Center tragedy. Jerome and Ruth Nadelhaft, native New Yorkers and retired University of Maine professors of history and English respectively, divide their time between Bangor and Manhattan.

After three days of watching the heart-wrenching destruction of the World Trade Center Towers from our home in Bangor, we awoke Friday, Sept. 14, knowing we were in the wrong place. We have lived in Bangor for 34 years, but both of us grew up in New York City where we bought an apartment in midtown Manhattan 41/2 years ago. We have divided our time between Bangor and New York City since then. Our Maine license plates read BGR NYC, and fairly represent our lives.

By early Saturday morning, we were driving fast toward the city. Traffic thinned as we approached, exactly opposite of our usual experience. Inside the car, we were silent: no music, no radio, no conversation. Once in our nine-story brick building that fronts on 42nd Street, we found ourselves embracing everyone we encountered and being embraced by them in return.

Knowing we come from Maine, many people wondered why we had left safety for the peril of the city. But even on 42nd Street, we were too far away, and we knew we needed to get as close as possible to what is now called ground zero. We had thought our grief was almost an abstraction, not realizing we actually knew people who worked in the World Trade Towers. Eddie, who used to work in our building, died there after working in the towers for only two weeks. And Keiko, who was at our son’s wedding, escaped with her life from the 78th floor. Our sense of connection was intensified.

On Saturday afternoon, when we headed south toward the disaster site, we could go only as far as Canal Street, less than a mile north. Every surface was covered with missing-persons posters, photographs copied onto sheets of paper with additional identifying details. Lampposts, mailboxes, door moldings, even the backs of leather jackets bore pictures. Women in wedding dresses, bathing suits, business clothes. Men in tuxedos, jeans, overalls. With children, at parties, alone, with family members.

The names and the faces testified to the incredible diversity that has always been New York City: every shade of complexion, every imaginable name and origin. After three or four days of wandering the city, we came to recognize and remember the missing. The posters radiated from ground zero for blocks and blocks.

And the shrines spread outward as well, including ones in our own neighborhood in a doorway on Tenth Avenue between 47th and 48th streets. An airline hostess named Debbie, we learned, had died on one of the United Airlines flights. Like many other airline personnel, she lived in midtown Manhattan, close to all forms of transportation.

Wherever there was a patch of grass, a scrap of unused sidewalk, a shrine had been created. Candles and flowers filled the tiny park called Duarte Square along with handwritten notes, pictures of the missing and the dead, and American flags of all sizes and materials. Storefronts often contained reminders from People for the Equal Treatment of Animals: ‘if you know of an animal whose person is missing, call this number.’ Apartment dwellers in the city are notorious for their devotion to pets of all sizes.

Union Square, at 14th Street, has become the most visible and elaborate shrine. For a while, it marked the southernmost point people could get to without identification proving they had reason to go below 14th Street. The lower part of Manhattan opened up, but Union Square has continued to be an ever-expanding expression of grief and determination. Remarkably, most of the hand-written messages speak of sorrow and call for restraint and justice. A handmade poster, copies taped to the sidewalk with masking tape, shows the ragged image of the American flag. The blue rectangle says, in firm white letters: REBUILD, while the red stripes trail off in painful irregularity.

The day we actually got within four blocks of Ground Zero, we traveled on the reopened subway and on foot, arriving at Union Square from the south.

Astonishingly, the subway still runs beneath the site of the World Trade Center; the A train doesn’t stop at Chambers Street now, but it travels slowly through the station; no one spoke as we passed through and re-entered the tunnel towards Nassau Street. That’s where we got off, and that’s where we came into the gray district, which is marked off by yellow tape, police in gas masks, and now National Guardsmen and women.

We had blue paper masks as did most of the people on the street. The police, construction workers, and the Guard had serious masks and were wearing them. Some pedestrians wore their masks, some did not. But we all smelled the acrid smell that has been dissipated but not entirely dissolved by the air currents that swirl around downtown among the remaining tall and dirty buildings.

For us, the city is a real presence, a palpable and tender place, which nurtured us in our childhoods and welcomed us when we returned. For us, New York has always been benign, encouraging, accepting. We took insults to the city personally when we heard them in conversation, in comic routines, in newspaper articles. So we have felt the hurt to the city personally, and the injuries to the buildings, streets, the very air brought us straight to anguish and loss. But it was impossible not to realize that New York continues to be itself. However stunned the city is, it is also furiously active in its own grief and recovery.

Everyone seems to be discovering the relevance of New York City. As John Kennedy declared himself a Berliner, people from all over are declaring themselves New Yorkers. A procession of what Mainers call ‘people from away’ have been marching to Ground Zero. If they are important enough, they get to the heart of the devastation to proclaim and to experience their profound sense of kinship. We were lucky enough to experience such an act at our own local fire station, Rescue Station No. 1, right next door to the 43rd Street side of our building. We were lucky because we had not yet been able to weep over the terrible destruction of the city, the loss of so many people, the losses still to come.

When we went around to the fire station, we already knew it had been the first to be called. Of the 12 men on that shift, ten were lost. We had actually seen our fire station on television in Bangor, when the Oxygen TV network took to broadcasting NY 1, our local news station whose studios are on the corner of 42nd Street and 10th Avenue. So we had seen the flowers and the candles and the mourners. But as we approached our fire station, on another dazzlingly sunny day, we heard drums. Gradually we came to understand that a group of young African Americans was marching down 43rd matching our pace. They drew up across the street, now filled with police cars, in front of the fire station.

The young men and women carried a banner identifying them as members of the National Association for a Peaceful Society. They were students from a religious college in Huntsville, Ala. They had voted to get themselves to New York City and play music to salute the firefighters, dead and alive, who turned out in response to the greatest disaster in New York history.

They played all the right songs: “America the Beautiful,” “God Bless America,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” And before they finished playing “Amazing Grace,” one of them stepped forward and told us who they were and why they had ridden all night in a van to play for us. Then they played “Amazing Grace” [again] and we all sang along, weeping as we sang. When they were done, each one of them embraced each one of us. They said, “God bless you,” and we said, “Thank you for coming.” And they formed back up again and marched down 43rd Street towards the Hudson River where the USS Intrepid presides over our neighborhood now – along with the hospital ship Comfort, which has no survivors to attend to.

Wednesday night, our son and daughter-in-law, went around to the fire station and said kaddish (Hebrew prayer for the dead). Inside the fire station, a chalkboard tracks which local restaurant is delivering breakfast, lunch, and supper. We always knew we were part of a neighborhood, and now the rest of the world knows, too.