R. B. Bernstein
You can't kill New York City. That's one of the comforting things that I've learned yet again in the past week. Real New Yorkers are thoughtful, helpful, kind to one another and to perfect strangers (and even to tourists, no matter how much some of us may grumble about them).
But, at the same time, we're all still in pain here, and there's a reason for it that people haven't really found the words to express.
New York City has become a haunted city -- a ghost town.
The obvious ghosts are the two towers of the World Trade Center. This morning, I rode the Q local as it lurched and heaved its way over the Manhattan Bridge. It gives you a brief but amazing view of lower Manhattan, and up to 11 September people would lift their heads, smile, and savor the spectacle of the skyline providing a backdrop for the noblest and most beautiful bridge in the whole world, the Brooklyn Bridge.
Now, however, people don't look up, or they avert their eyes. They can't bear to see the vacancy against the sky. They can't bear to be reminded that two old friends who never should have been taken away are gone.
People hated the twin towers when they were constructed in the late 1960s, but over the years since they opened in 1973 they became familiar landmarks, and many people grew to love them. They smiled on seeing them against the sky, whether from Brooklyn or in lower Manhattan. They dined at Windows on the World and oohed and aahed at the view. The towers swiftly became an icon of this city and of the vibrant life that they contained and sheltered. But they are gone now, and the wound is deep and painful. And their ghosts hover over this city.
There are other ghosts, too. There are subway lines that are cut off from stations that used to be milestones in people's lives. Those stations are, at best, shuttered and locked; at worst, they are damaged or wrecked. Some subway lines go through some of these stations slowly, carefully, and people look out the windows at the deserted platforms and the gated turnstiles -- and then look away, swallowing and dabbing their eyes. If you look at a subway map, you see a circulatory map of New York City as a living organism. On Monday, the Transit Authority published a new map showing the new routes for the duration. Some subway stations just are not shown any more. We don't know when, or whether, those old routes will be restored.
It's not just the buildings and the subways. It's what the buildings' destruction means to us as well. There was an entire, flourishing neighborhood that the World Trade Center anchored, and that, revitalized over the past twenty-eight years, grew up around it. The core of that neighborhood was itself a small city-within-a-city, with restaurants, banks, clothing stores, and one of the best bookstores in Manhattan (Borders, if you're interested).* That neighborhood is bereft, and its core is gone.
Everything seems less permanent, more fragile, more allowed to exist on sufferance. I walked through a large complex of buildings at NYU on my way here, and I know that those buildings seem as if they'll be there forever, but I also know now that they could be wrecked in an hour. It took 105 minutes from the first impact of the first plane to the last collapse of the second WTC tower. That's less than two hours -- less time than a forgettable disaster movie.
But the truly haunting ghosts are not the buildings of the WTC complex, nor the cut-off arteries and veins of the city's subway system, nor the life of the TriBeCa (Triangle Below Canal Street) neighborhood, nor the businesses that flourished and served thousands of people there.
The truly haunting ghosts are on every lamppost, on walls in every subway station, on every bus-stop shelter, in the city.
They are posters -- laser-printed 8.5" x 11" pages bearing photographs of smiling men and women, most of them in their teens, 20s, or 30s. Each bears a name, a phone number, an agonizingly careful physical description.
They are the ghosts of the people who, taken together, were the soul of the World Trade Center and the surrounding neighborhood. They were the people who ran Windows on the World, the people who ran the elevators, the people who made the bond trades, the people who sold books and tapes and posters, the people who made felafel and hot dogs, the people who were security guards and messengers and secretaries and mail-room workers. And a heartbreakingly large number of them are firefighters, people whose bravery and devotion to this city cannot be expressed in words. They did what Lincoln talked about -- they gave "the last full measure of devotion," knowing the risks and taking them anyway.
The ghosts look out, from every street corner, smiling, some of them in formal clothing from wedding photos, some of them relaxed, with children in their arms or on their knees, some of them serious, in photos taken for driver's licenses or passports or college or high-school yearbooks. They are from all walks of life, all races, all colors, all creeds, all levels of education, all levels of employment. They are the face not just of the World Trade Center, but of New York City. They have husbands and wives and partners and parents and children and brothers and sisters and friends who are trying to keep hope alive, even as hope dwindles day by day.
The people who put up those posters want their loved ones back. But some of them know that they won't get them back alive. Failing that miracle, they want certainty as to their loved ones' fates. They want closure. They want to be able to bury their dead, to mourn for them, and to honor them.
The unspoken fear is that many of these people will never know what happened to their loved ones. They will suffer the pain of not knowing for the rest of their lives. They will have a sense that their loved ones are gone, but that is all.
New York City is a ghost town, and it will be for a long time to come.
* I teach down there, and several of the heartbreaking photos showing people running in terror from the collapsing towers were taken on streets that I've walked hundreds of times.
R. B. Bernstein is adjunct professor of law at New York Law School, and a constitutional historian.