The Facade

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
November 4, 2001

I stand at the end of the street, as far as I can go before I’m stopped by the fence. I’m not sure we are supposed to be here at all. We came down Rector Street which must be narrow and old in the best of times. This is not the best of times. They are tearing up Rector Street tonight, trying to provide electricity to the disrupted area around Ground Zero.

As we walked down the narrow sidewalk, barely wide enough for one person to pass another, there were signs on barricades warning not to take pictures, that the ban applied to everyone, that no one was exempt. There must have been 15 signs all stretched along the sidewalk, the length of the block. Like those old-fashioned Burma Shave signs, I think. But instead of a clever rhyme, these hand-written signs warned by their very presence, to be prepared for the onslaught of emotions that are unleashed by viewing the site. There must be something to see, down this street.

On the corner where we turn to go down Washington Street, I find several trampled pieces of paper crunched into a corner. In the shadowy light, a pink colored bit stands out. I pick it up and shake off the ash. It is the front page of the Financial Times, dated August 4/5, 2001. The edges are scorched black. A remnant of an office, perhaps a person, gone forever. A last trace of the blizzard of paper that burned briefly and fluttered down to the street when the airplane struck nearly overhead. I would not keep it if it was personal, if there was an address label with a name or a floor.

We stand now in tearful silence. Although we were prepared by the signs, the impact of this view is devastating in its simple summation of what happened here. We are less than a block away from Ground Zero and before us is the remaining façade of the North Tower. Just a corner, a few stories high, is all that is left but its graceful arches and lattice are unmistakable. It emits a gray grainy glow in the work lights that turn nighttime here into permanent day.

We stand for minutes, unable to move, staring at the implausible fragileness of concrete and steel. The buildings on this street still have inches of ash on their windowsills. Sheets of paper occasionally drift like birds from the gash slashed into the wall of Deutsche Bank building by the collapsing South Tower. They fall all night, the young police officer assigned to guard this fence tells us. We ask what it’s like behind the fence, if he’s seen it. He has, but he can’t explain what lies beyond. His face says it all though and we understand. Weeks later, there are still no words for this. His eyes fill up as he describes a memorial nearby: hundreds of teddy bears, thousands of flowers.
In the sheer desolation of this place we want nothing more than to bond with someone. The man next to us calls his wife in Seattle on his cell phone so she can share this with him. So he doesn’t have to be alone. The policeman becomes flirty and agrees to look away while I take a forbidden picture. This is a crime scene he says sternly, and then turns his back until he hears the shutter click.

We could stare for hours into this nightmare landscape. It draws like the flames of a fire. The ghosts of the buildings and people that once were here flicker in the smoke from the smoldering rubble far below the surface. We need to go before we too are claimed, and so we slowly turn and walk away. Later this night, the construction workers will seal off the street to continue the repairs to the damaged utility lines. The next evening, a man with a high-pressure hose will be raised on a cherry picker to blast away the dust on the buildings. And this section of city, always thought so permanent, will be changed once again.