This morning, I puzzled out
This morning, I puzzled out the final leg of my new commute when I remembered that there is a ferry that leaves from the Hoboken train station and arrives at the World Financial Center, a five-minute walk from where I work. This ferry was part of the flotilla that evacuated untold thousands from downtown Manhattan on September 11. I don’t recall exactly when, but the last time I took the ferry I was going to fly kites in Liberty State Park, across the river in New Jersey. I fly stunt kites, and I would try to trace the downtown skyline with them, moving them up and around the twin towers, back and forth in the wind.
After I arrived at the dock, I decided to take a walk through the Winter Garden, the spacious glass atrium that nestles between the two towers of the World Financial Center and formerly connected to the twin towers. I walked across the new marble supplied by Campolonghi Italia of Montignoso, Italy, and installed by Pierro Marrai and his crew of marble craftsman. The damage was extensive, and the work required immense. But they said they’d open by September 11, 2002, and they almost made it. The Winter Garden opened to the public last week, on September 17. This morning, the new glass overhead is fresh and clean. There are 16 towering palm trees in the atrium, and at first I thought that they had survived the massacre of last September, but no: they were too clean, their bark too smooth, their fronds too brightly green. Replacements, then. But, for the most part, the lustrous space was as I remembered it. Then I reached the new glass façade, designed by Cesar Pelli, who also designed the original atrium. The expanse faces West Street, and Ground Zero. I paused there.
Ground Zero seems small, now, and the towering wreckage is a memory. It has returned to its origins, transformed into a construction site. The transportation hub beneath the World Trade Center was busier than Grand Central, and they’re working to rebuild it. PATH service from Jersey City should be restored by the end of 2003, and there are immense cranes working in the empty foundation, raising the steel beams of the new station into place and knitting them to the battered sides of the seven-story retaining wall. That damage is all that tells the tale of the site’s terrible origin: instead of finished, smooth concrete, massive chunks of the retaining wall’s top edge are missing. The entire surface is studded with tie-rod locks, stabilizing the cracked walls.
As much as I respect him, I think Giuliani is wrong to call this place a grave, and to say that nothing should be built here. Graves and graveyards are silent. They have bodies in them, and a monument for each. No work is done there, except for the digging of holes in the earth and the maintenance of the grounds. Ground Zero is now the antithesis of that. The bodies are gone. The tomb of wreckage has been removed and carted away. Hallowed ground? Yes, of course. But today, for the first time, I looked upon that expanse of emptiness without a knot in my stomach, or a lump in my throat. The place is now a hive of activity. There are cranes, and heavy loaders, and workers wearing bright orange vests. There are neat piles of construction materials and gleaming stacks of new steel beams. The support structures of new buildings are rising from the now-smooth floor of the foundation. And I smiled, just a bit, with satisfaction. Ground Zero is rapidly becoming a testament, not to the depravity of suicidal fanatics, but to the resilience and ingenuity of America and her citizenry.
