If I look out the
If I look out the corner windows on the West side of my building, I can look down into the small park on the other side of Broadway. Before September 11, it was full of trees, about 40 of them, arranged in neat rows, each with its own patch of dirt overlaid with a decorative iron grate set. Folks ate lunch there, played chess, and so forth, enjoying the shade and the green. After the 11th, the trees were taken down. Most of them had been knocked over by the twin concussions of the falling towers: trunks six or seven inches thick, splintered and broken. Then they put a chainlink fence up, and installed some trailer-offices for Tully Construction. It was also used as a parking lot by the workers.
Now, it's mostly empty. I remarked awhile ago that I wanted them to replant with proper trees, not dinky little saplings. The idea of scrawny stripling trees, struggling to grow when all those other trees had already put in so much effort, seemed to me to be just about the saddest thing ever, for some reason
I was wrong.
Looking down into the park just now, I could see the squares of dirt where each tree used to stand. They've started to fill them in with concrete.
