March 02, 2004

A few weeks ago, there was an unveiling at Ground Zero, unaccompanied by the usual media pomp that surrounds such things: 90 West Street. Completed in 1907, the 23-story building stands at the corner of West Street and the West Side Highway, on the southeast edge of the World Trade Center site. On September 11, the collapsing South Tower hurled tons of burning steel debris into the building's terra-cotta facade. Fire totally gutted four floors, and partially destroyed another four. Two people died in the building, trapped in an elevator.

The building was undergoing renovation at the time of the attacks, and was hidden from view by scaffolding. For most of the past two years, its damaged facade remained hidden, wrapped in a giant Hallmark greeting card: a fabric-mesh billboard, depicting a stylized heart. The heart was "Stars n' Stripes" across its top lobes, and the bottom portion depicted a rendering of New York's buildings. "It's not the size of the act that matters," the billboard told us in letters four feet tall. "It's the size of the heart." I thought the sentiment was inane. It loomed over the site of nearly three thousand murders, and the only "act" that sprang to my mind was that of piloting airliners into buildings. Bad, small-hearted hijackers! it seemed to say. It was a shallow, rosy affirmation in the face of violent death by fire, explosion, and crushing, made even more insipid by the fact that workers were still finding human remains caught in the building's scaffolding two years after the attacks. I suppose it was intended to encourage our charity, but I was glad when it was finally removed.

That removal revealed one of the last large-scale reminders of the day's destruction that remains now as it was then.

The towers' debris has long since been carted off, and is now a part of the bow stem of the USS New York and millions of aluminum cans across the country, among other things. Seven World Trade Center is being rebuilt as a massive, bunker-like structure with walls three feet thick in some places. The Deutschebank building has a neat, squared-off hole in its facade, instead of raking wounds that seemed to have been caused by giant, terrible claws. Within the pit of Ground Zero, the new PATH station is shiny and clean. The whole area bustles with new construction and rebuilding.

But there are other reminders dotting the downtown Manhattan landscape. On the west side of Ground Zero, behind the chainlink fence, stands a single, shattered concrete staircase, leading nowhere. If I remember the pre-attack geography correctly, it would have been in the mall portion of the complex, around where Borders bookstore used to stand. It may, in fact, have been the staircase leading from the ground floor to the top floor, where the science fiction section was. If so, it was a staircase that I used. Now, it is the only portion of that structure that remains.

Some of the reminders are very small in scale, hidden away along side streets around the site. In the days after the attacks, search and rescue crews entered the damaged buildings around Ground Zero, looking for survivors, remains, and wreckage. When they had finished searching a building, they marked it with an X, indicating in each quadrant the date of the search and what they found, if anything. These marks, in fading orange spraypaint that used to be fluorescent, are still visible today. The one on the east side of 90 West Street reads "IN - 9/16 - plane." I don't know what the "IN" means, but I do know that "plane" means that five days after the attacks, they found pieces of jetliner wreckage on top of the building.

The human reminders are the strangest, although their presence is not unexpected: the souvenir vendors. In addition to the usual folding card tables full of Yankees and Mets hats, "I heart NY" tee-shirts, and counterfeit sunglasses, there are now vendors who will sell you your very own replica of the twin towers in lucite. You can buy glossy 25-page booklets titled DAY OF TRAGEDY, with all the explosions and collapses in shiny color. There are postcards and snow-globes, FDNY baseball caps and DVDs. The Chinese women who sprout from the asphalt to sell you an umbrella when it rains will now sell you a DAY OF TRAGEDY when the sun is out.

The tables full of lucite towers are the most interesting, visually. They sparkle in prismatic fashion, an eye-catcher for sure. They're for the tourists, really...the small crowds of Japanese people with their sub-miniature digital cameras, the travelling school groups who take class pictures in front of the Ground Zero viewing fence. But I might buy one myself, for my box of 9/11 stuff.

I have a small, golden Washington Monument encased in lucite that I got when I was a kid...it's probably twenty-five years old. Cheaply made, the lucite actually shrank a bit with age, so the rectangular faces of the souvenir are crazed with small cracks, and the edges are bowed a bit, and concave.

I think that I would like to have a cheap pair of World Trade Center towers encased in clear plastic that has clouded and warped with age. I hope that I will be able to take it out of its box in the back of the closet, and remember that day, and be thankful that it never happened again.

I hope.