After the attacks, the unthinkable quickly became normal.
Sometime in the late fall of 2001, I found a place to stand in an overstuffed presentation room at Thomson Financial, my employer at the time, so that managers could memorialize the workers that Thomson had lost that September: seven employees as well as several contractors and affiliates.
I don’t remember a word that the speakers said, but I do remember thinking that the event was awkward, and that I wasn’t feeling whatever I was supposed to feel for these people I hadn’t known. Too many people had died, and here was a snapshot of a few of them; just like The New York Times’ Portraits of Grief, published daily then, it was both too little and too much to absorb — full of generic platitudes but at the same time heartbreakingly individual. A few weeks after the attacks, I had gone to a Brooklyn Duane Reade to buy sympathy cards to mail to the addresses Thomson provided, but the sympathy cards were sold out.
Sometime before or after that memorial, I sat at a conference table in a different, smaller room, as executives talked to us, in batches of a dozen or so, about the air quality in and around 195 Broadway, our headquarters, the closest surviving office building to the World Trade Center site. Preparing for our return on October 24, 2001, as the federal, state and local governments gradually reduced the no-go “frozen zone,” the building management had stripped out and replaced the carpets, including the fabric on the cubicle walls, and had scrubbed every desk clean; everything was or looked new, except for someone’s dusted-off desk plant, which the cleaners had saved.
These were executives I didn’t recognize, and they spoke in a well-rehearsed script. The government had said the air was safe, the managers told us. As most other people and I already knew, EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman had repeatedly said, including in the week just after 9/11, that the “air is safe to breathe.” We could express our concerns at this meeting, and we could wear company-provided disposable masks if we liked. But just as nobody would end up wearing the masks, nobody expressed their concerns — at least not strongly enough that I remember. This was not a work-from-home era; after six weeks of working from the couch or doubled up in satellite offices elsewhere in New York City, we would be back yards from Ground Zero, eight hours a day, five days a week.
The 9/11 attacks almost perfectly bisect my life — I was 26 then, and I am 51 now. From 25 years on, it would be easy to revisit every point of decision-making during this time as absurdly misguided.
But it’s hard to see how anyone, including me, could have done anything differently or better. What is most eerily strange from today’s perspective is not the retrospective horror of walking to and from work through a long-lingering cloud of moist ash as smiling photos of the “missing” stared out at us from beneath withered flowers and tattered teddy bears affixed to the fence of St. Paul’s Chapel, so that we could seamlessly continue putting out a magazine and website about global infrastructure — but how, after the first few days, it didn’t seem horrible at all.
One thing I didn’t notice about 9/11 at the time, because I was so young myself, was how young the victims were. At our company, the youngest person killed was Amy Elizabeth Toyen, 24, and the oldest, Ruth Sheila Lapin, was 53. The average age of these two victims mirrored the average age of the New York City 9/11 victims: 39. When I read about Amy, I was sad for her family, especially because it seemed like they could be my family — middle-class people from New England whose college-grad daughter got a good office job. But I didn’t focus on her age as a particularly ghastly aspect, nor the fact that all four of her grandparents survived her.
New York City, particularly Lower Manhattan, was a city of young people. I had arrived in New York two years before, after college graduation, sliding into the city’s economy with ease. It was near the height of the dot-com boom, and financial-journalist jobs abounded. In the weeks before Labor Day 1999, I sat on the hard red futon in the living room of my then-boyfriend (now husband)’s rent-regulated south Brooklyn apartment,, and went through the Sunday Times want ads for jobs. I showed up to the first interview to learn that it wasn’t a journalism outfit, but a scammy — or at least shady — private-detective group.
The second was at a publisher called Risk Waters, which covered financial technology. An editor interviewed me, asking me what I would do in certain reporting scenarios. What if I needed to know something about a company, but nobody at the company would talk to me? Who else might I call? What if I didn’t know anything about a particular technology in the news; how would I know which experts to trust? How might I cultivate sources? He gave me glossy back issues to take home, and I walked back down Broadway from the SoHo office pleased with myself, but not in a surprised way: Things were going well, as they were supposed to. Even though I had no job yet, I stopped in the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore at the lower tip of Manhattan to buy a book, and glided up to the 79th floor of One World Trade Center to meet my boyfriend at his office and tell him how it had gone.
My third interview was at Thomson, and that job seemed like the best fit. At Thomson, I would be covering financial deals themselves, rather than the technology behind the deals. I understood finance, having worked at an investment bank for three years in college, but I knew little about technology. My boss would be in London, not in New York, an arrangement that seemed both sophisticated and convenient.
And I immediately liked my London editor’s slightly off-putting, flat-affect attitude, even through the speakerphone for my in-person interview. When I effused that I was excited to work in finance because I was attracted by the fast pace of deals, he bemusedly observed that it took months, even years, for each infrastructure deal to close, and he seemed satisfied at my immediate, self-parodying pivot to saying that in that case, I would enjoy the slow pace of the in-depth research.
A woman from human resources, with a spiky short-blonde haircut and red leather pants, asked me if I was sure that I could hold my own with the investment bankers about whose deals we would be writing. Could I be assertive, when they pressured me to write what they wanted and not write what they didn’t want? Yes. I declined the second interview at Risk and started work at Thomson in mid-September, first at an office at One State Street Plaza, with red-lit views of the Statue of Liberty at sunset, then at a midtown office, and, finally, by the year 2000, at Thomson’s corporate headquarters at 195 Broadway.
The World Trade Center was the shimmering backdrop to my Lower Manhattan life. I bought my first office clothes at the Banana Republic in the basement mall. I opened my bank account at the bank beneath the complex, for the convenience of its ATMs there. For lunch, my colleagues and I would walk through or around the Trade Center to the Hudson River and Battery Park.
My boyfriend’s 79th-floor office was a furnished-office outlet at International Office Centers. On the days I waited in the lobby for him to come down, I would watch the people in their skirts and heels, dress pants and shiny shoes, walking to and from the elevator bank. Other days, I would go up to meet him, getting off at the sky lobby on the 78th floor, and taking the escalator up one more level. I got to know the security guards who would record my name before printing out my visitor badge; once, I asked a guard why he had to record me every single time. We both smiled at the silliness of bureaucracy. I made anodyne office talk — the weather, the new job, the commute — with the managers of my husband’s office.
It was going to be the new millennium, and then it was the new millennium; we didn’t have to go to a party underneath the Statue of Liberty to feel special and lucky, but also not special and lucky, because it was just how things were. We ate dinner — nearly all the time — at the Tall Ships at the Marriott World Trade Center, chomping into buffalo burgers as we listened to the chatter of bankers and business travelers. We often ate with friends, and one thing I remember about that time was that nobody ever noticed or cared who paid for dinner. Sometimes, you would pay, and sometimes, the other people would pay, and it never seemed like a big deal.
It’s not 9/11 and its aftermath that seem strange from a quarter-century on, but fragmentary memories like that one, against the default, today, of the annoying ritual of carefully parceling out who owes what after a dinner, even though, with all those extra years of working and saving, we theoretically should worry about money less, not more, than we did then.
Another economic vignette: In late 1999, I complained to human resources that my boss had given a new hire the “senior reporter” title, even though she had only three months’ seniority over me. The human-resources woman froze with a look of panic, and said that they couldn’t give two people the senior reporter title, but that she would give me a $12,000 raise; would that be all right? Every month, someone put a fresh unlimited MetroCard pass on my desk. Our health insurance was free. Again, those practices, and our taking them for granted, are the things that seem strange to me now.
I was aware of terrorism; I had grown up watching and reading stories about the mysterious and scary Middle East, and was particularly interested, as an addictive-reader child, always into an age-inappropriate novel, in Salman Rushdie; how could someone face death because of a book? My uncle had served in the Marines in Beirut. When I got my ID badge at Thomson, the security officer explained why we had to badge in at every floor, which was unusual at the time: It was because of what had happened across Church Street a few years earlier, at the World Trade Center, in 1993. I knew about al-Qaida; I had read the Times Magazine article. One time, walking by the big planters outside the World Trade Center, I wondered if it was wise to offer such potential hiding spaces for bombs.
During the OpSail parade of ships in the summer of 2000, we went out with friends to a fancy restaurant downtown — it had the word “bakery” in the name — and got too drunk to go home. We peered out at the ships through the Trade Center’s slatted windows, watching the lights of planes flying below us, and fell asleep on the office floor. In May 2001, my boyfriend left that office; we packed up his things in a couple of boxes and said goodbye to the staff. I forgot to return the key to the 79th-floor ladies’ room that an office manager, Olabisi Layeni Yee, had given me.
If the World Trade Center complex was a failed urban-planning experiment, as the conventional wisdom would insist later, the people who worked, visited and were beginning to live downtown didn’t know it. It worked fine for us.
***
The first thing I remember about post-9/11 was how nice all the bankers were. “Thank God you are OK,” said one infrastructure banker, in his smooth South African lilt, with an emotion that startled me. Humor existed: “You’d never think he could have run so fast,” said another banker about his portly colleague and their escape. For a while, we talked about 9/11, mostly on the landline phone (I didn’t have a cellphone) in those weeks working at home. But it was a short while — by mid-fall, nobody talked about it anymore. It wasn’t until at least a decade later that the spouse of a young colleague startled me by asking me blithely at a party if I had been in New York on 9/11.
Post-9/11 Downtown had a soundtrack, too. To this day, I viscerally recoil from Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah,” which street performers downtown played incessantly. Enya’s “Only Time” and “God Bless the USA” blasted from the card tables of the people who had come from elsewhere to help out at Ground Zero, but who didn’t seem to have much to do as New York City’s government quickly secured and professionalized the site.
The most sustained backing track was the incessant beep-beep-beep of heaving demolition carting trucks as they crisscrossed the World Trade Center site all day and all night. Most of the time, we weren’t looking out of the windows on the back side of our office at the recovery work, but we could never shut out the sounds. It didn’t take long for vendors to arrive downtown, to hawk souvenir brochures to the tourists who began to gather; it took longer for the truthers to show up with their pamphlets.
It’s harder to re-conjure the post-9/11 smell, feel and taste — the air I could feel clinging to my skin as I walked down Broadway, and that smell of burnt plastic, but sweeter. Wind would blow droplets from the fire hoses still trained on the fires nearby. Most days, I walked by the Chelsea Jeans store window display, the 9/11 dust caking the denim and cotton behind the glass.
Did I really trust what Christine Whitman and the Bush administration were saying about the air quality? My actions implied trust; educated people with resources and choices surely do not purposely, repeatedly put themselves in danger for no good reason.
But to see and feel the air near Ground Zero was to suspend disbelief and common sense when heeding Whitman’s words. If we were lied to, we consented to the lie. Why? People wanted to get back to work, and act as if things were normal, and so we ignored external abnormality for an interior normality. One evening that fall, waiting for a bus on Church Street, just north of the World Trade Center, a strong wind forced a gust of ash down my throat, and I felt it burn my core.
Every evening that fall, as the light waned ever earlier, I would walk the few steps to the barrier cutting us off from Ground Zero and watch as metalworkers arced their fire to reduce the achingly delicate but stubbornly sturdy remains of the World Trade Center lobby facade, until eventually, nothing was visible from our side of the fence. For a while, too, the remnants of the Borders bookstore at Five World Trade Center, a favorite pre-9/11 coffee spot, were visible from our windows; as we watched demolition workers dismantle them one evening, a coworker and I remarked to one another that the faster they were done with the demolition work, the faster they would rebuild.
For months, I never thought there would be another option but to rebuild, and that the term “rebuild” was to be taken literally: that is, we would re-create what had been lost. The mayor had promised just a day after 9/11 that “the skyline will be whole again.” As I attended my first government meeting — and started grappling with the complexities of New York’s state and local politics — I gradually realized that this seemingly obvious inevitability would not in fact happen. I started writing op-eds, and the newspaper printed them.
By the time I left my 195 Broadway office in May 2005, the World Trade Center site was still a pit — a neat grid from which smoke and ash no longer emanated, but still years away from becoming a busy construction site. What New York eventually built is a generic 21st century global-city complex of office buildings, shops and restaurants. The memorial supposedly defines the site, and yet it’s also easy to avoid if you want, a neat real-estate trick that actually makes sense. For me, the more poignant memorial is just nearby: the metal Koenig Sphere, once the centerpiece of the pre-9/11 World Trade Center plaza, now in its forever dented post-9/11 state in Liberty Park.
Though they seemed so at the time, it’s hard, anymore, to view the delays and the eventual outcome as failures. In 2002, 2003 and 2004, we seemed to be moving forward so painfully, inexcusably, cravenly slowly, or not at all. But today, those dates seem compressed so close to 9/11 as to be indistinguishable from the attacks. New York’s political process was imperfect, yes, but sometimes we don’t do the right thing on the right schedule, and that’s fine.
It has occurred to me that statistically, I had a better chance of dying on 9/11 than some of the people, like me in age and career, who did die. Amy Toyen, two years younger than me, lived and worked in Boston, and had come to New York just that morning, to attend the Risk Waters conference at Windows on the World atop One World Trade Center; 16 Risk Waters workers, as well as many attendees and restaurant workers, also perished. Andrea Haberman, months younger than me, had arrived the night before, for her own business trip near the top of the same building. They hadn’t spent two years of their lives geographically defined by the Twin Towers and the people in and around them.
I think not only of the five people at International Office Centers who died, but of all of the people I brushed by in Lower Manhattan during 1999, 2000, and the first eight months and 10 days of 2001. I talked to them, if briefly and trivially, I smiled at them, I walked the same lobbies, sidewalks and river promenades with them, ate at the same lunch spots with them, went up and down with them in the same elevators. Before 9/11, we all lived the same lives, and had the same certainty that an elevator that brought you up in the morning would bring you down again. Loose ties and low-stakes interactions are the fabric of urban life, all part of Clotho’s thread, and 9/11 severed some of these loose ties.
On that September day, the collective Lower Manhattan world split irrevocably into victims and survivors; the former left the rest of us behind, in a new world they would never know, a world that quickly became so normal that what came before seems the aberration. I still have my key to the 79th floor of the One World Trade Center ladies’ room on my keychain — just a normal, shiny piece of metal, seemingly indestructible.
