!6a00d83451599e69e200e54f785dd08834-800wi You could hear it at the end of President Obama’s speech last night: Nostalgia for 9/11. Not for the event, of course, but for the way it brought Americans together afterward. For a few shining, fragile months, there was no left or right, no socialists or right-wing nut jobs. It got our blood up, too. During that time, I can remember hearing a favorite radio DJ in New York say that he wanted to see Osama Bin Laden hung from the new towers that were going to be built in place of the old ones.That's not exactly how it happened—there are no towers there still—but it did happen.
Below is a post I wrote in 2006 about my experience of 9/11 in New York. It was written well after right and left had split back up and blood had cooled. I recycle it here because, like Obama, I want to briefly remember that time of unity afterward, at least for one day. You’ll notice that I end the post by saying, essentially, that the one positive that had come from 9/11 was that no Americans could now be called un-American. That didn’t last either, as Obama’s last announcement, about his "long-form" birth certificate, proved. But maybe this event will finally change that. Maybe the people who can’t believe that someone named Obama can run the U.S. will believe that someone who killed Osama can.
Tennis tomorrow.
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I liked the Twin Towers, as we called them when they were standing. “World Trade Center” sounded so faceless, and it was only after 9/11 that they were shorthanded as "the towers." From what I could tell, the architecture experts' word for them was “facile,” but I thought they were cool when I came across them as a kid reading the World Book. Yes, the Empire State building was imposing—it came with King Kong—but the towers shimmered. Plus, they were twins, a child-like word that made them seem, well, nicer. I lived in a small town five hours from New York, with no structures worth putting into a book; its downtown had been vacated after a mall went up outside of town. The pictures of New York came from another universe—a super-scaled one. The oversize rectangles of Central Park and the towers in particular appealed to me. The glamour that was missing everywhere else had apparently been boxed up on one island.
New York continued to be an unbelievable place to me, in every sense of the word. On our family’s infrequent visits, I’d walk around thinking, “I’m in New York City right now. I’m in New York City right now. I am within the geographical boundaries of New York City right now.” (That last one was the most exciting way to put it, for some nerdy reason.) This was during the edgy 1970s and 80s, and we once drove by two men in suits in midtown who were in a full-on fistfight. A few minutes later, as we ran into traffic on the George Washington Bridge, I yelled from the back seat at the car that was cutting us off. My parents looked back in surprise; the city had gotten to me.
I moved to Manhattan after college to take an internship at a magazine. My apartment was in the West Village. It was a small place, with a crazy roommate, but it had one fundamental virtue: a nearly unobstructed view of the towers. When you got home from some ridiculous entry-level job in the evening, the blinking red lights at the top of the towers were proof that at least you were doing it in New York. For me, one of those jobs was as a copyeditor at a legal publishing firm—see what I mean by ridiculous?—on the 40th floor of a midtown building. We had a full view of downtown from one of the conference rooms, and the whole firm gathered in it to stare at the towers the day they were bombed in 1993. Nobody could quite imagine what it would be like to see them fall.
Over the years, I would periodically go to the top of the towers to look around. No matter how times you’d been there before, it was always a shock to be so high up—you were way the hell up there. Once I walked into the viewing area behind a group of junior high girls. When they looked down, all of them let out high-pitched screams and put their hands over their eyes. On the other end, I went to a few rock shows at the foot of the towers. You could tilt your head back as far as possible and still not see the top. It was a lesson in humility, even for the rock stars.
On 9/11, I was working at TENNIS Magazine, in our old offices on 53rd St. and 7th Ave. When people ask what I was doing when I first heard about the attack, I have to say that I was “fiddling with a pencil at my desk.” That’s what I was doing when my colleague Tony Lance came in, and, choking up, said something about “planes flying” and “terrorists.” A few hours later, another editor at TENNIS, James Martin, called from his house in Connecticut. “I’m going to be in around noon. I’m going to the train now.” He hadn’t heard. “Turn around and put your TV on. You’re not going anywhere today,” I said.
In between, we watched it on TV like everyone else, in the office of our editorial director, Gil Rogin, a 70-year-old “legend in the business,” as they say (he had been the head guy at Sports Illustrated and a fiction writer for the New Yorker). His phone rang off the hook that morning. He’d pick it up each time and growl, “Can you believe this s---?” even before he knew who was calling. From his windows, you could see the river of people walking uptown, away from the towers.
Then they fell, and it went from being a major moment to an earth-shattering one. I walked against the tide of people, toward Brooklyn. The subways, along with everything else in the world, were out. My memory is of a piercingly clear day—absolutely perfect; there may have been a half-dozen that good in the five years since—and people standing in the street looking up and listening to radios in vans. We really thought the next one was coming that afternoon. Or if not, the next day. I also recall seeing and hearing fighter jets swooping in pairs between skyscrapers. Were they really there, or did I add that in my mind later?
By the time I got to the Village, the F train was back up. I crowded onto a car where rumors were flying fast. It seemed to be an accepted fact among the riders that a plane had been shot down in the vicinity of the White House. The F goes above ground in Brooklyn, so we were all treated to a view of the smoking rubble, and our first look at the new downtown skyline—it was stomach-turning. At home my TV was out (the towers had transmitted the signal), so I took a walk to try to calm down. By that time, there was a monstrous cloud of thin white dust creeping over the neighborhood. The smell was harsh, and a total mystery.
I knew a woman whose father had been killed in the towers, but that was as close as the attack got to me at first. Two years ago, I was playing tennis at my club in Brooklyn on the third anniversary of 9/11. The TV was tuned to the annual reading of the names at Ground Zero. I wanted to talk to the club’s manager, Ray, so I asked his regular doubles partner where he was. He pointed at the TV and told me that Ray’s wife had been at a meeting in the towers on the morning of 9/11—she didn’t work there—on a floor that was hit. From what I can tell, Ray, who’s in his early 50s, has adjusted. He has a girlfriend, he’s moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and he’s devoted his time to the club. He’s also a smooth doubles player who played in college. I’ve got the losses to prove it.
The tragedy didn’t strike me directly, but like everyone here I can’t get away from it. My apartment is near the Brooklyn Promenade, which has a bird’s-eye view of downtown Manhattan. The “skyline” there remains stomach-turning. If I still had a ridiculous grunt-level job, I would come home in the evening now and feel like I might as well do it in Wilmington, Delaware. Still, the Promenade draws as many tourists as ever. You can see them pointing and squinting toward Manhattan, trying to figure out exactly where the towers had been. After a while, a pre-9/11 photo of the skyline appeared on the fence to give people a clue. But I still can’t place where they were. That’s not surprising, I guess—even when they were standing, they weren’t quite believable.
What’s changed in the U.S. since 9/11, from a New Yorker’s point of view? The flags have come down from front porches—except for one Brooklyn street, in a neighborhood called Windsor Terrace, where they all still fly—and the red state-blue state divide has been promoted. But there’s been one change for the better, as far as we’re concerned. In the 1970s, the lefty years of Bella Abzug, Ed Koch, and “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” NYC was generally considered an un-American city. It was an attitude that continued, in a slightly less obvious form, in the Newt Gingrich 1990s. In those days, I regularly drove from New York to Pennsylvania on Route 80. The state of Pennsylvania had erected a sign at their border that read, “America Starts Here.” The sign isn’t there anymore. Everyone knows where America starts now.