A Quiet Place in New York
The memorial sits on 180 Greenwich Street. Smack-dab in lower Manhattan. The memorial is busy today. But then…
“It’s busy every day,” says a cop standing nearby. “This is what everyone comes to see in New York. Everybody in the world remembers exactly where they were that day.”
It’s cold outside. Biblical throngs of tourists are bundled in jackets, sipping from obligatory Starbucks cups. Conversations come in all languages.
This isn’t like other New York tourist attractions. This isn’t “Hamilton,” or the Met. The mood is somber. People are reverent.
A family from Ohio peers into a gaping hole where the north tower used to stand. There are manmade waterfalls rushing into a cavern. A cavern where bodies were once found. Approximately 3,000 of their names are engraved around the memorial.
“I was on my way to work that day,” says the mother of the family. “I was getting dressed, after a shower. I saw the second plane hit, I was dripping wet, and I went numb.”
Almost as if on cue, a commercial airliner flies overhead, past the One World Trade Center skyscraper above us. The plane flies well below the summit of the tower, an eerie reminder.
There is an old man escorted by a young woman. They are hooking arms. He is from Santee, California. He remembers where he was.
“I was in a coffee shop,” he says. “In San Diego. The shop closed down, that’s how serious it was.”
Tickets to visit the 9/11 Memorial Museum are cheap. One ticket will buy you admission into hell on earth. This is a hard place to visit.
The museum is impossibly crowded today. Standing room only. It’s worse than a major airport. And yet this is the quietest place in New York. There is no laughter. No idle conversation. You can hear your own heartbeat.
There are artifacts that survived the attacks. A blackened wallet. A mangled shoe. Stuffed animals. A cracked fireman’s helmet. The mutilated remains of a firetruck. A crushed ambulance.
There are several school kids taking the tour, maybe 10- and 11-year-olds. Their little feet tread on holy ground. The kids wear enormous backpacks on their tiny shoulders. They aren’t horsing around. They’re restrained. Reverential, even.
Their fifth-grade teacher remembers. “I was in college, in Virginia. They shut my school down that day. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, it must be pretty bad to close school.’ I remember being so scared.”
There is an inner room in the museum. There are thousands of photo portraits on the walls. Also projected on the walls are transcripts of audio recordings from family members.
I meet a man in the exhibit. He is from Long Island, touring the museum with his in-laws. “I was actually watching from the street when the tower collapsed. I’ll never forget it. Everyone was talking on cellphones, trying to let their family know they were okay. That’s why the cell towers were jammed and I couldn’t call my mom.”
To me, nothing is quite as sobering as the commemoration pools at Ground Zero. They are surreal.
It is surreal, remembering how closely Americans pulled together after the attacks. Surreal, remembering how every supermarket, car dealership, bank, school, K-Mart, churchhouse, courthouse, doghouse, henhouse and outhouse flew American flags.
Surreal, remembering how multi-millionaire country-music executives unselfishly used the subject of patriotism to sell more crappy records.
Surreal, remembering the World Series that year, when the cheers of Yankee Stadium nearly ripped a hole in the ozone.
Surreal.
I stand at Ground Zero. There, I meet a man clad in janitor’s clothing. He’s an older guy. He isn’t with anyone. He’s just leaning on the guard rail, gazing into the middle distance. We talk.
“Yeah, I come here whenever I have a little time before work,” he says, lighting a cigarette.
I ask if he knew someone who died in the attacks.
“No. But I’m American, so in a way, I knew every one of them.”