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WTC - After September 11th
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The World Trade Center - After September 11, 2001 - Page Three
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You find yourself going down side streets looking for relief from what you're seeing. But there isn't any relief. Down one street, there is a grate covering the window of a store where the ash is an inch thick. That's where I dump a roll of film out of the canister into my pocket, and carefully brush the ash into the container. Why, I don't really know. Evidence of the crime, I suppose. Something to look at and touch when it all seems so unreal.
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On the ground, a crumpled piece of paper. I walk over and uncrumple it. Its edges are flame-charred. A 1993 document from someone's files (right). Another piece of paper nearby. A contract from the Port Authority offices. Seventy-four people from the Port Authority died on September 11, many of them Port Authority Police Officers. I leave them both behind. They would be too much to take from this graveyard.
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Despite a real effort to clean things up, so much has been left behind. Building windows are still covered by ash; store overhangs are coated, and you wonder if that store has reopened, or will ever reopen.
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Far worse than the soot and the ash and the charred paper are the makeshift shrines that are everywhere. At a Port Authority Police substation in the subway, there are candles and flowers and posters by schoolchildren. (Top left) On a concrete stanchion on street along the barricades, there are candles and flowers and photographs and flags. (Top right) Everywhere there is a space to write or to paste a picture or flyer on, people are writing and pasting pictures and flyers. (Bottom left and right)
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The one that just about did me in was at a firestation by South Street Seaport. Look at these photos. Just look at them. These are men lost from one single firehouse. Six men from Engine Company 4. Eight men from Ladder Company 15. That's 14 -- fourteen -- from one firehouse. It is indescribably sad, simply heartbreaking. Even the "thank you" posters from kids around the world will bring tears to your eyes.
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Lower Manhattan -- now -- is dominated by Wall Street, where the New York Stock Exchange proclaims its allegiance with a giant flag (left). Wall Street, like most streets in that area, is narrow and dark. I try to imagine being in Toni's shoes, fleeing down those dark narrow streets in a fog of soot and ash. One street she fled down is marked now by above-ground telephone and/or power cables (right).
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Down near the South Street Seaport, you can see the trucks roll up with sifted debris and huge twisted steel girders and car-sized chunks of concrete, to be loaded by crane onto barges destined for the Fresh Kills Landfill. The debris will be sifted again at the landfill for evidence that may help identify the perpetrators, or help identify the dead. |
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