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04:17 A.M., Thursday, September 13th, 2001
Eric Rosenfield Mailing List 3.1: I've Never Seen Anything Like This

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From the Eric Rosenfield Mailing List. To get on the Eric Rosenfield Mailing List, fill out the form in the lower left hand corner.

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I am holding in my hands a piece of paper from the World Trade Center that I found lying on the ground in the financial district. It is an expense report from a company called "Cantor Fitzgerald", written by a man named David R. Meyer. The Cantor Fitzgerald Web Site is down, but according to this cached google page it is "historically known as one of the largest third market firms", and according to this cached google page it was located in the World Trade Center. There are names of people on this document and on these web pages who are probably dead now. How this piece of paper, along with the many hundreds I saw with it in the very heart of the disaster area, are in such good condition, I can only speculate.

We had to jump a fence to get that close to the sight. It was Benjamin, two friends of his and myself, all of us determined to see how close we could get to the carnage. At Houston street I was very gung ho about it; I was thinking of myself as real investigative journalist, going to do some real investigative journalistic coverage of the greatest man-made disaster of my lifetime. A disaster I had happened to see out my own window.

So that those of you outside of New York can get some idea of the geography, Times Square is at 42nd street. At 15th street there was a police barricade preventing cars from going through, and the all the subways end there now. At Houston street (which is essentially 1st street) there is another police barricade, preventing anyone from going further south without identification proving that they were residents of the streets below there. The World Trade Center is about 40 blocks south of Houston street, near Manhattan Island's southern tip.

In other words, about half of the city's main borough is in total lockdown right now. You can't avoid seeing police; there're everywhere, twice as prevalent as the firemen, or the ambulances, or the civilians wearing dust masks, though all those things are common sights as well.

Everywhere in Manhattan and Brooklyn there is an acrid scent, the scent of burning - putrid and ubiquitous, and the fire and smoke still billow from the horizon more then a day later. In Manhattan the smoke cloud dwarfs the skyscrapers, a monstrous Godzilla in gray and white.

We got to Houston street and saw the Police checking identifications, so we walked west along the barricade line, to see if any of the streets were unblocked. None were, but an entrance into the courtyard of a housing project was wide open in the middle of a block, so we ducked in. We walked through the courtyard, past people milling about, children playing, and what seemed like an abnormal number of security guards, to the parking lot, the gate of which was securely locked up.

Benjamin said "This is insane" every 15 minutes or so.

The fence on the other side of the parking lot was about 15 feet high, and we ducked behind some dumpsters and scaled it.

The other side was a completely different New York. There were no moving cars that weren't police or ambulances or fire trucks or construction vehicles or army units. Everything was eerily quiet. Mostly, the streets were empty except for the few locals we'd see walking about and talking, perhaps with a fearful glint in their eyes and an angsty gate in their step, though that might only be my own inference. In truth I couldn't tell what these people were thinking as they went about their lives in a suddenly protected and isolated part of the city. As we walked south the streets were gradually occupied by more and more police and the smell of the smoke got progressively stronger, until there were police on every block and the air was thick like a mild fog. Soon we were stopped.

"Where are you going?" Asked an officer.

"To see our Uncle on Warren Street." We lied, bold faced, "Do you know how to get there?"

"I don't know, you should those guys over there." He waved toward some officers down the block.

"Do you know if it's safe to smoke?" I asked, " I heard something about gas lines." I was genuinely concerned.

The cop smiled, "You can smoke everywhere."

I was about to make some crack about Mayor Guilianni but thought better of it.

We headed under an overpass that led to the Brooklyn Bridge, and up a roadway. This was the point when I started noticing the thin layer of dust on everything. Everything was coated with it, and in the light of the dim New York street lamps it looked orange and brown. I looked down at my feet and my shoes were wading in it, and I started noticing pieces of paper littering the ground. And just as I was taking that in we saw the first car.

The car probably hadn't been damaged where it was sitting, as the cars next to it were in reasonable condition, but this one car was a blackened hulk of twisted metal, hardly recognizable as a car at all except for the landmarks of the hood and tires.

"This is insane." Said Benjamin.

We took some pictures of the car and continued to walk. Then we saw another car, and then another, and another, black contorted creatures lining the sides of the roadway. There were tons of papers everywhere now, just dozens of them all over the place, and at this point I picked up the expense report from Cantor Fitzgerald and put it in my backpack.

The enormity of what we were witnessing hadn't struck yet. My emotions were somewhere else, some other realm that hadn't quite caught up the real world, and I was running on auto-pilot.

I started rifling through the papers trying to find the best ones. This sort of horrifies me now, that I was doing this, but it's what I did. I wanted to find one that said "World Trade Center" on it.

We found a pile of neck ties in perfect condition, that looked like they had been thrown there by some worker. Benjamin and I each grabbed one.

"You shouldn't do that." One of Benjamin's friends kept saying as we were taking things, and sure enough, a police officer started shouting at us.

"What are you doing?! Put that down, have some respect!" He said, and we put the ties and papers down.

We emerged from the roadway into a major intersection, where a ramp led directly to the Brooklyn Bridge, several City Government City buildings stood, and City Hall was fully visible a block away. This was the "Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall" 1-9 subway stop.

When I first came to New York City almost four years ago, I had come to this very spot to take pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge. One of the pictures I took of the bridge that day still hangs on my wall. It was a spot that the World Trade Center once towered over, only maybe 5 or 10 blocks away.

I'm going to try and describe the scene I saw there now. The air was foggy and small particles hung in it like they were waiting for someone to tell them to fall. The entire square was caked in orange-ish dust and dirt, everything dyed monochromatic on the street. Papers, debris, glass and small shards were everywhere, and on everything. The place teemed with workers, police and firemen, and almost everyone was wearing a dust mask or a gas mask. Just behind City Hall and the tall, Romanesque City Government buildings, the firecloud clung to the sky like a white specter. The firecloud was bigger, by far, then the World Trade Center ever had been. The wasteland that I had talked about in my previous article, the one that we had all seen on television, was now here, right in front of my eyes; here was the disaster area; here was the war zone.

To my relief, there were no body parts.

The cops began to notice we were there.

"Where are you going?"

"To visit our Uncle on Warren street."

"Down HERE? What are you, tourists? You better get out of here, if we catch you back here we'll lock you up."

We started back north. Benjamin's friends had seen enough, and seemly justifiably shaken. They left, and Benjamin tried to convince me to go back in, west and then south this time. I sat on a stairway in front of a bank covered in so much dust that you couldn't read it's name, and decided to call it quits.

"I'm going back in." Said Benjamin, and he headed west, while I headed north, walking past yet another long caravan of police, army and construction vehicles.

Benjamin told me later that he actually made it to the Trade Center's remains, right in front of the rubble, and that he volunteered to hand out water and was given a white paper disposable suit. He said that he saw the morgue. He said the police kept hassling him, even with the suit.

"This was the most unreal thing in my life. It was just surreal. It was like a movie, I felt like I was on a Universal Studios set. That's all I can say." He told me.

I'm sort of astounded that he had the constitution to go that far with it, and I wonder if we are bad people for doing what we did. I'm still in shock from what I saw. I look down at my dust caked shoes and pants and can only think of the Walt Whitman poem, "This Dust was Once the Man". I look over at the Cantor Fitzgerald expense report and think of it being pushed out the window by the air pressure of a collapsing Twin Tower.

What does any of this mean?

Eric | link

12:43 A.M., Thursday, September 13th, 2001
I was just down by the Brooklyn Bridge. Me and some people jumped a fence and got down there.

I have never in my life seen dustruction like that before. My shoes and pants are covered in dust.

More soon.

Eric | link

1:19 P.M., Wednesday, September 12th, 2001
My friend Benjamin was on the scene and took these pictures:
tnyc.jpg
tnyc2.jpg

Eric | link

12:36 A.M., Wednesday, September 12th, 2001
Eric Rosenfield Mailing List 3.0: Bosnia New York

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From the Eric Rosenfield Mailing List. To be on the Eric Rosenfield Mailing List, fill out the form in the lower left hand corner.

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The World Trade Center collapsed outside my window.

It's now 11:00 at night, and from my apartment in Brooklyn you can see clear across the water to the smoke that still billows gray against the black of the night sky. It would be all too easy to make a metaphorical parallel between the monstrous amount of smoke I've seen pouring out of lower Manhattan today and the pall that has fallen over the city, so I'll resist the urge, but it's been the smoke that has been most noticeable and unnerving from where I am, smoke so high you have to crane your neck to see it all, even though it comes from several miles away.

At 10am today, the radio woke me up, and I heard Howard Stern say something about the World Trade Center and how there was "no point in him being on right now" like he was about to go off the air. I immediately went over to my window where I saw a single tower of the Trade Center standing across the water, engulfed in the biggest plume of smoke I'd ever seen.

I rushed outside my room where my roommate, Morgan, was staring aghast at the television. He looked up at me in disbelief.

"I think I just saw one of the twin towers collapse." He said.

It had happened minutes before.

A half an hour later we were looking out the window as the second tower came tumbling to the Earth.

"When I saw the first tower go down," said Morgan, a lifelong New Yorker, "I thought, for a moment, that everything else was going to go down with it. The whole city. I mean, how could the World Trade Center collapse?"

The smoke bloomed, and the television looked like a mirror of what was happening out the window right next to it, as if they were shooting the news footage directly from our apartment. I had a hard time telling the difference: window, television, window, television; it was probably the most surreal moment of my life.

In the progressive montage of scenes that the television showed us, we saw a flight attendant rush out of an airport lobby crying "We work for a target!", Mayor Guilianni talking about how while they were evacuating him City Hall, right around the corner from the Trade Center, he "saw people jumping out of the windows" of the building, and footage of part of the financial district reduced to a cemetery of metal and brown ash. In the coming hours there were eyewitness accounts of a man emerging from an elevator while on fire, human bodies plowed into the concrete and the explosion reducing people to sloshy human puddles.

"It's like Israel." said Morgan. Then later, "It's like Bosnia." And later still, "It's like Independence Day. They just showed this line of burnt out cars and busses, completely hallowed out and charred, just like in Independence Day."

This kind of thing isn't supposed to happen here.

"Do you have any idea how much firepower it takes to bring down buildings of that size?" I asked.

Just a month before the power company had destroyed two gasoline towers in nearby Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Beforehand, the local news stations had made a big point of displaying the amount of explosives spread throughout the base of the large, hollow structures in order to bring them down.

Morgan and I both called our mothers, who live in town. "They had us all give blood," said my mother, a doctor at a local hospital, "and they're going to start bringing victims here. We're all getting ready."

We were told by the TV that the best thing we could do was give blood, so we left for the nearest hospital. On the way, even here in the borough of Brooklyn, we saw screaming cop cars and ambulances, an army reserve truck, and otherwise normal-looking people wearing filtered face masks on the street. And the sight of men in fatigues loading up an army reserve truck with supplies The city was in chaos, and the whole while the ever present smoke cloud streamed across the horizon from Manhattan, looming, ominous and frightening. "The smoke cloud is veering south east," said the news radio, "into Brooklyn."

At the hospital we were told that we couldn't give blood today (no reason expressly given, though Morgan hazarded that all the medical personal had been sent into Manhattan), and that we'd have to either come back the next morning or call a number we were given on a sheet of paper.

At home I called the number and was told that they weren't accepting any more blood donations, but they took my number and told me that they would call me when they were. They just didn't have enough people to collect blood, even though there's a blood shortage.

Mere months ago I used to work on Water street, not five blocks from the Trade Center buildings. This is the first time I've been really glad that they fired me; I can't imagine having been trapped down there, and I wonder about my former co-workers. And I was the one who talked my roommate out of us moving into a building in that area, because I desperately didn't want to live in the financial district.

I have never been in a war zone, but today New York sure felt like what would I imagine one feels like. Which is a sentiment I heard a reporter in the Financial District express just after I wrote it. They're evacuating everything below Canal street. Three buildings have collapsed, two more are in danger of falling, many more are on fire and the entire area is engulfed in a layer of soot and debris. The unyielding smoke is rolling through Brooklyn just south of us, and the neighborhood of the financial district is a total wasteland.

Of course, most of this information is from the American lifeline of television. All I can see firsthand right now is the continuing smoke (and smoke and smoke and smoke) and the regular stream of police, ambulances and even one caravan of trucks towing construction and rescue vehicles, motoring down the otherwise empty Brooklyn-Queens Expressway out my window. But I'm getting the feeling that the sound of sirens will be a pretty regular occurrence for the next few days.

At a local deli a worker, clearly of draftable age, told me that he "hope we bomb dem. It's about time we bomb dem." And for the first time in my life it was a sentiment I agreed with. For most of my life I had toed the line that war was only justified if someone attacked American soil. And now someone has attacked American soil on a level not seen since Pearl Harbor, and an attack with perhaps as much significance as the British burning down the White House in 1812. Insanity. The most Americans ever killed in one day was during the Civil War, and that was just over 20,000. It looks like this will dwarf that, and make Oklahoma City look like a very minor incident. It's hard to imagine; the death toll is pretty assuredly greater then that on D-Day. And while we don't know who did it, something very American deep inside me hopes that when we find out, and we will find out, that we blow dem up real good. It's something I've never thought, the kind of thoughts I never thought I'd have, and as much as the fact that I think these things horrifies and frightens me, I really do want to see people die for this in a very palpable way.

"I hope it's the Palestinians." Said an Israeli girl at a local cafe, "I mean, I'm sorry it happened, but I hope it's the Palestinians because then it wouldn't just be the Israelis against them, but the Americans too and that would be great."

George W. Bush went on television and said most of nothing. He is right when he said the quote that he will probably be known for forever, that "there is a quiet, unyielding anger in America today". At least, there is in this apartment - a quite, unyielding anger mixed with shock, disbelief and horror.

Every few minutes I have to say to myself, "They destroyed the World Trade Center" to reaffirm that this really happened. It's so far-fetched. If you had told me yesterday that terrorists were going to be able to demolish those buildings, I wouldn't have believed you. And I'm not sure you can really appreciate how astounding that is unless you have - sorry, had - stood beneath those buildings where you actually had to tilt your head back a full ninety degrees so that it hurts your neck, just to see the top.

"I wonder if they'll rebuild the towers." Said Morgan, and it's easy to imagine at this point that they will rebuild it, simply because it's so hard to imagine the New York skyline without it. But my bet is that they will build a large monument there, a la Oklahoma city, in that spot in the financial district, something like a war memorial, a tourist attraction to replace a tourist attraction, for the neighborhood where George Washington was sworn into his first term, and tall, masted ships sit permanently in the harbor. I wonder how much meaning and comfort it will actually give to those who lost people today, and what the power of memorials really is. Maybe they have power, I don't know. I've never lived through something that warranted a memorial.

If we can prove the Bin Laden is responsible, as most people seem to think he is, and if Afghanistan continues to harbor him, then there is little doubt that we will go to war with Afghanistan. Other then that, not much is clear. A lot of people are dead. The Mayor doesn't want anyone going into Manhattan tomorrow who doesn't have to. The city is shaken, the financial district is shut down, and everybody is calling and emailing everybody else to make sure everybody is okay. Not everybody is okay.

They destroyed the World Trade Center.

They destroyed the World Trade Center.

Eric | link

2:38 P.M., Monday, September 10th, 2001
So I'm in my Anthropology class and the teacher is talking about the syllabus. "If you see a book on there, without chpater or page numbers listed, that means you just read the whole book for that class."

Oy and vey.

Eric | link

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