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expedient memorials
Wednesday, September 19 2001
It took less than a week for the guy who sells me my morning bagel to memorize what I get, and I haven't had to tell him since. I don't know where exactly he comes from, but it's somewhere in the Middle East. These days he flies a prominent American Flag from the front of his cart.
During my lunch hour, I caught the Red Line subway down to Canal Street to see how things were going very close to the site of the World Trade Center. Canal Street now marks the northern boundary of the general exclusion zone that surrounds the attack site, although it is possible to cross the police cordon if one presents suitably convincing credentials.
There are makeshift memorials all up and down Canal Street in vicinity of the Varick cross street. For an entire block there are many eight by four foot slabs of plywood leaning against a wall, and passersby are encouraged to write their story on a small piece of adhesive paper, which is then stuck beside many other such stories. At every corner are massive impromptu circular shrines of candles, flowers, and pictures. With well over 5000 people not yet accounted for, these shrines are liberally sprinkled with posters featuring pictures and descriptions of the missing. The convention is always to write as though these people really are missing and will eventually return. Some of the posters directly address the missing people, telling them "We love you very much, please come home." It's somehow horrible and beautiful at the same time. One can't dwell long within this enormity of loss without starting to feel it.
Along Canal Street today.
In the vanished shadow of the World Trade Center towers, lower Manhattan now lies within something of a radio dead zone. Directly south of Canal Street, I noticed a fresh antenna nest being erected atop one particularly tall brick building. What with so much of the very latest in antenna technology down so relatively close to street level, it looked like something straight out of science fiction, glistening with the silvery sheen of not-yet-faded aluminum. Meanwhile, down at my level, I saw the gritty pragmatism of post-apocalyptic capitalism thriving amid the dust. I don't know what store it was, but there were crates and crates of old computer motherboards for sale right there on the bustling north sidewalk of the street.
Gretchen came to meet me at work while I was in the middle of a flurry of work-related business. It's amazing how quickly and accurately one can work when one is trying to show off.
We walked down to Washington Square Park on our way to an art supply place on Canal Street and stopped for a light dinner at a noodle restaurant called Republic, which features as its icon a red star that would not be out of place on the side of a Soviet tank. Since Gretchen does not like sushi, I think this was the first time we have ever shared a beaker of warm sake.
While we chopsticked and slurped through our noodles, Gretchen was telling me that she couldn't relate to the new feeling of community sweeping New York in this, its darkest hour. I agreed with her to an extent, saying that I definitely couldn't relate to the obnoxious displays of patriotism, especially in a city as cynical and jaded as this one. Patriotism is to be expected with the yahoos from out of town, but it doesn't look good on a New Yorker. There is a reason people in Manhattan like to wear black. They look ridiculous in red, white, and blue.
To my mind, flamboyant patriotism is an inappropriate (and tasteless) response to massive casualties. Patriotism and provincial American bullheadedness is, after all, part of the reason so many people want to kill themselves destroying our cities. Nonetheless, I told Gretchen that I did feel different in this city now. Whether I've wanted to or not, I've become part of something that is bigger than any individual. This is what happens when societies share a massive traumatizing experience. It's a chemical thing; it affects something, our serotonin perhaps, in a synchronizing way. Our differences suddenly seem less important than our similarities.
After dinner, it was already too late to go to the art supply store, so we decided to go into Washington Square Park to look for cute dogs in the fenced-in dog run. But as we entered the park, the most obvious presence in the park wasn't the dogs at all. It was the windrows of makeshift shrines and paper monuments to the thousands of people the World Trade Center tragedy had rendered "missing." The other day one of Gretchen's friends had told her about the Washington Square shrines, and Gretchen couldn't imagine wanting to see them at all. They didn't resonate with her. But now, in the thick of things, surrounded by handmade teeshirts and hundreds of posters hopefully calling out to the missing, we were gradually sucked in.
True, much of it had a conventional off-putting folksy American tackiness about it, especially in places where people saw fit to memorialize the tragedy through patriotism, thinly-disguised jingoism, or crassly opportunistic Jesus salesmanship. But here it was, the unmoderated free expression of the People, coming together in a way they never had before to construct a spontaneous memorial to those who had been lost. It was, as Gretchen quickly pointed out, the diametrical opposite of the glorious award-winning granite statuary that will one day memorialize this sad event.
As we wandered away from the center of the display, we found ourselves in an especially touching part of the memorial. Here the bellicosity, flags, and Jesus talk thinned out and we were left with a more secularly personal commemoration of those who hadn't made it back from the 105th or 101st floors, or God forbid, the Windows of the World restaurant atop tower #1. What was particularly affecting in this display wasn't just the breadth of the swath of those who had been lost, it was also the depth of details. Many of these people had been simple blue collar workers: custodians, bus boys, cooks. Along with hopeful pleas such as, "come home, we love you very much," there were also the little descriptive details about jewelry, tattoos or birthmarks that might prove useful if a body was found. One of the missing had, we learned, a birthmark "in the shape of Puerto Rico" on his hand. As we looked at these posters in overwhelmed near-silence, a thin grey haired woman politely reached past us and began lighting the candles. There were all varieties of candles, including the Jewish kind that are designed to burn for 24 hours.
The missing posters continued onto any available space on the outside wall of a nearby newsstand (staffed by an evidently Middle Eastern man). Comfortably nestled among these posters was a small sticker urging people to be vigilant and protect their Muslim and Arab neighbors.
The only commemorations we saw that indicated certain knowledge of what had become of the missing were for those people who had been onboard the hijacked planes. Hanging on a section of fence was a large white sheet with the handwritten names of the passengers and the flight crew. Though I'd seen some Middle Eastern names among the World Trade Center missing, there were none mentioned in connection with the planes' passenger lists. I wondered if there were any innocent Arab passengers on those planes who had been left off these lists.
"I'm really glad we went there," said Gretchen as we walked down the steps into the Q subway station. She hadn't expected to have been moved so profoundly.
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