The below piece is something I wrote a decade ago, when I worked in downtown NYC, just blocks away from the slowly rebuilt World Trade Center. We will never forget the day of 09/11/01...
Barclay Street is Broken
I was sitting in freshman biology when my high school principal
announced the attack on the World Trade Center. It was an uneasy day living 30
miles from New York City, where frantic kids tried to reach their parents. My
dad took hours to get home from Manhattan, but all was fine in my world.
September 11th became present in the community, with memorials built
to honor people that were lost that day. I never really felt the effect until
2010, when I began working around the corner from the World Trade Center site.
The blocks surrounding the World Trade center site, mostly
filled with financial companies, government agencies, and small businesses,
appear fine today. Lower Manhattan has made continuous improvements in safety
in the past few years and I’m comforted to see the heavy police presence on
nearby street corners and surrounding subway stations. But underneath the
surface of downtown New York, I see a lurking fear in the eyes of my sidewalk
sharers. It’s a common bond we are all united by. As a 9 to 5 resident of the
area, I have a weary vigilance. I could never be completely comfortable being a
few hundred feet from what is essentially a mass grave. It’s the announcement
on the downtown E-train that gets me every time, last stop, World Trade
Center.” The finality of that announcement stays with me because on September
11th, that was the last stop for some people.
I’ve spent the last 18 months watching the construction of
the new World Trade Center, along with hundreds of tourists. The tourists shock
me. They come off the subway or the downtown sightseeing buses and flock toward
Church Street, eager to snap a few pictures of the Ground Zero for their
friends or the bent metal cross outside St. Peter’s Church, across from the WTC.
The eagerness of the tourists reflects the country’s view of these events. They
flock to this site, forever tied into history, with smiles on their faces, and
it seems like another stop on the NY sightseeing tour. It minimizes the fear
and unease that New York feels, but I’m not sure that is a good thing.
In some ways, the effects of September 11th have
helped offer more flashy buzz for New York, Batman-style, like the week after
Osama Bin Laden died. For 4-5 days, I found it impossible to get to the doors
of my office because of news crews and tourists packing the surrounding
streets. People ran through the streets with American flags on their backs in
an attempt to show US pride, but also to attract the attention of news
producers. And attract the attention they did, feeding to a media circus that
New Yorkers do not want or need as we continue to heal and feel at home again.
