photo: 911digitalarchive.org
Which is not to say, once I realized it was 9/11, that I didn't become teary eyed and sad again. I did. I watched a History Channel commemorative piece of compiled documentary film and voice - 102 Minutes and relived again shock, outrage and grief.
But there was a difference. Something has healed. I didn't seem to be carrying this grief within me anymore....and I felt lighter as a result...sad but not depressed.
I sat in the same chair as the one I sat in seven years ago and watched the same scenes as I did seven years ago and was unable to move my eyes from the screen as was true seven years ago....but finally I'd let something go.
Was I particularly long to heal?
If it took me seven years to let go of the trauma of 9/11 and I was NOT on the scene, related to anyone lost, but simply a former NYC resident and a long time design contractor to the city's power company with contacts and resources still within the city...what sort of trauma have those with tangible loses during 9/11 endured? What sort of trauma have the relief workers and men and women who searched through the rubble for weeks, months endured?
I lost a part of my visual memory of a city I was a resident of for two decades. There is a tangible hole in my visual reality and this hurts me. It is however a minor loss.
The trauma of 9/11 was larger, greater, more complex that anything before experienced...for many people. Is the physical and emotional pain felt by those of us estranged from the city, who lost no one, who "did" nothing to repair the city's physical plant insignificant?
Of course I mourned for the people who worked in the towers who lost their lives. I was terrified with them. I clung to the same hope they clung to. I cheered for the men and women on the job who went to the aid of those trapped in the buildings or directed to safety those who made it out with those from nearby buildings. Later I joined the city and so many families who mourned the loss of the city servicemen who climbed up so many staircases searching for people to help out of the burning towers, only to be killed as the buildings fell down upon them.
I identified with the confusion and distress and fear of my fellow NYC citizens. I cried for the couple who plunged to their deaths hand in hand. I attempted to find solace in written words about the events of the day. I wrote about the support of my fellow country folks who hung out flags of all denominations - some tattered, and black with something which wasn't dust - that surely had seen battles during their life times. I wrote about the villages and towns and country places which rallied to the support of whomever and whatever would happen from that day forward.
I wondered if the firemen who parked their fire trucks outside of Gristedes on 6th Avenue or the A&P at the Zuckendorf Towers and who walked the aisles collecting the food for the meal one or two of them would prepare that day - in black and yellow rubber garb - who appeared to be some of the tallest and strongest men I'd ever seen... I wondered if they were some of the men lost in those towers?
I wondered if the Blue Cross Blue Shield people I visited on a business project and whose office views I coveted, made it out alive?
I am happy to have first ventured to the top of the towers with two small children and shared an unbelieveable view and sense of place with the freshness of younger eyes and spirits. I wondered if those two children's memories of the towers, now as grown young men, are forever combined with my own of our shared afternoon on the observation deck?
I wondered if my photographer friend of long ago who took me to Windows on the World at the top of the North tower on what was a totally overcast evening...remembers my belief that the powers that be would lift the clouds so we could enjoy the view with our dinner...if he remembers the towers as I do when the clouds opened and the entire city was at our feet? And how astounding and spectacular that view was?
And if that last horrific view of those lost in those towers is something I can ever forget?
I wondered if all the artists and craftspeople who were invited to contribute (their art work) and then to attend the fancy soiree auction for the Museum of Contemporary Crafts with Vice President Mondale were as nervous as I was to be with such celebrity that we forgot we were on top of such an amazing structure and being catered to by wait people and chefs some of whom surely perished years later on 9/11. How perfect they'd made our evening.
I wondered if Philippe Petit mourned the loss of the venue for his remarkable feat of walking back and forth from the top of North tower to South tower...and if that was absurd to wonder?
I am remembering my introduction to the towers years ago. I'd spent an evening at a friend's unique loft in lower Manhattan. The main room had a built-in hot tub against one wall. A beautiful ceramic pathway led to the steps up to the mouth of the tub and radiated to the center of the main room. The WTC towers were a block or so away. I had never visited the towers.
During the evening we took a hike under and on the raised concourse, around the enormous 80 foot tall marbled lobbies 208 feet on each side. We admired tall polished metal arches reminiscent of a gothic - Islamic combo which appeared to hold up a vertically embossed exterior which disappeared 110 floors above us. The base of the buildings were quiet, empty, eerie and still - darker at street level than in the night sky where thousands of office windows sparkle.
But still the grief clung to me.
I wondered if the firemen who parked their fire trucks outside of Gristedes on 6th Avenue or the A&P at the Zuckendorf Towers and who walked the aisles collecting the food for the meal one or two of them would prepare that day - in black and yellow rubber garb - who appeared to be some of the tallest and strongest men I'd ever seen... I wondered if they were some of the men lost in those towers?
I wondered if the Blue Cross Blue Shield people I visited on a business project and whose office views I coveted, made it out alive?
I am happy to have first ventured to the top of the towers with two small children and shared an unbelieveable view and sense of place with the freshness of younger eyes and spirits. I wondered if those two children's memories of the towers, now as grown young men, are forever combined with my own of our shared afternoon on the observation deck?
I wondered if my photographer friend of long ago who took me to Windows on the World at the top of the North tower on what was a totally overcast evening...remembers my belief that the powers that be would lift the clouds so we could enjoy the view with our dinner...if he remembers the towers as I do when the clouds opened and the entire city was at our feet? And how astounding and spectacular that view was?
And if that last horrific view of those lost in those towers is something I can ever forget?
I wondered if all the artists and craftspeople who were invited to contribute (their art work) and then to attend the fancy soiree auction for the Museum of Contemporary Crafts with Vice President Mondale were as nervous as I was to be with such celebrity that we forgot we were on top of such an amazing structure and being catered to by wait people and chefs some of whom surely perished years later on 9/11. How perfect they'd made our evening.
I wondered if Philippe Petit mourned the loss of the venue for his remarkable feat of walking back and forth from the top of North tower to South tower...and if that was absurd to wonder?
I am remembering my introduction to the towers years ago. I'd spent an evening at a friend's unique loft in lower Manhattan. The main room had a built-in hot tub against one wall. A beautiful ceramic pathway led to the steps up to the mouth of the tub and radiated to the center of the main room. The WTC towers were a block or so away. I had never visited the towers.
During the evening we took a hike under and on the raised concourse, around the enormous 80 foot tall marbled lobbies 208 feet on each side. We admired tall polished metal arches reminiscent of a gothic - Islamic combo which appeared to hold up a vertically embossed exterior which disappeared 110 floors above us. The base of the buildings were quiet, empty, eerie and still - darker at street level than in the night sky where thousands of office windows sparkle.
I had a private viewing of a very public place - the same place where 50,000 thousand persons bustled in on Monday morning and 200,000 visitors convened daily to conduct their business within the 7 Trade Center buildings. After the towers came down, was it odd to wonder if the loft survived?
The zebra bar so named (informally) for it's exterior painted stripes on a TriBeCa corner blocks North of the towers ... was one of "our" places to meet, eat, drink, talk, on a Friday night. This coincided with the instincts of many other literate beings who fell into TriBeCa, where wide empty streets along the sidewalks against loading docks of blocky warehouse type buildings were the rule, not the exception. This was the extended neighborhood of the WTC. Where one night, after the firing of a friend (unjustly, of course) three of us convened to obliterate the problems of the day and ordered the house special platters of middle eastern specialties and had so much food we had to commander more sidewalk tables. I wondered is the neighborhood the same around the pits of where the WTC used to be? Could it ever be the same?
I wondered if the client I bundled my marketing piece with in his print job remembers the image on my postcard? Does anyone remember that post card? It was a photo retouchced surreal image of buildings and streets poking through torn tufts of clouds showing a part of the city in digital semi-ruin. The photo was taken from the top of the WTC. The altered image was used to create a whacky travel postcard of a place called SOGO (my business name, a la SOHO, NOHO and a silly place called MOHO...the median down the center of Houston Street). Why did I create a bombed out image of lower Manhattan a decade prior to 9/11? The question, the image haunts me.
In greeting people long not seen since my leaving the city several years before 9/11...in the first few minutes of conversation, each has shared independently what happened to them after the horrors of that day. It's an odd, no longer unexpected and disturbing connection. There must be millions of same stories.
There were many brave people who demonstrated themselves during and after 9/11. The word unfolded its true meaning around the events. I don't think I ever knew bravery as a tangible behavior until 9/11. It had been the stuff of the silver screen and novels and history books; it became the stuff of everyday people. Now I tend to cringe when the word is over used or ill used and I am angered for those who were truly brave during the events surrounding 9/11. But I don't think they'd mind.
The Pennsylvania plane passengers who diverted the fourth plane were remarkable, strong, smart, brave and frightened humans. They are certainly the stuff of legends with their "let's roll" battle cry. I used to find myself in the plane with them and wondered what I might do. It's part of the agony of the day to not measure up.
I am not particularly fond of the name "Freedom Tower" but I have no better name to add to those considered. America Tower or Spirit Tower or even Tower of Freedom seem better to me. Like every other artist I drew a plan of a memorial as part of my personal ritual of grief and renewal. Mine was two enormous polished stone cubes to fill the footprints of the fallen towers, 208 feet per side, engraved with the names of those lost and embossed with the image of the arched grid work of the broken towers. Reminisent of the VietNam memorial.
To me, the memorial of the WTC must be at ground level for those who will come to see it and for the families who see what we call Ground Zero as the resting place of those they love. What happens to the skyline seems superficial.
The VietNam memorial is incredibly powerful. It engenders profound silence and respect and solidarity. It gribs the Earth. It is called simply The Wall. Will the Freedom Tower be called, one day, The Tower? The VietNam memorial combines the very personal with a grand scale. It is very beautifully finished and fits into its landscape perfectly. Its size, its long view and perspective mirrors the overwhelming consequences of war. Is the crystalline Freedom Tower of the same stuff? I just don't know. What I do know is the footprint of ground zero is sacred ground. The essence of the people who died on that spot will always remain. This I can feel; anyone can feel.
I am sorry to say that I don't particularly like any of the designs on paper or even in 3-D mock-up cityscapes. I think the Freedom Tower looks like a lipstick brush case, similar to the Kaiser Wilheim Memorial Cathedral in Berlin whose bombed out structure was filled with memorial buildings which the locals call a lipstick case and compact. The Freedom Tower is more retro in design than modern and simply enormous. I would not have made such a tall structure (1776 feet: approx. 400 feet taller than the height of WTC [North] Tower One). It seems brazen and unsafe. I would have made something which generated a shadow of the original towers. Or I would inscribe that shadow on the site of Ground Zero. Are their two reflecting pools within the footprints of the original towers? That would make sense.
I'm afraid I will always want the twin towers to return to my landscape. I will not embrace the change easily. The new structure verifies the reality of 9/11 and the loss. In that view, the delays are understandable.
The zebra bar so named (informally) for it's exterior painted stripes on a TriBeCa corner blocks North of the towers ... was one of "our" places to meet, eat, drink, talk, on a Friday night. This coincided with the instincts of many other literate beings who fell into TriBeCa, where wide empty streets along the sidewalks against loading docks of blocky warehouse type buildings were the rule, not the exception. This was the extended neighborhood of the WTC. Where one night, after the firing of a friend (unjustly, of course) three of us convened to obliterate the problems of the day and ordered the house special platters of middle eastern specialties and had so much food we had to commander more sidewalk tables. I wondered is the neighborhood the same around the pits of where the WTC used to be? Could it ever be the same?
I wondered if the client I bundled my marketing piece with in his print job remembers the image on my postcard? Does anyone remember that post card? It was a photo retouchced surreal image of buildings and streets poking through torn tufts of clouds showing a part of the city in digital semi-ruin. The photo was taken from the top of the WTC. The altered image was used to create a whacky travel postcard of a place called SOGO (my business name, a la SOHO, NOHO and a silly place called MOHO...the median down the center of Houston Street). Why did I create a bombed out image of lower Manhattan a decade prior to 9/11? The question, the image haunts me.
In greeting people long not seen since my leaving the city several years before 9/11...in the first few minutes of conversation, each has shared independently what happened to them after the horrors of that day. It's an odd, no longer unexpected and disturbing connection. There must be millions of same stories.
bravery has real meaning
There were many brave people who demonstrated themselves during and after 9/11. The word unfolded its true meaning around the events. I don't think I ever knew bravery as a tangible behavior until 9/11. It had been the stuff of the silver screen and novels and history books; it became the stuff of everyday people. Now I tend to cringe when the word is over used or ill used and I am angered for those who were truly brave during the events surrounding 9/11. But I don't think they'd mind.
Are all brave people heros?
The Pennsylvania plane passengers who diverted the fourth plane were remarkable, strong, smart, brave and frightened humans. They are certainly the stuff of legends with their "let's roll" battle cry. I used to find myself in the plane with them and wondered what I might do. It's part of the agony of the day to not measure up.
I know less about the Pentagon attack because news casts of events in Washington fell out of my shocked mind. But I've read of more ordinary people who worked to save one another. I recall the reports of the airline passenger, a wife calling her husband on her cell to warn him that the white house might be under attack before the plane she traveled in disintegrated into the side of the Pentagon. These people knew they were about to die, swiftly one hopes and still they had the presence of mind to warn others, to console those they left behind.
I find I am proud of people I never knew. Perhaps, in part, this is what national pride is all about. Has the word hero become too small to hold the memory of so many lost people?
Remembering the intent of people who called their homes and families from the WTC leaving messages of love and farewell. The remarkable nature of those phone calls, how kind, how loving, how sad.
I find I am proud of people I never knew. Perhaps, in part, this is what national pride is all about. Has the word hero become too small to hold the memory of so many lost people?
Remembering the intent of people who called their homes and families from the WTC leaving messages of love and farewell. The remarkable nature of those phone calls, how kind, how loving, how sad.
And all the photos of the lost in Union Square which was a block from where I formerly lived and worked. And then the waiting for what became the lack of survivors and images of the debris and papers and gray dust that coated the city and its people. The truckloads of debris being trucked out of the site, the cadaver dogs and the call for special booties to save their bleeding feet. And the media coverage of the families and memorials over the years. Each so heartfelt and sad.
I have listened twice to all the names as a homage to each individual lost. I feel others pay tribute in this fashion. Now the children are growing big who speak their parent's names. They look strong and healthy. They seem to have survived with loving memories.
But mostly what I know is how the world changed in those 102 minutes. Phrases like "forever changed" make me cringe whenever I hear them. I know this is the truth, nonetheless I hate this reality. And I dislike all those who use our fears to their political advantage. This year will prove a telling testament to US citizens' abilities to stand up for themselves and vote bravely against the fear mongers.
But mostly what I know is how the world changed in those 102 minutes. Phrases like "forever changed" make me cringe whenever I hear them. I know this is the truth, nonetheless I hate this reality. And I dislike all those who use our fears to their political advantage. This year will prove a telling testament to US citizens' abilities to stand up for themselves and vote bravely against the fear mongers.
I am not particularly fond of the name "Freedom Tower" but I have no better name to add to those considered. America Tower or Spirit Tower or even Tower of Freedom seem better to me. Like every other artist I drew a plan of a memorial as part of my personal ritual of grief and renewal. Mine was two enormous polished stone cubes to fill the footprints of the fallen towers, 208 feet per side, engraved with the names of those lost and embossed with the image of the arched grid work of the broken towers. Reminisent of the VietNam memorial.
To me, the memorial of the WTC must be at ground level for those who will come to see it and for the families who see what we call Ground Zero as the resting place of those they love. What happens to the skyline seems superficial.
The VietNam memorial is incredibly powerful. It engenders profound silence and respect and solidarity. It gribs the Earth. It is called simply The Wall. Will the Freedom Tower be called, one day, The Tower? The VietNam memorial combines the very personal with a grand scale. It is very beautifully finished and fits into its landscape perfectly. Its size, its long view and perspective mirrors the overwhelming consequences of war. Is the crystalline Freedom Tower of the same stuff? I just don't know. What I do know is the footprint of ground zero is sacred ground. The essence of the people who died on that spot will always remain. This I can feel; anyone can feel.
I am appalled at the lack of direction in the construction of the Freedom Tower and the delays holding up the project. The squabbles, the tantrums, the changes...are these particularly American?
I am sorry to say that I don't particularly like any of the designs on paper or even in 3-D mock-up cityscapes. I think the Freedom Tower looks like a lipstick brush case, similar to the Kaiser Wilheim Memorial Cathedral in Berlin whose bombed out structure was filled with memorial buildings which the locals call a lipstick case and compact. The Freedom Tower is more retro in design than modern and simply enormous. I would not have made such a tall structure (1776 feet: approx. 400 feet taller than the height of WTC [North] Tower One). It seems brazen and unsafe. I would have made something which generated a shadow of the original towers. Or I would inscribe that shadow on the site of Ground Zero. Are their two reflecting pools within the footprints of the original towers? That would make sense.
I'm afraid I will always want the twin towers to return to my landscape. I will not embrace the change easily. The new structure verifies the reality of 9/11 and the loss. In that view, the delays are understandable.
But today I feel ready to build - to go forward and embrace the future. Finally my disproportionate grief has subsided. I didn't notice as it left me but I am sure it has gone. Oddly, being host to a type of 9/11 induced post traumatic stress syndrome is another similarity many Americans undoubtedly share.
