A Paradise Built in Hell (30 page)

Fireman Stanley Trojanowski had tried to put out the fires that had started in some cars—leaking jet fuel and the cascade of papers on fire had ignited many vehicles. “A couple of young kids, maybe in their teens or maybe their early twenties, tried to help me get the line from under all the debris to get some water on the fires. They were just civilians. There were a lot of cops sitting there dazed, all full of debris. I couldn’t get their attention.” Many policemen and women and firefighters were valiant that day, but so were the others in the crowd. Joe Blozis, an investigator for the police department, recalls, “Something else that I won’t forget is that the civilians, the pedestrians on the streets and sidewalks, were actually directing traffic to help us get through. Not only us, but all emergency vehicles. Streams of people, lines of people, were stopping other pedestrians and clearing trafficways to get the emergency vehicles in. If it weren’t for the pedestrians doing this, it would have been a nightmare getting emergency vehicles down to that site.” A private security director, Ralph Blasi, said, “I have the greatest admiration for the private security officers, guys who are making around twenty-five thousand dollars a year. We had often asked security guards, prior to 9/11, what they would do if a bomb went off and they saw a couple of dead bodies. The consensus was always that they would run. But on September 11, I had sixty guards working with me and not one ran.” The owners and workers in small businesses around the epicenter pulled people inside for safety and breathable air when the collapses happened.

Ada Rosario-Dolch was the principal of Leadership High School, a block away. That morning she was concerned about her sister who worked in the towers, but “I can honestly say that one of the first miracles was that I didn’t think about my sister again for the rest of the day. She worked at Cantor Fitzgerald and she did die in the World Trade Center that day, but at the time all I could think about was the kids.” It’s an extraordinary thing to say—that one’s sister died, and that it was a miracle not to think of her until later. Rosario-Dolch continues, “I had two girls in wheelchairs. . . . I asked the elevator operators to go upstairs and get them, because I knew exactly where they were. When they brought them down I told all of them, ‘Start going toward Battery Park. Meet me at the corner.’ I then told my A.P. [assistant principal] to go up to the fourteenth floor and start the evacuation, floor by floor. I wanted everybody out, custodial workers, kitchen workers, everybody. I mean, these people were phenomenal. Nobody panicked. . . . We got everybody out and we went to Battery Park. . . . We knew the problem was north. We needed to go south. The two head security officers from the American Stock Exchange made sure that the street was clear and open, so that as the kids walked out they could walk out freely toward Battery Park. I waited by the exit door, and as each kid came out, I told them, ‘You hold hands. This is like kindergarden. Find a partner. Don’t be alone. This is a good time to make a friend.’ ” All her students were successfully evacuated. In many cases, teachers took students home or evacuated on the boats with them to New Jersey and Staten Island. Parents were terrified when their children could not be located, but no students were harmed (except by inhaling the toxic air).

Many people were caught between the destruction and the water’s edge, and hundreds of thousands were evacuated by water. Three hundred thousand is a moderate estimate. Ferries whose captains spotted the smoke or collapse turned around to dump their passengers out of harm’s way, and then their captains and crew made fast repeat trips to haul away everyone they could. A historic-fireboat crew heard the Coast Guard call for all available boats and took 150 people, twice their normal load. All kinds of boats were involved, cruise ships and pleasure boats, water taxis, sailboats, municipal tankers, ferries, yachts, and tugs, some responding to the Coast Guard, many on their own initiative. A forty-one-year-old policeman named Peter Moog remembers, “One of our harbor boats pulled in, and I knew a guy on it, Keith Duvall. He said, ‘Grab a sledgehammer. We’ll break into one of those yachts and take it.’ There were about a thousand people there, all waiting to get the hell off the island. Keith and I broke into a boat. I said, ‘Rich people always leave the keys in the boat.’ So we ended up finding the keys and Keith got the boat started. I think he made about ten trips back and forth to Jersey with this big boat, taking about a hundred people a trip.”

Many boats pulled up alongside the waterfronts, but there were no docks calibrated to their heights: people had to jump or climb on board. A fireman on one of the city’s fireboats remembers, “People were just diving onto the boat. We were trying to catch them, trying to help them get on. Mothers and nannies with infants in their arms were dropping the children down to us. At one point we had four or five of them wrapped in little blankets, and we put them in bunks down in the crew quarters. I put four of the babies in one bunk, like little peanuts lined up in a row.” They helped the mothers and nannies into the boat, hauled out one jumper who missed and landed in the water, and had to go in after another woman who’d fallen in and was too exhausted to haul herself out. A waterfront metalworker who went on board a ferry to help says, “Everyone did what they needed to do. No one had to tell anyone what to do. The mechanics who usually repair the boats hopped on boats to work as crew mates.” And of his own experience he recalled, “I only had time to act. I didn’t have time to react.”

Ellen Meyers, who founded the nonprofit Teachers Network, was just getting off the subway at Canal Street when she saw the first plane hit. She became one of the first batch of people heading south while the thousands were streaming north, because her eighty-year-old mother lived in Battery Park City. She ran into an old friend named Jim, and the two joined forces. They got to her mother and were inside a utility room with fifty other people when they heard the second tower collapse. Meyers recalls that her mother said, “ ‘Maybe by now I have a river view.’ So I’m laughing. Jim says, ‘I haven’t lived with HIV for twenty years to die right now.’ I’m laughing more. He’s laughing. We are laughing hysterically, and what goes through my mind is, ‘There’s no other two people I’d rather be with at this moment.’ And that’s my thought. I said, ‘Okay. This is it. But boy, am I glad I’m with Jim and my mother.’ I’m a person who likes company, and I realize, even in death I want to have company, you know, in that moment. I said, ‘Well, this is it, and I want to go with them.’ It feels okay. It feels okay.” They lived, uninjured, packed her mother onto one of the boats, then got on boats themselves, and as soon as they docked went back to helping out.

Marcia Goffin, an executive in her fifties who worked in a law firm next to the towers, formed a series of emotional bonds as she moved through the calamity. She came running out of her building hand in hand with her assistant, Anne, and joined a small crowd trying to protect from the sea of runners a man who was down and bleeding, until a policeman took on the task and told them all to “get out of here.” She didn’t see anyone being trampled: “It seemed like a steady surge. People kept coming and coming and coming.” She comforted a stricken man shaking in the subway, put her hands on his shoulder and made sure he was okay to move on. He told her, “I just ran down eighty flights and I’m alive.” You could imagine that caregiving was particularly in her nature if it were not that so many people were doing the same that apocalyptic morning. She took the subway herself before the system was shut down and felt intensely connected with the other people on the car, though she never saw any of them again. She then got on a bus and sat down next to an African American woman with whom she held hands for much of the ride uptown, and when the two women and all the other riders were kicked off the bus—it was going back downtown, Goffin surmised, to evacuate more people—she brought the woman home with her to her Upper East Side apartment to rest and regroup and figure out how to go farther north to her own home. After a few hours the stranger left. Fleeting emotional connections were typical of this and many disasters, though there are exceptions—not only friendships but marriages would be launched amid the ruins of the towers in the months that followed.

Astra Taylor was in her early twenties, a tall young woman from Georgia working at a left-wing publishing house in TriBeCa, and she went out into the street with hundreds of others to watch the extraordinary spectacle not so far away. “We were all trying to figure this out together. What was happening to us, should we go home, and what should we do? A few people were crying, but I felt like they were the special kind of person who had the special capacity for empathy, to really empathize. We were just sort of in the streets, and there was this flood of people coming north, people covered in dust running for their life and not stopping. There are still hundreds of us in the streets feeling oddly insular.” Her sixteen-year-old brother was with her, and they walked to the Village, had a beer—lots of people were having beer, waiting to find out whether life would go on, what had happened, and what they should and could do next. The Taylors gathered with the thousands on Delancey Street being held back from the Williamsburg Bridge because the police were worried that it too might be a target on that morning when no one was sure whether there was more in store for New York. Finally the throngs were allowed to walk, and they turned that bridge, like the Brooklyn Bridge earlier that day, into a broad pedestrian avenue to safety.

“We were probably milling around for two hours, waiting to cross the bridge, getting hot, and that was the moment where you were feeling your small softness. You’re just this small, soft human amongst all these others just wanting to cross this water. Finally we were allowed to cross the Williamsburg Bridge, and the people who met us on the other side were the Hasidics [members of the ultratraditional sect of Jews centered in Brooklyn]. They met us with bottles of water. The feeling on the street was a sense of community and calmness. There was a sense on the street on September 11 of calm, of trusting in the people around you—kind of being impressed with how intelligently the people around you were handling the circumstances. There was camaraderie, no hysterics, no panic, you felt that people would come together. That’s obviously what happened in the towers, there was a lot of heroism that day. But then suddenly you’re back in your apartment and you’re isolated and you’re watching the news and it’s this hysterical . . . they were so overwrought and they’re just showing the image again and again of the plane hitting the tower and the tower collapsing. The experience on television was so different than the experience on the street.

“I felt connected to the people on the street and I felt impressed by them. I also felt that reality is not what I thought it was, I still have a lot to learn. The reality that people would do this, commit this act of terrorism but also the reality that people in the street are trustworthy, that people would help you and that you would help. Work—I really hate work—and it gets in the way so much: we’re rushing to work and we’re at work and rushing from work. We didn’t go to work for a few days, and you had all this time to talk to people and talk to your family.” Taylor had a lot of family on hand: two of her three younger siblings were with her in her warehouse home in Brooklyn. Her wheelchair-bound younger sister wasn’t frightened by the attacks either. She was terrified that her parents would make her come back home because of them, and she’d lose her newfound liberty. She didn’t, and the usually reclusive Taylors put on an exhibition for the neighborhood in their home. Taylor summed up Brooklyn that week as an anarchist’s paradise, a somber carnival: “No one went to work and everyone talked to strangers.”

I
t was as though, in the first hours after the World Trade Center towers were hit, the people in and around the impact site became particles flung outward, away from danger. Thus did a million or so people evacuate themselves safely. Simultaneously there began a convergence on the site that grew all that day and week, tens of thousands of skilled professionals from medics to ironworkers and countless others just hoping to help. Many stayed to become integral parts of the long process of dismantling the monstrous rubble piles and searching for the dead, or took care of the workers who did so. The desire to help was overwhelming for a great many people, and because the attacks were perceived as an attack on the nation, not on the city, and because the media covered everything about them exhaustively, the convergence and contributions were on an unprecedented scale. Volunteers came from all over the country and Canada, and donations and expressions of solidarity came from around the world. “Nous sommes tous Americaines”—“We Are All Americans”—was the headline of
Le Monde,
one of France’s leading newspapers.

Charles Fritz had identified the phenomenon of convergence in 1957, writing, “Movement toward the disaster area usually is both quantitatively and qualitatively more significant than flight or evacuation from the scene of destruction. Within minutes following most domestic disasters, thousands of people begin to converge on the disaster area and on first-aid stations, hospitals, relief, and communications centers in the disaster environs. Shortly following, tons of unsolicited equipment and supplies of clothing, food, bedding, and other material begin arriving in the disaster area.” He identified various converging parties, from skilled and unskilled volunteers to the merely curious to opportunists. In New York, souvenir sellers and proselytizing Scientologists were among the most frequently noted in the latter category.

Families also began to converge, particularly the families of those who worked in the towers, many of them from outside the city. Flyers advertising for missing people began to wallpaper the city, posted by those with the forlorn hope that there were survivors in the rubble or hospitals or otherwise somehow missing but alive. (Undocumented workers disappeared with far less ceremony; their families were far away or afraid to seek them publicly.) The photographs on the flyers were often vacation snapshots or other incongruously cheery images, put out during those days of uncertainty. Distraught partners, parents, offspring, and others walked around asking if anyone had seen the person whose photograph they carried, asked hospitals for lists of people present, and generally thronged lower Manhattan. They became part of the community volunteers took care of, with kindness, with practical assistance in fielding new bureaucracies, with food, and other forms of assistance. The hospitals too had hoped to care for the injured, and medical teams all over the city waited in vain.