A Paradise Built in Hell (32 page)

Kate Joyce, a nineteen-year-old from New Mexico whose plane had landed in New York as the towers were collapsing, spent much of the next few days at Union Square and remembers, “The city was veiled in the simultaneous chaos and quiet of disaster, and there there was an overarching and unspoken desire (almost hunger) to provide ears, eyes, voices, and bodies that would first and foremost nurture one another as we spoke passionately of the contemporary and historical conflicts, contradictions and connections affecting our lives. We stayed for hours, through the night, and into the week, riveted and expressive, in mourning and humbled, and in the ecstacy of a transformative present.” About three and a half weeks after September 11, the parks department arrived during a lull in the crowds and carted away the candles and the layers of paper. New fences went up around the square, putting much of the space off-limits. The present was no longer transformative, or it was transformed back to ordinary life.

You can imagine concentric circles of impact, disruption and participation spreading from lower Manhattan. The response was global, and nationally it was intense for weeks afterward. All over the country, people were seized with the urgent desire to give or somehow help. I was in a gym in San Francisco that morning, and a bodybuilder urged us all in a voice thick with emotion to go to the nearest blood bank. In New York itself, hospitals prepared for a huge influx of wounded, and a triage center was set up on the Chelsea Piers, but the disaster had been so brutal and absolute that there were only the living and the dead and few in between, including some burn victims at that point. (Perhaps memory of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing affected this reaction; in that incident there were only six deaths but more than a thousand injuries.) The armies of medical personnel were not required, which was hard for them at that moment when everyone’s greatest need was to help: the staff waiting in hospitals and newly established medical sites was one of the peculiarly melancholy aspects of that day. People all over New York and all over the country lined up to donate blood, even though there was no particular need for it.

And the blood donations continued anyway—half a million donors, by one count, 125,000 gallons of donated blood, though far more people volunteered than donated. The Red Cross urged the White House’s inhabitants to donate, and so they did, and so did many U.S. politicians, and even Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, in a symbolically compelling and utterly useless gesture. (Blood is carefully screened, the United States has stricter criteria than many nations, and donations from abroad did not meet these standards.) People offered this stuff from their own bodies as though such a deep gift of life could somehow mitigate all that death. At St. Vincent’s Hospital in the West Village, the lines of would-be donors wound around the block and eventually crowded the surrounding streets, becoming yet another way people passed the first hours and days out in public.

Many were turned away there and elsewhere, but the nation’s blood banks were glutted with blood that would later be thrown away, in part because screening standards had been compromised—and in part because it wasn’t needed at that time and the new supply far exceeded storage capacity. By December blood banks were back to making appeals for donors. Indeed, that moment of crisis had varying durations. Even across Manhattan, those at the northern end of the island had radically different experiences than those who worked or lived near Ground Zero. For most New Yorkers life returned, in many ways, to normal that week or month, or to normal routines and systems, even if they were profoundly disrupted psychologically and politically. For those working on the Pile, the ordeal would last for months. For residents in the area, their lives would be disrupted for upward of a couple of years. For those who were bereaved, widowed, orphaned, or severely injured or traumatized, there was no end in sight, though the word
closure
was invoked constantly by the media. And though few came to the trauma centers, thousands acquired more insidious injuries that would manifest later—respiratory damage from breathing the asbestos, heavy-metal, and otherwise toxic dust of the towers’ collapse and the smoldering site afterward. And nightmares.

 

 

 

Tobin James Mueller was a writer and musician in his fifties who’d been up late the night before and was woken up in his Village apartment by the first plane. He in turn woke up his bellhop son, and they went to Washington Square to mull and mill, then to give blood. The next morning Mueller found a table on the West Side Highway at Seventeenth Street, where people were handing out coffee and doughnuts, and joined them. He wrote about what happened soon after: “I began as one guy behind a table of coffee and donuts, stationed on a sidewalk alongside a temporary ambulance dispatch mobile home unit. After three days’ time, I find myself the coordinator of an army of 200 volunteers who have transformed the entire Pier 59 warehouse into a makeshift mini-mall for rescue workers on break. In addition, we staff a thriving deli-sized food station that feeds hundreds of firemen and ambulance personnel along the West Side Highway. We stock an amateur distribution center that fills a Police Harbor boat every 20 minutes (with respiratory masks, goggles, medicines, clothes, shovels, food and anything else we can find) destined for the Hudson River side of the World Trade Center.”

Mueller added, “Everyone here was rejected by the city’s official sites. I accept anyone who wants to help and anything anyone wants to donate. We find a place for everything and everyone. A hopeful would-be volunteer comes up to me and asks if there is anything she can do. I give her a task, and that’s the last direction I need to give. Each volunteer becomes a self-motivated never-say-die powerhouse who does whatever it takes to get the job done. Then they find a hundred more jobs to do. There is so much to do. It’s so much fun to participate in, I forget to sleep. Many of my volunteers have been working for over 36 hours. It is difficult to bring oneself to go back home. The thought of closing my eyes makes me tremble.”

What began as a doughnut dispensary expanded phenomenally during the next few days. A security guard looked the other way as they took over a warehouse on the Chelsea Piers and quickly filled it with goods and services. The volunteers began to put out the call for supplies over the media, and people came with respirators, boots, socks, tools, cigarettes, Gatorade—whatever was needed. As new volunteers arrived, they were drawn into the expanding operation, which found a use for almost everyone. Years later he described how it worked: “No one is turned away, my one rule. I never said no. That’s one of the reasons it became a utopia.” His authority was only to coordinate and appoint people, then let them take charge, his power only to give others the power to act. Someone advised about food spoilage and was appointed to take charge of the food. When people driven out by the devastation surrounding Ground Zero arrived to ask about housing, Mueller invited a new volunteer to work on it; the volunteer recruited others, who began calling hotels to ask for donated rooms, and they soon had a flourishing housing service.

He added, “We grew until Friday night without any interference from anyone. We were all going without sleep and all crazed. . . . I realized
this is a little heaven
. Everyone is walking around hollowed out by grief, they need to do this, you don’t think beyond it. . . . Every twenty minutes we would fill a boat for Ground Zero—the Ground Zero area became a site of its own. ‘Boat in’ would be called, and about two hundred to three hundred workers would yell ‘form a line’—a bucket brigade.” They would load the boats, which also continued to be part of the massive volunteer operations. Across the Hudson River, volunteers in Jersey City created a similar operation.

Daniel Smith, a young architect, ended up at the piers too. He remembers that there were “in any given ten-minute period” about a hundred people donating goods. Of the other volunteers, he said, “You met great people. People had a good sense of humor. People were working really well together. There was a tremendous cross-section of people. I mean, you had people who very clearly English wasn’t their first language, working with people who were, you know—obviously, you know—spent their Sundays doing the
Times
crossword. You had people who were not American citizens, that were feeling just as welcome as people who had lived in New York City for two or three generations.” Like Mueller, he was struck by how well the commissary worked in the absence of a centralized authority.

Smith told Columbia University’s oral history interviewer that within a few days, professionals who sought to run things appeared. The highly functional bottom-up organization of the commissary clashed with the top-down structure of these organizations. Smith says, “Everyone was in charge. The National Guard came. They were in charge. The army came. They were in charge. There wasn’t—on the upper levels, there wasn’t a lot of coordination in a lot of ways. In some ways, that may sound like it was frustrating, but actually, what it enabled us to do is cut through all the red tape and get work done, since we weren’t connected with FEMA or the OEM [New York’s Office of Emergency Management] or the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the National Guard. We were able to just go in and do work. Basically, everyone that I met was really gung-ho about doing what they wanted to do, and like me, they didn’t take no for an answer.

“I mean, we had security, food, housing, communications, counseling, massage therapy, which sort of fit in with counseling. There was the data processing center, the donations for medical supplies, and then also non-medical supplies.” Contributions of food and material goods so outran need that they had to begin turning donors away. That Sunday the official agencies shut down the unofficial operation. In Mueller’s account, they were not only shut down, but treated with suspicion. It had been a brief run, and a rewarding one for volunteers like Mueller and Smith, who were amazed by the harmony and productivity they achieved. Tricia Wachtendorf, a disaster sociologist who spent considerable time in New York during the aftermath of September 11, comments that convergent volunteers often irk officials because “the appearance of these groups suggests the inadequacy of official response efforts.” She describes how goods managed by groups like Mueller’s and Smith’s were called “rebel food” and “renegade supplies.” The improvisational skills of volunteers and emergent groups often outstrips that of institutions, she notes, and so they almost always function well first and are then eclipsed by the official relief agencies and established volunteer groups, which have resources and continuity on their side. The initially guerrilla effort became increasingly managed and professionalized as time went on, though a number of volunteers stayed on in their original roles or in salaried positions developed later.

For Mueller, the Chelsea Piers commissary had been a utopia; for Temma Kaplan, the city had become the “beloved community” that Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement dreamed of; for Kate Joyce, Union Square provided “an ecstatic present.” For others, it was a far more overtly religious paradise. Father James Martin had left the business world to become a Jesuit priest thirteen years before 9/11, and he worked as an editor for the national Catholic newspaper
America.
But when the towers collapsed, he joined the convergence to see what he could do and became a chaplain at Ground Zero. Occasionally he gave blessings, and a few times he celebrated Mass, but mostly he just listened, comforted, and talked to the people at the site, particularly the many Catholic firemen.

A month later Martin reflected, “I do think, however, that it’s made people a lot more—I think ‘contemplative’ is the best way to say it. I think people are really forced to ponder a lot of things that they might not have thought about: death, life, suffering, evil, all the big issues that might have been easier for people not to look at. I think that people are forced to look at those things now. I have to say, for me, working down there has been the most profound experience of the Holy Spirit that I’ve ever had. It’s a feeling, of course, but it’s also a very strong feeling, and it’s an experience that I’ve not really had before. Essentially, for me, even from the first day, I felt this enormous sense of unity and friendship and concord and amity and everyone working together. For one thing, you have all these firefighters who gave their lives, firefighters and police officers and rescue workers who lie in the rubble. So that informs everything. Second of all, you have all the volunteers, all the rescue workers who were there donating their time, essentially. Not only the people from New York City but people who had come from all over the country. I talked to one firefighter who said he drove up from Florida. So there was this tremendous sense of just charity. On top of that, everybody was kind and patient and generous and helpful. I didn’t hear one argument the whole time I was down there. It was really striking. You just got the sense—for me as a Christian—of the Kingdom of God. This is the Kingdom, this is the notion of everyone working and living together and eating together and pulling for a cause—totally other-directed, totally selfless and, frankly, very self-deprecating.

“So there’s that feeling of unity. Then there were signs to me of God’s presence. You walked on this boat that everybody ate on. There was a cruise line that I subsequently found out had sent their boat up from Virginia to be docked at the World Financial Center and provide food for everyone, with donations from area restaurants. Everyone ate on that boat: firefighters, rescue workers, police officers, steelworkers, welders, ironworkers, EMS people, search-and-rescue teams, nurses, doctors, priests. You walked on that boat and you saw this great crowd of people eating together, which was a very Eucharistic image for me, everyone eating together, everyone breaking bread together, in a sense, the heavenly banquet. It was very powerful.” Another Jesuit, Father Steve Katsouros, joked with a colleague, “Osama bin Laden has done a lot to get Catholics to go back to church. I think that there is something very redemptive that has happened for so many people, and I think that they are looking at their world, their values, through different lenses.”