New York at War (55 page)

For all its lurid novelty, the new vision offered by jihadists like bin Laden recalled older fantasies. Bringing the miseries of war home to a smug, comfortable enemy population had been a goal of the city’s assailants from Robert Cobb Kennedy in 1864 to German propagandists in 1918 to Ted Gold in 1969 to al Qaeda hijackers in 2001. New York, seemingly invulnerable symbol of America in all its power and conceit, was supposedly rendered vulnerable to apocalypse by the very values and forces that made and sustained it. For the Virginian Edmund Ruffin in 1860, that force was the free labor system that had created the North’s insupportable inequities of wealth and power; his fictional vision presented a New York consuming itself in a cataclysmic class war. For Adolf Hitler, Jewish capitalism and American decadence would collapse in a sea of flames on Manhattan, courtesy of the Luftwaffe.

September 11 was not the first time, moreover, that the city had been targeted in order to eradicate its threatening fascinations—whether in the form of “tasty flesh,” financial power, cosmopolitan sophistication, or unfettered expression. In their plans to annihilate (or at least chasten) New York, militants seeking purity in their own lives attempted to exorcize the seductive demons of capitalism, pluralism, permissiveness, and/or imperialism.

None of these visions of the humbling of New York are interchangeable, and only a few of them have actually cost lives. The cataclysm of September 11, 2001, was an event unique in its tragedy, horror, and magnitude. Yet the recurring echo is there, a byproduct of New York’s role as the signature city not only of America but also of nineteenth-and twentieth-century modernity.

Epilogue

N
ew York City and its people are resilient. They have adjusted incrementally to an urban culture reshaped by war in the twenty-first century as well as in earlier centuries. Bomb-sniffing dogs and gun-toting officers wending through train terminals, metal detectors and ID checks in office lobbies, long lines at airport check-ins: all have become part of the accepted background static of our daily urban lives. One has to live in and with the city, after all.

This persistence is healthy and life-affirming, but it is also a form of sanity-saving denial. For if the shock, numbness, and urgent grief that New Yorkers felt after 9/11 have largely faded, a lingering vulnerability has not. If history is a guide, New York City will be attacked again in the future as it has been in the past; the difference is that future attacks hold the prospect of being indiscriminate, and perhaps more deadly. Only bad luck and blunders kept Najibullah Zazi and four other al Qaeda operatives from bombing the New York subway in September 2009 and Faisal Shahzad from setting off a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010. Nor has al Qaeda rescinded its post–9/11 threat to use “nuclear and biological equipment” to kill “hundreds of thousands” of Americans. Navigating on foot through a dense rush-hour crowd in Penn Station or Grand Central, one finds it hard not to have fleeting visions, quickly pushed away, of what another attack might bring. Anxieties lie just below the surface, even as most New Yorkers ignore the suggestion of the city’s Office of Emergency Management that they compile a “Disaster Plan Checklist” and contemplate the possibility of evacuation or “sheltering” in the event of terrorism or natural catastrophe. The demise of Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders may bury the fears deeper, but they still exist.
¹

New York’s experience of war affords another lesson. The recurrent challenge to New Yorkers has been how to tell enemies from friends in a city of varied, often insular micro-communities. The challenge has been to distinguish spies, saboteurs, and terrorists from their seemingly identical but innocent neighbors. But it has also been about how to balance freedom and diversity against the need for security and survival.

The lessons of the city’s legacy in this regard are not especially cheery. Repeatedly, New York communities—black, Catholic, loyalist, German, Jewish, leftist—suffered for the sins of a few; ethnic and political antagonisms fueled sweeping accusations of disloyalty that tainted the innocent majority as well as the guilty minority. This legacy has echoed through the city’s recent history and its ongoing public concerns. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, for instance, many New Yorkers and other Americans opposed the plan to build an Islamic community center two blocks from Ground Zero, arguing that the center’s location represented an affront to those lost on 9/11. Given the horrors of 9/11, and the still unhealed wounds of that day, anger and aversion were not surprising reactions to the proposal. But too often in the ensuing debate, fear, ignorance, wholesale stereotyping, and bigotry—embodied in allegations that the center would become an “Islamic Supremacist Mega-Mosque” for terrorist sympathizers or even a base for nefarious anti-American plots—stood in for temperate, discriminating scrutiny. The fact that telling friend from enemy can be a murky business does not exempt New Yorkers or other Americans from the ongoing need to try.
²

The inevitable paradox of New York, and of America, has been that the very thing that makes them vulnerable—their heritage of taking in the peoples of the world—has always been their strength as well. Robert W. Snyder, a historian who was engulfed in the dust cloud near the collapsing South Tower on September 11, managed to duck into a nearby food court with two other men. There, “we were helped by one man who probably came from the Middle East, another who might trace his family to Ireland, and women with roots in Africa and Latin America. . . . There might have been a Muslim among us, but we never got around to asking each other’s religion. All we did was recognize each other as human beings who needed help.”
³

As during other moments of passion and stress in the city’s history, the backlash against Islamic Americans in the wake of 9/11 implicitly denies the important contributions to the city’s history of some New Yorkers: people like Abdel Rahman Mosabbah, who foiled the bomb plot against the B train; Emad Salem, who helped the FBI catch the 1993 bombers; the Muslim vendor Aliou Niasse, who alerted police to Shahzad’s bomb-laden SUV in Times Square; and the Muslim first responders who sought to rescue New Yorkers at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. These men and women were no more “typical” of Muslims than were Ramzi Yousef or Omar Abdel-Rahman, but their stories suggest another legacy in New York, one just as validly part of the city’s history. That is the legacy of Paddy M’Caffrey and other Irish New Yorkers who sheltered black children during the Draft Riot; it is the legacy of an unnamed Jew who helped William Powell’s family escape a racist mob; it is the legacy of businessman Robert Bernhard, who tried to shield a student demonstrator from the blows of another mob on Wall Street in 1970. New York’s wars have pitted New Yorkers against each other, testing and straining the limits of their tolerance and common humanity. It is a test whose challenges will recur.
⁴

In the early morning hours of September 16, 2001, four New Yorkers—two white and two Latino—entered the café of Labib Salama, an Egyptian emigrant, on Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens. They began to overturn tables, smashing dishes and a mirrored wall—retribution for the attack on America perpetrated five days earlier. Salama had no link to either the 9/11 attack or to jihadism; his crime was to be an Arab New Yorker with an identifiably Arab business. Police quickly arrested the four, but Salama refused to press charges. “There’s enough hatred already. We don’t want to make more. Let them go,” he told the patrolmen. An hour later, the four assailants returned, thanked Salama, and helped the café owner and his friends clean up the debris they had left behind. Salama, his Egyptian friends, and the four sat drinking coffee and chatting until well after sunrise, sharing their thoughts and emotions about the terrorist violation of their city. As the four men departed, Salama told them, “Next time you want to come and be friendly with us, you don’t have to hit us and then say you’re sorry. Just come and be friendly in the first place.”
⁵

In those few hours, Labib Salama and his four new friends experienced the worst and best of New York’s long legacy of war.

Acknowledgments

I
would like to thank the friends and colleagues who, in various ways, helped me to write this book. Marc Aronson provided encouragement and lively conversation throughout the planning and writing stages; our lunches often helped me to bring my evidence and arguments into sharper focus. Jan S. Ramirez, Amy Weinstein, and Katherine Edgerton of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum adroitly and graciously answered my research questions. So did Daniella Romano of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation; Ken Yellis, content developer for the project The Brooklyn Navy Yard: Past, Present, and Future; and Robin Parkinson of Exhibition Art & Technology. The libraries and librarians of Summit, Millburn, Westfield, and Chatham, New Jersey, and of Princeton University and the New-York Historical Society provided congenial environments in which to read, think, and write.

Presentations by Mike Wallace at the Gotham Center for New York City History and at Columbia University helped to illuminate the city before and during World War II. Mark Levine shared with me his public school dog tag from his 1950s Brooklyn childhood—a type of artifact I was half-ready to consign to the realm of urban myth until he showed me one. Joshua Brown and Wendy Fisher helped me to understand New York’s anti–Vietnam War movement, in which both were active participants.

I benefited from an insightful reading of the book proposal by Robert W. Snyder and from a similarly thoughtful scrutiny of a portion of the manuscript by Benjamin J. Kaplan. The book profited when Luke Dempsey employed his eagle eye to help me cut a bulky manuscript down to a more manageable length. Special thanks go to Robert Frankel, who served above and beyond the call of duty, reading every draft chapter of the manuscript and offering suggestions that saved me from numerous infelicities and errors.

My agent, Sam Stoloff of the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, supported what I was trying to do with enthusiasm and good humor. Lara Heimert, my editor at Basic Books, has strengthened the book with her keen understanding of the big picture and skill at separating the wheat from the chaff. I am indebted to both of them, and to associate editor Alexander Littlefield, senior project editor Sandra Beris, art director Nicole Caputo, Mike Morgenfeld and his mapmaking team, and editorial assistant Katy O’Donnell. Copyeditor Beth Wright added important finishing touches to the manuscript.

The enthusiasm of family members and friends helped to sustain me through the long process of researching and writing
New York at War.
In particular I would like to thank Deborah Jaffe and David Drake, Amy Worth and Joe Mayer, Roses Katz, Al Katz, Janice Katz, David Hines, Norman Worth and Charlotte Leigh, Kenneth Hechter, and Shirley Berger and Charles Cartwright for their support. Norman Worth generously shared with me his memories of being an air raid messenger in Borough Park, Brooklyn, during World War II, and his experiences as a soldier in the Korean War. His daughter Wendy, my first wife, would have been proud of his contribution to this book.

Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank Jill, Toby, and Matt, who have ridden the author’s roller coaster with me since the project’s inception. Their collective love, support, sense of humor, and patience truly made the writing of this book possible. I hope they like the finished product.

Notes

Introduction

1
Edward Robb Ellis,
The Epic of New York City: A Narrative History
(New York: Coward-McCann, 1966), 596; Allan Nevins, editor,
The Diary of Philip Hone,
1828–1851 (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1927), 2:730.

Chapter 1

1
Samuel Purchas,
Henry Hudson’s Voyages from Purchas His Pilgrimes
(Chester, VT: Readex Microprint, 1966), 592. As with several of the quotations included in this book, for the sake of the modern-day reader I have modernized the spelling, capitalization, and punctuation of the original text here, which is excerpted from Robert Juet’s logbook published in London by Samuel Purchas in 1625.

2
Ibid., 592. The name “Lenape” can be used interchangeably with “Munsee” and “Delaware.” All refer to the native people of the New York City area and their kin in the mid-Atlantic region. For recent reassessments of their history, see Robert S. Grumet,
The Munsee Indians: A History
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009); Amy C. Schutt,
People of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Eric W. Sanderson,
Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009).

3
Purchas,
Henry Hudson’s Voyages,
592.

4
Ibid.

5
Ibid., 586, 592.

6
Ibid., 592.

7
Ibid., 592–595.

8
Henri and Barbara van der Zee
, A Sweet and Alien Land: The Story of Dutch New York
(New York: Viking Press, 1978), 14; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace,
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21.

9
Robert G. Albion,
The Rise of New York Port: 1815–1860
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), 19–20, 23–25, 28–35.

10
Charles McKew Parr,
The Voyages of David de Vries, Navigator and Adventurer
(New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969), 46. For the Dutch-Spanish war and Dutch trade generally, see Jonathan I. Israel,
The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).