What Was it Like Being In New York?

Over the last five months, I’ve had a lot of people ask me about September 11th. I used to say that my experience in New York City was a lot like most people’s across the country. I was glued to the television, finding out all my information from Peter Jennings and CNN. I didn’t see the crashes and didn’t even know about them until an hour later.

But, truthfully, to say that my experience of that fateful day and the many weeks that followed was like the experiences of people not in New York City just isn’t true.

Having lived in New York for three years, I had amassed a group of friends who I needed to check on. Some were students, some were people I worked with, some were people I just knew. I was lucky that I didn’t know anyone who was lost in the WTC attacks. But, I have friends who lost people. And I know too many people who were supposed to be there that day, or had been there the day before.

I could see the smoke from my building. I tried to give blood, but all the blood banks were overcrowded. I rounded up all the extra sweaters and blankets in my room and donated them as soon as I could.

But mostly, we sat around, despondently watching the television which provided no respite. Image after image of destruction and death rolled across the screen. And the smell lingered in the air for weeks: faintly five miles north of Ground Zero where I lived, heavily in the area nearer to the site which I frequented. And every night around midnight, a parade of relief equipment would caravan down Broadway below my window. For the first week, I would look out and watch the trucks and cranes drive by. But, at some point I didn’t or couldn’t look anymore.

I never went to Ground Zero. There seemed something wrong about making it into a tourist attraction or a spectacle. I didn’t want to be one of the people staring at the wreckage where so many had lost their lives. After a while, I could barely handle watching the news or seeing
the fliers plastered on building walls and lamp posts, the color photocopies of people smiling, real people who might never have been found.

The people who died were real, even if I hadn’t known them. I read their profiles in the New York Times for many days until it became too much. And I respect the fact that they lived and breathed and ate and slept and laughed and screwed and yelled and cried just like I do. And I recognize that they each died a more terrible death than anyone deserves. So, for that reason, I never went to Ground Zero. I refused to make real people’s deaths into an attraction.