A DAY IN NEW YORK CITY UNLIKE ANY OTHER

By Mark del Costello

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This was read on-air by Big Daddy Graham and Angelo Cataldi on WIP 610 radio in Philadelphia and published in the Times of London and the Tampa Tribune.

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I was raised in Burlington New Jersey, but I grew up in New York City. I lived there during some very good times, some very bad times and some very strange times. The Bicentennial, John Lennon’s Assassination, the Summer of Sam, The Blackout, the Transit strike, Studio 54, CBGBs and the daily life that New Yorkers consider normal but everyone else in the world considers bizarre.

Tuesday 9.11 was a day that transcended all the days in New York that I have ever lived. Disbelief, horror, sadness, bravery, courage and unimaginable loss. I was scheduled for a video shoot at CBGBs in Lower Manhattan that morning. Strange circumstances caused the shoot to be cancelled. Stranger circumstances caused the cancellation of life on that morning.

On 9.11 thinking that I was to interview Hilly Kristal at his famous club, CBGB on the lower East side of Manhattan, I headed North on the New Jersey turnpike towards New York City. Sometime a little after 10am traffic was backed up and stopped. Like everyone else I stopped and looked on in confusion at what was happening across the river in lower Manhattan.  I took a few photographs with the few frames of film left in my camera and having no alternative I managed to cross the turnpike and head back home. 

At home after watching the endless repeats of the nightmarish video images I realized that I couldn’t sit and watch it all on television. I had to go to the City where I grew up. Not to see it but to feel it. I had to feel what my fellow New Yorkers felt.

It was a day like no other I have experienced in New York.  It was a day of sadness, sorrow, tears, smiles, resilience, determination, gratitude, loss, prayer, reflection and virtually every other emotion except anger.

The train ride was free. Penn Station seemed not unlike Penn Station on another day… a “normal day”. If you are a New Yorker you walk three times faster than non New Yorkers. Non New Yorkers saunter, gawk and get hit on by panhandlers. But, on 7^th Avenue everyone’s pace slowed. The air was filled with a smell and a haze like the smoke of a huge cremation. Everyone’s lungs hesitated to ingest the air. They looked south and saw in disbelief the empty sky where hours earlier the two tall icons of Manhattan once haughtily stood. There was tentativeness in everyone’s gait. Then everyone moved to his or her destinations at what seemed a slower, more respectful but resolute pace. 

New York, especially Manhattan, is a series of small distinct neighborhoods. Below Penn Station is Chelsea, then Greenwich Village. In the Village at 14^th street every avenue was barricaded and the barricades manned by a few police who politely checked Ids. If you lived or worked below 14^th Street you could pass.  Below the Village at Houston Street there were more barricades preventing non-emergency personnel from traveling down the maze of small Dutch built streets to City Hall, the Financial Center and the Trade Center. But, a few like me managed to bypass the barricades on the East side.

Walking down East Broadway toward City Hall the dust and smoke in the air thickened. East Broadway is a main artery leading to the heart of the City, which had been so mortally wounded. Smoke, soot, dust and debris filled the air burning eyes, coating clothes and choking the lungs. The City’s wound was still bleeding. Men and vehicles were moving down the abandoned streets quickly with purpose and determination to stem it. Another huge building was afire and collapsed. As one rescue worker said, “what a show!” It was a show. A tragedy on the grandest scale. Real death and real destruction on a scale that this country hasn’t witnessed since the burning of Atlanta and Chicago, the earthquakes of San Francisco and Los Angeles, the riots in Newark, Detroit and Los Angeles and the flood of Johnstown.

The entire evening of 9.11 I walked around the Village, SoHo, Little Italy and Chinatown amongst the stunned masses. This was no madding crowd. Anger wasn’t present. Disbelief alternated with a resolute determination this horror. America may not have experienced worse but this wasn’t defeat it was a clarion call to the spirit with which Americans believe they’ve been endowed since the Revolution. I had gotten close to ground zero. The photo ops were there. But, I couldn’t take a photograph of a dying person, the grisly remains or the extraordinary men and women who were coming and going from the front line of the battle. For the first time in my life I couldn’t look through the lens and press the button.

Thousands of persons were dead and dying. The images of the guy diving headfirst and the man and woman holding hands falling to their deaths were in my eyes. Those photographs had already been taken. Thankfully I didn’t have to take them. At that time and that place I had no purpose. I was a tourist. I left and returned uptown to Houston Street. 

 All through that night and into the next morning from the East Side of Houston to the West Side the streets in every direction were vacant of civilian cars and trucks allowing the free flow of traffic for convoys of emergency vehicles, ambulances, fire trucks and dump trucks loaded with rubble. By the morning of the 12^th vehicles bearing the license plates of states not only of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania filled the streets but also those from Florida, Ohio, the Carolinas and every state within a 24 hour drive to the City.

At dawn pedestrians started to fill the streets – men carrying briefcases, women pushing baby carriages, homeless people and millionaires watched as truck after truck came and went to and from the Lower West Side. When they realized the trucks now arriving were from Florida spontaneous and joyous cheers like those greeting the triumphs of Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Willy Mays and Mickey Mantle erupted.

Every vehicle traveling North from the Trade Center carrying exhausted, dust covered men and women who were met with respectful and grateful applause. The vehicles passed all day and evening and the outpouring of gratitude never subsided.

In the times of crisis New Yorkers are the most compassionate and caring people on the planet. The competitiveness and aggressiveness that the City demands of its residents disappears and is replaced by a resolute attitude of survival and a determination to overcome everything and anything. On these days there is only one agenda among 12 million people.

One day after the horror children played with masks over their mouths and noses in the playgrounds of the West village. Guys played basketball and handball on the courts near Washington Square. The cues and balls in Soho Billiards cracked. These were small pockets of life as New Yorkers remembered it. In the secluded park at Bowery and Houston a few feet from CBGBs people sat and spoke in hushed tones. It was a small pocket of serenity where the small glories of nature were a reminder that life goes on. The very air in this park was devoid of the smoke and ash that saturated the air around it.

The face of every New Yorker bore looks of concern, disbelief and hope. The only negative emotion present was frustration. Everyone wanted to do something. But, all they could do was thank the cops, firemen and other men and women covered in dust.

 As dusk set in on the 12^th the restaurants opened. From Houston to 14^th half of the restaurants were open for business. And all of them were at least half filled. A movie theater on 14^th street offered free admission. CBGBs offered no music, but the bar was open and they guaranteed that on the 13th some local bands would play – with or without the WTC.

The streets East of NYU were filled with students off from classes wearing masks to filter the smoke filled air. They were walking North and West towards Washington Square. The streetlights in the Square were off but it was alight with the brilliance of thousands of small candles held by thousands of people gathered around the reflecting pool. A young man and woman held up an American flag and in the candlelight everyone sang. They sang Amazing Grace with sorrow. They sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic with resolve. They sang America and the National Anthem with pride. And they sang Stand By Me and Lean on Me with hope.

Walking North to Great Jones Street a firehouse was open and six firemen who one day before where fighting fires in the bowels of hell stood in the doorway in clothes freshly washed. The people walking by upon seeing them were automatically drawn towards them. Not knowing what to say all that could be said was “thank you, thank you, thank you”. Maybe for the first time in a day and a half these New York’s bravest showed emotion. Words were lost. They just nodded in response.

 A few blocks West at 6^th Avenue and 10^th another firehouse stood with its doors closed, it’s bravest absent. The members of New York’s Station 20 were lying with those they had hoped to save under the rubble of the Towers. Flowers were laid. Candles were lit. Tears were shed and prayers were said for the members of Station 20. Brave New Yorkers that no one standing in front of their station house knew. But, for whom everyone there felt a profound loss. For whom everyone there mourned.

On the televisions in stores, restaurants and windows New Yorkers spoke to other New Yorkers pleading for information on missing relatives and friends. The number of those missing will grow to number unfathomable by any living American. While they are New Yorkers they are first and foremost Americans. New York City was targeted, but America was the target. New York is America’s greatest City and it has now suffered America’s greatest loss.

On the television and radio; in the newspapers and magazines revenge and vengeance are broadcast and printed in dramatic words and statements. America feels a need to bring death and destruction to those responsible for the death and destruction visited upon New York City. In New York the only words spoken by New Yorkers are words of prayer, praise, concern and hope. Amidst all of the death and destruction today New Yorkers were concerned only with life.

Mark del Costello

September 12, 2001

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