Scenes from Ground Zero
On Friday, September 9, I went to work with my son-in-law Russ, an ironworker on the Four World Trade Center building. He has to be at work at 7:00 a.m., so we got an early start with a subway car full of other bleary eyed commuters from the Beverly Road station in Brooklyn. With a quick change at DeKalb Street it took 20 minutes to reach lower Manhattan. At Rector Street we climbed up to the Financial District and made our way to the Ground Zero construction site, which was already buzzing with the sounds drilling, dump trucks and noise of external lifts sliding up the sides of what would become a 72-story building. Ground Zero is still mostly a gaping hole with four hundred newly planted trees surrounding the Sept. 11 Museum and Memorial with the Freedom Tower (One WTC) and Seven WTC on the periphery. (See a “spherical” view of Ground Zero at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904716604576546571601601298.html)
Russ joined a stream of other construction workers making their way through security checkpoints into the site. As I turned a corner near one entrance, I discovered a small shrine on the sidewalk comprising ID patches from fire and police departments all over the world. There was also a lit candle and a single red rose; nearby a bronze plaque commemorated the 343 firefighters who had died there and a bronze mural depicting the burning twin towers and forlorn firefighters battling the blaze—“May we never forget.” I spent the next two hours walking around the perimeter of the site and then crossed the West Side Highway on an overpass that led to the World Financial District and even more dramatic vistas of the memorial site. It was a route that our daughter Christina took to her job at American Express headquarters where she worked in 2001. Fortunately on September 11th she was scheduled to go into work a little later than usual and was safe at home when the towers were struck.
