GROUND ZERO

Jenna Orkin


GROUND ZERO
September 11, 2007 8:30 A.M.


At the corner of Fulton and Church, two dozen cops stand around, murmuring. Nearby huddles a smaller contingent of firefighters. More are undoubtedly on the A list of the actual ceremony in Zuccotti Park from which we hoi polloi are barricaded. The sky is fittingly bleak, spitting needles of rain.

Pedestrians pour out of the PATH station, a few talking loudly. A woman mimes, "Ssh."

A man with his arm around his twelve-year-old son is being interviewed for TV. He's flown in every year from San Diego, he says, to pay his respects.

Three hulks in black T-shirts reading "Investigate 911" with a picture of the towers billowing smoke, stride purposefully towards some meeting place.

In the plaza of Brown Brothers Harriman a sculpture of a giant red cube stands poised on one corner like a ballerina on pointe; a feat of engineering rather than art but these days no one cares about the difference. Across the street to the east is Chase Manhattan; to the south, HSBC; to the north, Bank of America. A block away stands the beleaguered former Deutsche Bank, - also site of a more recent tragedy - sixteen storeys shorter from its catastrophe-ridden deconstruction. We are in the heart of the beast.

The clock of Trinity Church which, for several months after September 11, 2001, was frozen at five to nine, inches towards 8:46.

At 8:43 a choir starts singing. At least that's when we in the plaza are able to catch a few high notes. Sounds like a harmonized version of the Star Spangled Banner. The distance adds to the removed, ghostly nature of this ceremony which seems designed to attenuate the memory of 9/11 and, as they are so fond of saying in booming downtown, to "move on."

South Korean TV wants to talk. I tell them they probably won't use what I have to say. They persist.

I tell them I'm here because 9/11 signalled the beginning of the end for much of America. Then I tell them, in brief, why I think so.

The reporter - who is the most respectful journalist I've ever come across, and in Lower Manhattan over the last six years, there have been many - says, "But some people want to move forward."

I am not giving him the poignant sort of soundbite he is looking for but he takes several minutes' worth of footage.

Next to a marble slab honoring that great New Yorker, Harry Helmsley, an African American guy blows a shofer, a beautiful ram's horn which, he explains, he laminated himself. It's a gesture of ecumenism since although he's Christian, he is playing a traditional Jewish instrument of mourning.

A reporter from WNYC who's been diligent about the environmental issue, also approaches for an interview in the course of which 9:03 comes and goes without apparent acknowledgment. This is what a moment of silence looks (and sounds) like from a block away.

As I leave I pass the podium where family members are reading the names of the victims ("...and my brother, firefighter....") including one whom I knew slightly from the playground when our children were small. The reading is slow and deliberate so as not to shortchange anybody. They are up to the letter D.