I remember being irked in 2006 when a silver-screen drama called “United 93” came out, followed soon by Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center.”
“Why are we making Hollywood movies about this already?” I thought, with annoyance. “Put a cork in it, Oliver Stone.”
“I’m still in the Don’t-Want-to-Talk-About-It phase,” I would say when friends sitting around on a couch many years later inevitably started offering personal accounts of what they were doing on the day (as Americans have done for Pearl Harbor or the death of John F. Kennedy). I still don’t want to talk about it.
New Yorkers have eight million stories to tell about Sept. 11, and I’ve always strongly felt I should shut up on that score. It strikes me as unseemly to pipe up with my own partly story: Who cares? I wasn’t directly impacted, no one I knew as more than a passing acquaintance died, I wasn’t harmed, and I should shut up.
But it’s also true that as a then-New Yorker I was a part of a spontaneous and unsung public response to the civic emergency, and that this response has not been described in literature (at least none that I have seen, although I am clearly at a disadvantage there because, as I’m saying, I’m still in the Don’t-Want-to-Read-About-It phase). The way this response sprang up was in some ways mysterious — almost mystical, to me — and this September morning, walking into town on a blue-sky Tumbleweed Tuesday to get a coffee, I’ve decided that this phenomenon I witnessed should be recorded somewhere. So here, on the 25th anniversary, I’m putting it down in writing. And I’m doing so with apologies to those who lost people they loved.
Because this needs to be told chronologically, l feel I must start with the mundane part, the blah-blah recounting all Americans of a certain age engage in. On the morning of Sept. 11, I was a senior editor in the features department at Vogue magazine. I lived in a huge floor-through on Smith Street in Brooklyn, across the East River, about a mile and a half from the Twin Towers as the crow flies. I was lying in bed listening to WNYC radio, which had its station headquarters in the Municipal Building, a few blocks from the World Trade Center. The radio presenter, Mark Hilan, broke into the broadcast: “There has been an explosion,” he said.
He brought a colleague onto the microphone who had witnessed an airplane flying into the first tower. The colleague used the phrase “an airliner,” but it took my mind several minutes to understand. I kept imagining an accident with a small private plane, like a Cessna; at that time, 2001, I was learning to fly Cessnas here at East Hampton airport on the weekends. I got out of bed and turned on the television in my living room to see images of what was happening. At the window, I could see the pillar of smoke rising.
I spoke to my mom by phone; she was with colleagues from The Star, who had walked up to watch CNN on the TV in her bedroom on Edwards Lane. When the second plane crashed into the second tower, we knew that this was an event of great magnitude. I actually fell to my knees.
I’d read “The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis” in The New Yorker a few years before, a feature story that described what would happen if the Citicorp Building fell over: That magazine story described a calamity that would crush half of Lower Manhattan. This is partly why, in that moment on Sept. 11, I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea that the titanically large Twin Towers could disintegrate and collapse vertically. From our perspective in Brooklyn, we imagined that many, many blocks of Manhattan must have been crushed by the towers falling as you’d knock down a tower of blocks. (Instead, obviously, the buildings came straight down and mainly collapsed into dust. I still don’t understand the physics of it.)
I went up onto the roof of the building on Smith Street and there was a teenage boy up there, looking across the East River, a neighbor from Puerto Rico. He and I talked briefly and mutually decided we needed to do something. I said there was a hospital in Brooklyn Heights, and that we should run there to try to give blood. We imagined thousands and thousands of survivors. We ran out into Smith Street and walk-jogged about 20 blocks to the hospital on Amity. As we got closer, we joined a flood tide of strangers who were doing the same thing. People were rushing from all directions.
When we got to the hospital, we were told blood was not needed. They had not received any survivors. The hospital staff told us all to go to the Brooklyn Civic Center at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, and we ran there; they also didn’t need blood and told us to wait or go home. Now we were wandering, wondering how to help. I went back to the corner of Clinton and Amity Street and spent a few hours on that warm morning redirecting the flow of citizens who were still running toward the hospital on Amity, like a volunteer traffic cop, telling them they were asked to respond to the Civic Center instead. Silver ash fell from the clear blue sky, like snowflakes, all that day. Later that evening, as I was going back to my apartment, I saw fire trucks from the volunteer department of Shelter Island (or it may have been Hampton Bays, I saw both departments at some point) moving west on Smith Street.
The next day, Sept. 12, I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge and found myself embroiled in a spontaneous civilian response that sprang up from the dust. I was on foot; there was no car traffic allowed into Manhattan. I sat in Father Demo Square at Sixth Avenue in the Village, in the heavy silver dust, among other bewildered citizens. I’m not sure how I became aware that the basement of Our Lady of Pompeii, a Catholic church across Carmine Street, was being used by volunteers who were doing . . . something . . . but I noticed some young people coming and going from a basement entranceway. They turned out to be the staff of Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral campaign, who rented an office upstairs. Some of them were making sandwiches. The church was about 20 blocks north of Ground Zero, and they were preparing food for the first responders.
There was an apron on one of the tables in the basement, and I put it on and began making sandwiches with bread and mayonnaise. And because I was the one wearing the apron, I guess, the other random strangers who filtered in seeking some way to help — parents with a small boy, assorted hipsters, then a monk or friar in a brown cassock who watched me out of the corner of his eye the entire time — assumed I must be in charge. The random assortment of volunteers that assembled spontaneously in the basement of Our Lady of Pompeii, in the collapse of order and official forms of authority, turned to me as the authority in charge because I was wearing an apron. (Remember that this was only Sept. 12, and all of New York was shouting, “Where is George Bush?” The president was still in a bunker somewhere and no one knew what the hell was happening.) Again, it’s unseemly to say so, but I have something of a knack for logistics, and I became, somehow, the organizer of an impromptu volunteer operation from the basement of Our Lady of Pompei, sending bagged meals and personal-care items like tissues or deodorant down to the Pile. People would wander in, wanting to do something, and I’d have them call six friends who lived within walking distance and get them to bring us 200 brown paper bags, or six pounds of sliced ham, or 100 pocket-size packs of Kleenex, or whatever the current need was. I remember Tom Shone and Chris Trela bringing cold cuts and handing them over with quizzical expressions.
It became an assembly line, and alongside the assembly line a delivery network sprang up of professional van drivers who knew how to maneuver the streets of Lower Manhattan. There was one guy in particular — I wish I could remember his name — who, like me, mysteriously emerged as the person in charge of the delivery fleet, the dispatcher. He had a white van. They became known to the authorities and were granted permission to drive below the cordon that had blocked off the neighborhood from civilian traffic. They went down below Canal and handed them out through the side doors of the vans.
For at least 10 years after this, I held onto my old Motorola flip phone, because it had the numbers of these comrades: One contact might be “Antonio Pompeii” or “Rodrigo Pompeii.” We never knew one another’s last names.
I ran the basement kitchen for . . . I’m not sure how long. It must have been at least a couple weeks, because at one point I was invited to go uptown and sit at a table for a meeting between FEMA, the Red Cross, and the various food-delivery volunteer groups that had sprung up out of the earth, from nothing. Some of Manhattan’s most famous chefs, who were bringing magnificent meals and baked goods to the responders on the Pile, were at the table, though I couldn’t tell you with confidence if it was Bouley or Boulud, or who it was. I was the tiniest mouse, doing the tiniest part. I can remember what the woman representing FEMA looked like, in her black suit, wearing a look of frustration, and how astounded I was that the Red Cross’s rescue tents were serving M.R.E.s — military “meals ready to eat” — to no one, miles from the scene, by the Hudson River at Chelsea Piers and in far distant Shea Stadium in Queens. It was a lesson in how slowly and inefficiently the grand army moves, in contrast with bands of guerillas.
After some time, a few weeks, I guess, a representative from the Bloomberg mayoral campaign came downstairs into the basement and told me it was time to shut the operation down. The church needed the space back. I took off my apron and went home.
Twenty-five years have passed. I lost my old comrades’ phone numbers a decade ago (not that I ever did call them again). For a long time, the only record I had of the strangers with whom I did something in the basement of Our Lady of Pompeii was a poem I found years later on the internet, which described the scene, and describes me, a nameless New Yorker, in my apron and designer sunglasses. The poem was written by one of the men who came in and made sandwiches with us, but this morning, going to the place where I’d bookmarked it on my laptop, the poem has disappeared into the ether, too.