EDITOR’S NOTE: Herald sports columnist Larry Henry visited the area surrounding the World Trade Center last Sunday while in New York covering the Mariners.
NEW YORK — Small handprints cover a red, white and blue plastic sheet on a wrought-iron fence near where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood. These are high-fives from Hershey Elementary School, and they come from Luke and Matt and Ben and hundreds of other kids.
Overhead, a jet makes its way slowly and soundlessly across the sky, and you watch it until it disappears from sight.
In the distance, dust rises where tall buildings once graced the landscape.
On a deserted storefront hang photos of hundreds of people. "Remember these faces," a message reads. "They belong to the bravest. They are the members of the fire department who charged toward the calamity at the World Trade Center and didn’t make it."
In another window are letters from schoolchildren.
"Dear all hard workers," one begins. "Hope you know you are very helpful to the world … plus you are going to be a hero." It is from Pearl. "P.S. — God loves you. I’ll pray for you."
A police barricade is festooned with buckets of flowers. Someone has placed a small teddy bear there with these words: "Galatians 6:2. Bear ye one another’s burdens and so fulfill the love of Christ. John G. is bearing your burden and sent you this bear."
Street merchants have set up everywhere, selling red, white and blue ribbons, miniature American flags, FDNY caps, NYPD caps and photos of the World Trade Center as New Yorkers once knew it. At one stand, a T-shirt reads "America Most Wanted. Dead ‘n’ Alive." There is a picture of Osama bin Laden.
Many businesses in the area are closed. Dust cakes the windows. The buildings look like something on the back lot of a movie studio that hasn’t been used for a long time.
At the corner of Ann Street and Broadway, a picture of Josh Vitale hangs from a police barricade. He is a good-looking young man. He was born Jan. 30, 1973 and died Sept. 11, 2001. "Lost to us forever in this senseless tragedy," a notice reads.
The Hage family of Toledo, Ohio — Emily and Julia — sent a thank-you note to the New York firefighters. "You are awesome!" Only now, the Hage family message is skittering along the sidewalk. A man stops to pick it up, reads it and reattaches it to a barricade.
Under a 24-hour banking sign, a man of indeterminate age — he could be 50, he could be 70 — plays a violin as hundreds of people pass by. Many stop for a few minutes to read letters, poems and thoughts that have been posted on the front of the bank. "If you don’t like America, you are free to leave. We will help you pack," reads one. The violinist — dressed in red and blue — plays "Amazing Grace" and tears well up in your eyes because it is that kind of song and this is that kind of place.
The sidewalks are jammed, with not much room to maneuver, but on this warm day in late October there is no pushing or shoving or swearing. People are mannerly and reverential, as if they have come to a funeral home to observe the deceased, only there is no deceased to observe.
Down the street, looking west, you can see 5 World Trade Center, now a blackened shell of a building. People stand quietly and stare and wonder "Was it as horrible as it looks?"
Farther down the street, a fireman on an overhead ladder sprays water on smoking rubble. You can’t see much from here, but this is as close to ground zero as you’re going to get. A guess is maybe four blocks away.
Then it hits you. All that space. All that emptiness. All that nothingness.
That is what calls up in your mind the planes, the impact, the flames, the horror of buildings crumbling, the clouds of dust overtaking fleeing masses.
The dust won’t go away. It rises from down there where thousands perished. Street cleaners come by periodically to wash down Broadway. High up, perhaps 40 stories, men on a scaffold power-wash the side of an office building in what seems like a lost cause.
From down there, where they are still searching for bodies, six emergency service workers come trudging up the street. Five of them wear hard hats. The sixth has his head wrapped in a bandana of the American flag. They are grim-faced men who seem oblivious to the hundreds watching them, as if they have seen something they can’t shake. Maybe they have. Several bodies of firefighters were found this day.
A professional baseball player, Brett Tomko, in town for the playoffs, walks unrecognized in the crowds. The eyes tell you that he can’t believe what he is seeing. Or hearing. "It’s eerie," he says. "Real quiet. This is New York. You expect noise and sirens."
And weird. You expect weird.
And you get it. A woman made up to look like the Statue of Liberty stands in the middle of a sidewalk. That’s not unusual. What is unusual is her color. She is dyed green, from head to foot. She says she is a former art teacher from Iowa and has been making her living as Lady Liberty since 1986. She says she has made a good living, and now she is raising money that will go to the disaster relief fund. She says she has raised more than $11,000.
You make your way slowly down a slight incline and now you are on the south side of the site. And as you look north, you can see the skeletal remains of the south tower, not much there, not much to see, not much …
Someone raises a camera and a National Guardsman shouts, "No pictures. This is a crime scene."
You are ordered to keep moving, and so you do.
You come upon long, steel girders alongside a street, girders that have been taken from the crime scene. The steel has been bent and twisted by the fires that burned from the hell that was unleashed from the sky that day.
Passersby walk over and do strange things. They touch the steel. They tap it with their knuckles. They run their hands over it.
Then they start to walk away, stop, turn around, look back at what they have seen. Silently, they turn and walk up the street.
There are four of you in the group, and you catch a cab, and not much is said on the ride back to the hotel.
You go to the Carnegie Deli for lunch. You came here a year ago, and there was much hustle and bustle and the waiters were all business.
Now they seat you and give you menus and seem friendlier. You aren’t there five minutes when, suddenly, the place quiets and you look up and in the middle of the room, the serving people have gathered and they begin to sing. And they are singing "God Bless America," and they are singing it loud and proud.
And you squinch your lips together real tight because if you don’t, you are going to burst out crying.
It has been that kind of day.
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