TEN YEARS later, visiting the World Trade Center construction site is like receiving a jolt of high-voltage current.
In the streets surrounding the security enclosure, people and vehicles seem to converge from every direction. The noise of traffic, drills, hammers, diggers and clanging steel meld in an indescribable din. The earth rumbles each time a train passes beneath.
This is Manhattan at maximum sensory overload, deafening and smelling of hot dogs, pizza, mustard, sweat, dust, exhaust, singed rubber and soldered steel. Were it not for the solemnity of Michael Arad’s monument to the 2,983 victims of 9/11 and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and the Tribute Center created by the families in a former deli outside the perimeter, you could almost forget the human cost of that day.
For two different stories co-exist here; one of heroism and loss, the other of renewal. Survival and resilience are the watchwords of the 9/11 commemorations, the essence of America’s self image. The “survivor tree” has been replanted in the memorial plaza, after recovering in a botanical garden, a lone pear among a young forest of white swamp oaks. The “survivor stairs”, by which thousands of employees escaped from the north tower, are part of the unfinished National Memorial Museum.
“Three thousand of our loved ones and family members were taken from us,” says Bill Baroni, a dual citizen of Ireland and the US and deputy director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which has overall responsibility for the World Trade Center site.
“Yet we will remember those we lost with this stunning memorial. We will rebuild even higher. One World Trade Center is higher than the Twin Towers were. That’s the message. You can attack us. We will remember with deep passion and sadness those we lost, but we will also rebuild, and we will be resilient. We’re a tough lot.”
The 16 acres spread out before the observation deck where I stand with Baroni look like a cross between an archaeological dig and a science fiction film set. Two giant grey voids, entitled “Reflecting Absence”, fill the exact outline of the original Twin Towers, surrounded by an oasis of trees where presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush will address the families next Sunday.
Construction workers in fluorescent vests, hard hats and boots – 3,500 men working 24/7 – teem over the other half of the site, to the north and east. Girders, pipes and concrete walls are layered below like lasagne. These are the foundations for the new Port Authority Trans-Hudson (Path) railroad hub – designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, who created Dublin’s Beckett bridge – and World Trade Center towers two and three, which will be built when there is sufficient demand for office space.
When an Irish-American named Austin Tobin oversaw the building of the original World Trade Center in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was vaunted as the greatest building project since the pyramids. Superlatives are a way of life in New York.
“This is certainly the biggest construction project in the US,” Baroni boasts. The waterfalls that form the pools of Arad’s monument are “the biggest man-made waterfalls in the world”. The $17 billion project is “the most complex construction project on the planet”, he continues, “because we are building four office towers, a transportation hub, a shopping centre, museum and memorial on top of each other.”
To complicate matters, the old Path station, the terminus for trains to and from New Jersey, and the number one subway line, have been kept open through construction. Engineers enclosed the subway line in a $1 billion steel box. The Port Authority says 49,000 people travel through the construction site daily, and another 15,000 pass by on the street outside.
At the northwest and southeast corners, towers one and four rise almost before one’s eyes, clad in mirror glass reflecting the clouds and sky. The elegant, twisting form of Number One World Trade Center has reached 80 floors and is adding another floor weekly. “We never finish. Next floor. Next floor,” I hear a workman mutter in the lift when his shift ends.
Number One WTC will be the tallest building in the western hemisphere. “It will rise to 1,776ft (541 metres), and from the top, from the 104th storey, you’ll be able to see the curvature of the earth,” says Baroni.
The original name, “Freedom Tower”, was dropped because it was too political, too acute a reminder of the 9/11 attacks.
The walls of the rudimentary construction lift in number one are covered with decals, bumper stickers and pin-ups in bikinis. Support America against Terrorism. Teamsters. Semper Fi. A host of local union chapters. An Irish tricolour with the letters Irl.
The 71st floor is open to the elements, with only a thin veil of netting separating one from dizzying views of the Empire State Building, New Jersey, the Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge. From this height, Manhattan is so narrow one could reach out with both arms and embrace it. This was the view they had from the Twin Towers.
On the plaza below, workmen put the last granite blocks into place, in anticipation of the first visit from families of 9/11 victims.
A section of the bronze border around the pools is reserved for “First Responders New York Fire Department”. So many Irish names . . . Hannafin, Corrigan, Keating, McGovern, Donnelly, McAvoy, Maloney, Coyle, McSweeney, Kennedy, Byrne, McShane, Ryan, O’Keeffe . . .
The museum, which will not open until September 2012, points like the prow of a ship at the diagonal between the two pools, the invisible line where Philippe Petit performed his high-wire walk between the Twin Towers on August 7th, 1974.
A photograph in Colum McCann's award-winning novel Let the Great World Spinshows a plane flying past as Petit makes his crossing; it looks like it's going to crash into the tower. "We wait for the explosion but it never occurs," McCann writes. "The plane passes, the tightrope walker gets to the end of the wire. Things don't fall apart."
Arad, the architect who designed the monument, said he had wanted to place a stone inscribed with Petit’s name beneath the place where the wire was stretched. In the simplicity of the plaza one senses, in McCann’s words, “the intrusion of time and history. The collision point of stories”.
In grey, ash-laden images of the collapsed World Trade Center, leaning high arches give an impression of cathedral fan vaulting. Two of the multistorey steel tridents that created the distinctive arches stand in the glass atrium of the unfinished museum, amid scaffolds and dust.
The escalators leading down to bedrock do not yet function. Descending the stairs, ever deeper, one reaches a cavernous, tomb-like hall enclosed on one side by the slurry wall, which oozes rusty water.
“The whole site is below the level of the Hudson River,” explains Baroni of the Port Authority. “When the towers came down, they were afraid the slurry wall would collapse. Had that happened, it would have flooded lower Manhattan and the entire New York subway system. It held.”
A new slurry wall has been built for the site, but the old one is part of the museum. It dwarfs the fire trucks and a taxi damaged on 9/11, wrapped like Christmas toys in white plastic, waiting to go on display.
At the southernmost tip of the original Twin Towers, deep in the entrails of lower Manhattan, is the place the families call “the true Ground Zero”, the last vestige of the concrete foundations of the Twin Towers – huge, dust-covered blocks with an aura of ancient ruins.
The landmark continues to haunt New York. In the tourist trinket shops around the site you can buy pre-9/11 photographs sold as postcards and fridge magnets. One night a year, its forms are replicated by two powerful shafts of light sent heavenward. This is all that remains: the outline of two voids filled with water; two rusted steel tridents; a staircase and the unearthed fundaments of the world’s most unfortunate building.
At the Tribute Center across the street from the construction site, New Yorkers grieve for the towers in a video testimonial. It was a city within the city, each floor a whole acre, they recall with affection. They’re nostalgic for the betrothal and wedding parties at the Windows on the World, the way one looked down on the clouds, like a bed of cotton . . .
But it is another wall – not the slurry wall, not the “true Ground zero”, that moves one most. The poster wall, covered with hundreds of photocopied A4 pieces of paper. “Missing”, they all say at the top. Photographs of smiling men and women, young and old, black and white, Asian and Hispanic, many in graduation or wedding garb. The physical description, what they were wearing that day, where they were last seen. The telephone number of a parent, spouse or sibling. Call if you’ve seen them.
One poster seems to acknowledge the futility of the exercise. “Missing”, it says above the face of a handsome young man. No name. No details. Just, “Please Pray”. Until now, no trace has been found of 1,123 people – nearly 41 per cent of the 2,753 who died in the World Trade Center. (The other victims were casualties of the planes that crashed into the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and six people killed in the 1993 bombing.)
For months, even years, grieving friends and relatives left these posters on the walls of lower Manhattan, the way one searches for a lost pet. They hung T-shirts with the names of the missing on the wrought iron gate at St Paul’s Chapel, around the corner from the World Trade Center.
In every war, in every massacre, it is enough to enter into the individual lives of the victims for sorrow to engulf you. Orchestral music is piped into a back room of the Tribute Center. A wilted bouquet of red roses is propped against a wall bearing the names of all 2,983 victims. Photographs and mementos line the other three walls. Tourists sit staring, stunned, boxes of tissues pre-positioned on the benches beside them.
Lee Ielpi, a co-founder of the Tribute Center, tells how the “band of dads” – eight retired firemen, including himself – returned to the smouldering ruins, day after day, searching for their sons. Jonathan Ielpi’s helmet and torn fireman’s coat are preserved in a glass case.
“I was the most fortunate of the bunch,” Ielpi says. “I’m the only one who was able to bring his son’s body home in one piece.”
Handwritten notes appear among the collage of photos. “Mom”, one starts, with a happy face drawn in the “o” of “Mom”. The borders of the white note card are filled with Xs and Os, hugs and kisses. “I am going to wash the dishes tonight . . . Your loving, devoted, caring, thoughtful, sincere, kind kid Jody.”
In the very last room, where visitors sit around a large table, writing messages for the bulletin board, a group of Far East Asians huddle, weeping. I strike up a conversation with two Spanish cops and their wives. They’re in New York for the 2011 World Police and Fire Games, and felt compelled to visit the centre, “to touch history”, says Jaime Curulla Sierra (33). He and his friend Raúl Cabrera Alonso are drafting a note to pin on the wall, with the shoulder patch of the Barcelona constabulary.
“In Catalonia, 9/11 is our national day, so everyone was at home, watching TV,” Curulla Sierra remembers. “It was lunchtime – around 3pm. In Spain we lunch late. I think nobody ate lunch that day.”
These 10 years later, Curulla Sierra says he is not angry, only sad. He feels solidarity with the victims and their families, “not because they are American, but because they are human beings. Nationality isn’t important.”
No man is an island . . . Any man’s death diminishes me.
A few days earlier, Colum McCann said he didn’t think of 9/11 as an Irish or even an American tragedy. “I think of it as belonging to everybody,” he said. “It was one of the first truly universal events. It’s when the 21st century started.”