Ten Years Later

Apparently time flies not only when you're having fun and when you're having rum, but also when you're thinking back to That Day. Can it really be ten years? I'm afraid it can because I have the proof of it - a teenager got in my cab recently, somehow the subject of 9/11 came up, and he said, "Well, I was only six years old then so I don't really remember it."

Oh my God. And I thought I was getting old when some kid said he didn't know that Paul McCartney was once in the Beatles.

Well, time marches on, but if anyone ever doubted that 9/11 was the seminal event of our lifetimes, just notice the extent to which it is not being forgotten. There are elements about the tragedy that fiercely demand that we hold onto it, that we do not let it go, that we sift out from the figurative ruins what the lessons of the event have become and use those lessons to improve conditions however we can.

On an emotional level, I know it is embedded in my psyche. I still get choked up in the middle of a sentence when a tourist asks me where I was on that day. I can still privately break out in tears when certain memories are evoked. Not that I dwell on it or feel stuck in it. But it's always there.

On an intellectual level, I take this with me, as grim as it is - that there exist, and I believe have always existed, certain beings on this planet who will use whatever pretext they can get their hands on to do harm to other people. It's not good enough to just come out and say, "What really turns me on is maiming and killing other people". You've got to have a cause if you want to do it in a really big way. Hitler and those who avidly followed him were stellar examples, as are the current crop.

So what can we do? For me, the lessons of 9/11 are threefold. First, you've got to find a cause of your own. Find an activity that is truly beneficial to mankind and do what you can to contribute to it. Second, speak out. Do not be afraid to make your opinions known. Write letters to the editor. Vote. Start a blog. Thoughts, when expressed, are like ripples in a pond. Never underestimate the effects of your ripples. And third...

On the fifth anniversary of 9/11 I visited Ground Zero late at night to pay my respects. Each year a certain area on Church Street was set aside for expressions of sympathy and support. I was drawn to one in particular, a large board with about fifty different messages on it which had been created by elementary school students in California. One of these messages was profound in its simplicity and affected me deeply.

"Be nice to people," was all it said.

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To read other posts I've written about 9/11, please click on the labels below.

The World Trade Center: A Remembrance

I will have more to say about the taxi strike, but since yesterday was the 6th anniversary of 9/11 I thought it would be appropriate to observe that occasion before delving again into the politics of the taxi industry. So here goes...

It has become an annual event for me, deep in the night of Sept. 11th, to stop driving my cab for awhile and take a reverential break down at Ground Zero. I did so last night.

The area looks different than it did a year ago, and this is a good thing. Construction has finally begun for the new buildings. Numerous cranes are down in "the pit" and the streets all around the place are torn up to make way for new pipelines and God knows what. The rebuilding process is underway at last.

Due to the nature of the current construction, there's not as much space available at Ground Zero itself as there has been in the past for people to display pictures of loved ones lost in the tragedy. In fact, there were not nearly as many mementos in place as there were last year, probably because the commemoration ceremonies took place a couple of blocks south of Ground Zero at Liberty Street this year. But the ones that were there stirred deep emotions in me.

I have found that I cannot let go of 9/11. I cannot dismiss it mentally as something that just happened. The awful significance of the event is too disturbing. And I cannot forget the stories I have heard, and continue to hear, from many passengers in my cab. (To read some of them, click here.)

Also, I miss the towers themselves. I still see them in my mind whenever I drive past Ground Zero. When I get a fare to the nearby residential complex called Battery Park City I still sometimes think of heading over to the North Tower where the Windows of the World restaurant used to be to look for my next ride. I picture the driveway where I used to wait for people who had just dined up in the clouds and I remember how I never tired of stepping out of my cab and just looking up and marveling at the sheer size of the structures.

Perhaps when the new World Trade Center is built I will begin to not care so much that the old one is gone. But perhaps not. Perhaps it's more likely that anyone who had ever been to the Twin Towers will have a permanent bond to the memory of the place.

And having said that, I'd like to share with you some unadulterated nostalgia regarding the World Trade Center, if you will indulge me. It's something that happened in the spring of 1973...

I lived in those days in a dive called the Hadson Hotel on W. 31st Street. It was a less than charming place with shared bathrooms, but for $70 a month it served its purpose, which was to live cheaply, if not well. But I did have a view of Herald Square from my window, plus I knew I would never starve - there were plenty of cockroaches available. So I had no complaints.

One lovely Saturday afternoon in May my friend Judy Huelsman and I decided to take a bike ride from the Hadson down into lower Manhattan along the Hudson River. It was a great day for a ride. Not only was the weather perfect on that particular day, but the city was all but empty. There's nothing like a deserted Manhattan to give the people who didn't leave a sense of entitlement. It's as if the empty buildings belong to you. As it turned out, that would be an understatement for us that afternoon.

We pedaled along enjoying the air and the sights until, about forty minutes into our journey, we came to the area of the sparkling, new World Trade Center on the south side of Vesey Street. This was a brand new and utterly magnificent sight to us, since we lived and worked uptown and never got to the lower end of the island. So we were taking it in with the same awe that tourists would have who were seeing it for the very first time, our jaws dropping, so to speak.

At that time the North Tower had been completed and was partially occupied, but the interior of the South Tower was still under construction and was unoccupied. So since the area was partially in operation, it wasn't closed off to the public as a construction sight normally would be. Thus we were able to park our bikes and wander around without anyone kicking us out. Not that anyone was around who would kick us out. The place was deserted.

We walked along and found ourselves approaching the South Tower. We pulled on the handle of one of the doors. To our surprise, the door opened! We entered the building. We walked around the unfinished lobby. We walked up and down a flight of stairs. After a minute or two we realized that there was no one else around. Apparently we had the entire South Tower all to ourselves!

We reacted like children who had gained control of an amusement park, calling out to each other from one end of the massive lobby to the other and fooling around. And then we found the elevators. We pushed the button. The door opened! We entered and pushed 33. The door closed and... up we went! The elevators were working! What would we see when we got up there? We had no idea.

The door opened and we looked out at what at that time was the 33rd floor of the South Tower. It was bare from one side of the building to the other. The interior walls had not yet been constructed, so we could walk around the entirety of the floor without obstructions. Which we did. But, of course, the coolest thing was simply to look out the windows. Since we were able to move around from one side of the tower to the other, we could view the skyline, the harbor, and the Statue of Liberty - all of New York City - from every conceivable angle.

And when we decided we'd had enough of the 33rd floor, we went back to the elevator and went higher up to get an even better view. And that's how we spent the next hour - riding the elevators (quite a thrill by itself, as the elevators in the WTC had enormous thrust) and getting off and on at whichever floors we desired. And then finally, having other things that needed to be done that day, we rode back down to the lobby, got back on our bikes, and pedaled away.

And we never saw a soul.

For one afternoon in May of 1973, my friend and I had one of the Twin Towers all to ourselves.

It was one of the best days of my life.

And perhaps clicking here for Pictures From A Taxi will make this one of the best days of your life... well, maybe that's a bit of an overstatement...

Pictures From Ground Zero, 9/11/06

Each year on the night of September 11th the "ghosts" of the Twin Towers appear at Ground Zero as twin columns of laser lights that shine upward into the sky as far as the eye can see. It's a starkly beautiful remembrance of the buildings themselves and of the events that occurred there. Driving my taxi around the city that night, I took some shots of the lights from various vantage points and wound up stopping at Ground Zero at 3 AM to pay my respects.

From 5th Avenue as it enters Greenwich Village.

An artsy kind of shot taken from the 59th Street Bridge.





The source of the lights turned out to be from the roof of a parking lot above the entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

Ground Zero is four blocks in length. The gargantuan pit can be viewed from behind a fence on the Church Street side.

The one person I knew who perished that day was Debbie Paris, the wife of my old friend Jim Marrash. I remember Debbie as a caring and lovely person.

One of the items displayed on the fence surrounding Ground Zero was this collection of pictures and messages from children in an elementary school in California. It contained this bit of advice...

9/11 Stories In My Cab

I am often asked by passengers where I was on 9/11. I tell them I have two answers to that question and they are both truthful: a) I was at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11th, and b) I was home asleep on Sept. 11th.

I drove a night shift on Sept. 10th, 200l. The shift started at 5 PM and ended at 5 AM. At 2 AM during that shift, then Sept. 11th, I picked a woman up in Greenwich Village and drove her to the PATH train entrance of the World Trade Center on Vesey Street. The PATH train is an all-night subway that runs to New Jersey. It was just a routine ride. I drove for another three hours that night and went home. I live alone and didn't know about the attacks until my daughter came over and informed me of it at around 3 PM. I was actually getting ready to go to work, having no knowledge of what the rest of the world already knew.

And yet, oddly enough, I can say that technically I was there that day. The idea that eight hours after dropping off that fare at the WTC the towers would cease to exist still strikes me today as unfathomable. Anyone who ever stood at the foot of one of those buildings and looked up would fully understand that. It just couldn't have happened.

The weeks that followed 9/11 were, of course, a special time in New York City. I drove a cab relentlessly during those weeks, barely taking a day off, feeling a sense of obligation to carry on. It was a time more than any other time when people needed to share what they were going through. I would just ask "How are you doing?" when anyone got in my taxi. What came back more often than not was a flood of communication and emotion.

One of the aspects of the tragedy that still amazes me is how many people it involved directly. Momentous events do not always involve many people. The JFK assassination comes to mind. But the events of 9/11 entangled everyone who lived in New York City. Thus, everyone has a story. I heard many of those stories in the months that followed. Some of them have stayed with me.

There was a young man who told me how he was climbing up the stairs from his subway station just beneath the WTC and, having no idea that a plane had just crashed into one of the towers, was confronted with a scene of chaos instead of the usual sights on the street that he was so used to seeing as he reached street level. He likened it to opening a familiar door and suddenly finding yourself in Dante's Inferno.

There was a woman from a church group who told me they were caring for several children from a daycare center near the WTC whose parents had never come to take them home.

There was a young woman who worked on the 10th floor of the first building to be hit who told me that the initial attempt of the people on her floor to evacuate had been thwarted because there was a fire in the part of the lobby where the staircase was located. Burning jet fuel had dropped down the elevator shafts and was burning in the lobby. Everyone had to go back up the stairs to their offices. Not knowing what to do, she crouched under her desk and prayed, basically paralyzed with fear. Eventually a second attempt to leave the building was successful, as by that time the firemen had arrived and had put out the fire in the lobby. But as she filed out of the building with the others, they were ordered to walk forward and not look back. Bodies of people who were jumping from the top floors were landing in the plaza and the police were trying to spare the people who were leaving the horror of seeing this.

There was a fireman who told me how he had barely escaped being killed by the debris of the collapsing first tower by taking refuge under a fire truck. He commented that many people have said that the events seemed like scenes from a Godzilla movie but he thought it was more like scenes from SAVING PRIVATE RYAN.

And there was a ride with two other firemen who told me, as we passed a firehouse on Amsterdam Avenue at Sixty-Sixth Street, that every fireman from that station had died.

Most of the stories I heard were told to me within a year of 9/11. It took about that much time for most people to have said all they had to say to whomever needed to hear it and for individual lives to be moving forward again. But the eeriest story I have yet heard was actually told to me just a few months ago.

I picked up a 30ish man on 57th Street and 3rd Avenue at around midnight one night last April. He put some light luggage in the trunk and we started to drive to his destination at West End Avenue and 83rd Street. He told me he'd just been dropped off there on 57th Street by the driver of an airport shuttle bus and was pissed off at the driver because he wouldn't take him all the way home. He was a flight attendant for American Airlines who had just completed a long day's work and wanted to get home without a hassle. Now he had to pay for a cab ride.

I've always thought that his job was intriguing and adventurous, so I found myself asking him the same question that is often asked of me: "What was the wildest thing that's ever happened to you?" Here's what he told me.

He said he used to be based in Boston and that Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles was a regular run for him. Flight 11 was the plane that flew into the north tower of the WTC. Had it not been for his own good fortune he could easily have been scheduled to work that flight. But he wasn't penciled in that day. The crew who perished were all friends of his.

He said that he did work that flight on Sept. 3rd and was scheduled to work it again on Sept. 13th and Sept. 17th. On the Sept. 3rd flight one of the passengers, he said, was Mohammed Atta, the leader of the hijackers. This was confirmed by flight records, but my passenger didn't need to have his memory tweaked when he was interviewed by the FBI. He remembered him.

He said that Atta was traveling alone and was noticed and talked about by all the attendants during the flight due to oddities in his behavior. He would not make eye contact with anyone. He spoke to no one. He wanted no food, drink, or anything from any of the attendants for the entire six hour flight. In short, he stood out. He did not seem at all like a normal passenger.

I found the story encouraging in a way. It bears out what a veteran prosecutor in NYC once told me about the possibility of crime in a taxi cab: "the one you think it is, it is". For all their evil brilliance, the hijackers were still not clever enough not to be noticed by the people who work the planes day in and day out.

I've always remembered that advice.