Absences

Creative reflections on New York City after the World Trade Center

The skyline still beautiful at night,

Though haunted by the absence of the Towers, by the
thousands of souls who perished so unexpectedly, so evilly.
New York seems less like home, somehow, since that morning.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look in that direction
without feeling a stab of sadness.

from “Skylines”, by David Trinidad

Transformation

This is not a history of what happened in Manhattan on the eleventh of September 2001. This is a history that takes as its origin the moment the smoke clouds surrounding the South Tower’s summit began their interminable descent, revealing bright blue sky behind—but that really begins with the sound of alarm clocks on September 12, when New Yorkers woke up, and looked up, and saw again that something was missing.

It is perhaps misleading, although formally a truism, to emphasise that New York changed that Tuesday. The lure of New York derives considerably from its perpetual dynamism, its restless transformation. New York did change, dramatically, but New York is always changing. This transformation differed from the city’s history of transformations in being immediate, gigantic, and marked not by an innovation or a substitution, but by absences.

Absence is the immediate register and recurring theme of this altered New York. For many citizens, the absences are foremost the perished friends and relations—most of whom were for a long time regarded as “missing” due to the absence of remains. But for every citizen, and particularly those without human objects of their grief, there is the overwhelming absence of the towers. Thomas Beller writes of the fallen towers that they “had been, for all their enormity, oddly quiet structures. Now their absence is deafening and is practically all we can think of.” In alternating harmony, Ulrich Baer testifies that the World Trade Center “dwarfed the imagination before its destruction, and now stumps us in its absence.”

There were other absences too. Epicentered in New York, but rippling out across America, the awareness of an absence of normalcy, stark at first but fading. There has been a keenly felt absence of significance, of meaning in daily events and rituals, when set against the enormity of what happened in New York, Virginia and the skies over Pennsylvania. But though often persistent, feelings of absence are finally transient sensations. They are transient because they demand responses—responses which venerate and also recreate, and eventually begin to fill the void. This is a short history of how New York has responded to feelings of absence, in the literature and rendering of artists, and the photographs and narratives of citizens.

NY state of mind

Novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz, in Nearing November, describes a group of disparate individuals who have taken to New York streets in the month since the attacks to write their stories in chalk. Each morning they write the same sentences, to the increasing dismay of city officials (“Go back to your lives, he said. Or at least write something new.”) Their stories are not exceptional ones in the city—they all commence to the same formula: “I was in my car, on the bridge, I saw… On the bus, a woman on a cell phone started screaming…. I was feeding the baby, I had the radio on…”

Schwartz’s story may not have been fictional; in a collection of both fiction and nonfiction by various New York authors, the writer does not declare her story’s origin. Whether it is reportage or not, as a metaphor for the city’s response to the fall of the towers, there is a resonance in this image of personal stories repeated and repeated, each sentence refined to its most poignant form.

I have read hundreds of narratives like those her characters record in chalk on the city streets. New York City has become (partly in response to September 11) the major “weblogging” hub of cyberspace—thousands of its citizens keep online journals. A substantial number of these predate the attacks, with alreadyestablished readerships, and each includes at least one account of the event from a personal perspective. Thousands of other New Yorkers have also posted their narratives of that day on the Web; a handful of the more eloquent are included in collections such as “Fray — Missing Pieces” and “Mr Beller’s Neighborhood”. And some of those whose stories are particularly enmeshed in the events of that day were sought out by journalists and historians, and their narratives have been recorded in book collections like September 11: An Oral History.

These stories, whether long or short, whether written on the day or months later, follow a common format and all are oriented according to the same landmarks. The vast majority begin with a version of “it was a day like any other”, or “I was sleeping in”, or a discussion of the unusually sunny autumn morning. There is a reference to the moment of rupture when they are made aware of the attacks. For those close to the event—several are within the towers—it is a terrible sound, or shaking floors; for those more distant, it is a radio report, or a frantic phone call from a friend. Then the stories tend to follow an overt or implicit clock. That was 8:46am, the first plane, the North Tower. Now, 9:03am, the second plane, the South Tower, and I was... Now, 10:08am, the fall of the South Tower, and I saw... Now, 10:28am, the fall of the North Tower, and people around me...

Only after that, the stories fan out and the content varies. Some consider the possible causes and the political ramifications, some conclude in testaments of rage or despair or both, some attempt to assess their emotional reactions (and often the adequacy thereof). Many cling anxiously to a continued chronological narrative of the day and days after. But all eventually try to obtain some compass on the events, some way to stand off to the side and see the whole picture; to comprehend it, to respond to it, and finally to accommodate it, so that their changed city might become home again. It is curious how many New Yorkers could see the World Trade Center out their window, and yet from 9am were glued to their televisions. It wasn’t just the frantic need for information. It was the hope that the media would be able to present what had happened in a familiar form, so that it could be digested and understood, because it was just too overwhelming, both too real and too unreal, to look out the window.

The strength of this need sparked an unannounced but nearly universal response in ordinary New Yorkers. The citizenry began, almost as the towers were falling, a spontaneous, reflexive, autohistorical project. It took many forms, but is remarkably homogenous and sharply defined for a grassroots phenomenon. In prosaic terms, a note from an amateur photographer—on the wall of a New York gallery that offered its space to anyone’s photos of the day—characterises and exemplifies this response:

On September 11th and in the days that followed, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was filled with so much sorrow, so many mixed emotions. I started taking pictures because I felt the need to document what was going on. But a part of me also wanted to experience the events more, to feel things more deeply in order to reach a level of acceptance and understanding. I am hoping that the images will help me sort through it all in time.

Just as the personal narratives are notable for their commonality of form, so these phrases (especially “the need to document”, and “help me sort through it all in time”) are reverberated verbatim as prefaces to the general public’s creative responses in the immediate aftermath. The bloggers felt a new urgency in maintaining their journals for this reason—no longer was it just about speaking to the outside world; it was just as much about speaking to their future selves, who would somehow be capable of comprehending what their present selves could not. The walls of the gallery in which that note hung were cluttered with other similar notes clipped to photos, and the collection eventually became a book project which echoed each of them in its introduction: “By allowing people to bear witness to the expression and pain of others, the project hoped to promote understanding of the tragedy on a human level and to begin a healing process.”

Amateur and professional photographers grabbed their cameras as soon as they heard what was happening. Photographs taken near “Ground Zero” in the minutes and hours after the towers collapsed are images of thick dust and invariably people clutching cameras. Professional photographers explained this reflex to go down to Manhattan and record what was going on, not as an opportunistic enterprise, but as a small way of contributing. The sentiment of Magnum photojournalist Alex Webb is chorused throughout Magnum’s book on the event, and on the web by scores of hobbyist photographers: “Terrorists had attacked my city. Thousands of people were probably dead. I felt I had to photograph.”

In the days after, sheets of paper and fabric were laid down or hung up across Manhattan and the other boroughs so the public could put down their thoughts, stories and poems for the city to share. This “spontaneous burgeoning of poetry” , as an elliptical way of expressing what seemed almost ineffable, is notable for its public nature. It was created in public space, its act of creation was witnessed by others unknown to the author, the author eventually left it and more people (who may or may not have written something themselves) milled around to read it. Almost all were anonymous, and tantalizingly sad, like the chalked epitaph that reads “Gina—I remember you. I had a crush on you. R.I.P.,” or blazing with fury: “Destroy those who kill innocents now!!” These ubiquitous sheets were applied to the city “like huge bandages soaking up grief, disbelief, and rage.”

A bite from the Big Apple

A whole city attempted to comprehend the atrocity at its heart by looking straight into it and faithfully recording all the minutiae. That speaks of the urgency of the absences its citizens felt, and also of their bravery. But the process of seeking to accommodate what had happened to the city into the city by direct confrontation could not be sustained. It must have felt like looking into the sun—shortly you are dazzled, and desperate to look away. Six months after the towers fell, Debra Fontaine wrote that “the further away September 11th gets, the rawer I seem to get, and the less I want to talk about, be reminded of, or think about it.” That exhausted admission, that she is not yet on terms with the experience but can no longer countenance it, illustrates the limit of the public’s autohistorical project. What had recently been the only subject people could talk about was now something few people voluntarily brought up, without having diminished in importance at all.

The traditional biographers of the city—its resident writers and artists—began to venture into these awkward silences. Many of them had seemed to lose their voices in the immediate aftermath. Anne Nelson’s play, The Guys, has a secondary theme exploring the selfdoubt of a professional writer as she tries to find some way to contribute to her broken New York. Writers and artists are better equipped to pursue thoughts and feelings obliquely, prismatically, and when the towers fell this approach seemed hopelessly inadequate. But as the public’s repetition of the same stories, the same prefaces, began to drown itself out, there seemed to be a real need for new words and new ways of reflecting on what had happened. So Nelson’s play is a warming story that still provides an insight into devastating loss. Similarly, Schwartz doesn’t record the stories that are chalked up on the New York streets, but instead records the people who felt the need to tell them.

John Kelly, in his poem Travel Log, acknowledges and confiscates the stunted vocabulary of repeated phrases by simply compiling a litany of them. The lines of his poem have insufficient semantic energy in isolation, but when the context of the World Trade Center is applied they start to resonate: “Whose bubble has burst / Who looked up in horror / Who ran for cover / Whose kindness came through / Who missed it by 10 hours / Who heard from abroad…” The poem is uncritical—in fact in a way it is panegyric—but its length, its droning rhythm, and the cloying familiarity of its lines signal a need for original, creative expression.

The trauma of September 11 was drawn out by its visibility. The rubble that remained of the towers smouldered for ninetynine days. The “terrible, stinging odour” of burnt plastic and concrete particles lingered so long and infiltrated everything so deeply that people began to associate the smell with “home”. Many New Yorkers developed respiratory problems that might have had an emotional origin as much as an environmental cause—some daydreamed that they were inhaling the dead. But more persistent than the smoke and the stench, the most unrelenting reminder of what had happened was the ruined skyline. New Yorkers would look up, reflexively, and the towers by which they had oriented themselves and reassured themselves (even if they had rarely admired them) were still absent. Coping with trauma requires some measure of forgetting—just for long enough to allow the mind to transform and progress—but the skyline of the city denied its citizens this necessary escape.

Those “oddly quiet structures”, in their absence, became imbued and invested with the city’s values and dreams. People dusted off memories almost lost—a first kiss, a daredevil highwire stunt, the awe of a child slipping quarters in the viewers’ slots on the observation deck—and offered them slightly sheepishly, embarrassed at their ordinariness. The towers had been unromantic; at best they were somewhat euphemistically described as elegant, and during their construction, many citizens had scoffed. “‘Atrocious,’ they said. ‘Monstrosities. Blocking out the sky, those hideous things.’” But the ordinariness of these shared recollections restored to the towers a humanity that had been so badly ruptured when they collapsed and took thousands of people with them. Moreover, the towers acquired potent symbolism. In popular imagination, their colossal height represented firm defiance, and their shared form and shared fate bespoke loyalty and unity. Some artists took their form and reappraised it less jingoistically—as in Dave McKean’s painting of the towers as cowering, devastated human figures with their backs to each other, covering their ears. This latent, posthumous symbolism is significant and poignant, because on that Tuesday the towers had been targeted for their status as symbols, though their symbolism was interpreted very differently.

Approaching Ground Zero

On the halfyear anniversary of the attacks, the Tribute in Light was installed at the site of the fallen towers and remained for a little over a month. A sculpture of light beams shot from 88 “cannons” on the ground, it was created by a collective of artists called “Creative Times” and sponsored by various groups, including David Rockefeller, whose money had funded construction of the original towers, and Con Edison who provided the power on which it ran. From a distance, the bluewhite pillars of the Tribute in Light projected ghostly apparitions of the twin towers for four hours each night, catching motes of dust and propelling them into the sky. On overcast nights, the beams appeared to flow down from the clouds “like a pillar of fire”; the action of the dust and the roiling litup clouds creating an arresting vision that was captured in countless photographs and beamed around the world. Since the sheets and vigils at Union Square, this was the first creative project that the whole city, not just could, but was almost compelled to share in.

The Tribute in Light was conceived by several groups independently shortly after the towers fell, who later joined together to see it to fruition. One of these groups, in a gesture that illustrates again the overwhelming sense of absence after the towers, named itself the Project to Restore Immediately the Skyline of Manhattan—or PRISM. That name can also convey a certain attitude of denial, and in that denial perhaps an insensitivity to the human victims of the towers’ fate. Similarly, the tribute may have been—at best—mistimed. Certainly it sent a resolute, sombre and quite striking message to New Yorkers and to the world, but it was not universally considered cathartic by the citizenry. At the time its light beams were resurrecting the old Manhattan skyline in ethereal form, many New Yorkers were (like Debra Fontaine) trying to shrink away from the omnipresence of that wound to their city, able to approach it only tentatively and indirectly. To see the towers restored as light was to imagine them again as steel and glass, and to see them extinguished at 11:30pm each evening, collapsing in reverse up to the clouds, involuntarily called to mind the original moment of disbelief as their glass forms flowered and fell and left just smoke and sky behind.

The ambivalence of New Yorkers towards the Tribute in Light gives Daniel Libeskind some foretaste of his challenge. In late February 2003, Libeskind’s studio was awarded the contract to develop the complex that would be situated at the former World Trade Center site—at what is currently just referred to as “Ground Zero” by New Yorkers.

The city has followed the design process anxiously. The affected area of Lower Manhattan has become a sacred place—the initial resting place of so many friends and neighbours. It is still somewhat unspeakable, almost unapproachable, two years on, and New Yorkers are fiercely protective of it. Eugene Richards’ and Janine Altongy’s photo collection, Stepping Through the Ashes, reverently portrays the space as not just a 16 acre pit of rubble, but rather a space that is so symbolically expansive it can only be captured in glimpses. One New York blogger visited the site a year after the attacks “and spent some time quietly observing what was happening there. For the most part, what I saw horrified me: tourists had flocked to the site in droves... [a] mass of gaping onlookers.” Whatever Libeskind designs, and whatever Larry Silverstein builds, will have to equal the emotional fortune New Yorkers have vested in that space.

Setha Low, in discussing the desired characteristics of the future World Trade Center plaza, sets its developers the task of a design and design ethic that is inclusive, open, and complex in character—an approach that both memorialises and forgets, that encourages healing and pride both within its boundaries and across the wider city. Taking Union Square as a model and examining the way New Yorkers used that space following the attacks, she stresses the need for a public sense of ownership of the space, to use it, to modify it, and to interpret it. Most importantly, the design should not fall prey to contemporary anxieties. She captures in microcosm the creative energy that New Yorkers devote to the space when she interviews eight and twelveyear olds at a Lower Manhattan school, whose imaginative ideas for rebuilding display a deep and varied understanding of the meanings of Ground Zero.

Libeskind does appear to grasp Low’s points. “We have to be able to enter this ground while creating a quiet, meditative and spiritual space,” he writes. Low recognised the contradictions in New Yorkers’ hopes for Ground Zero, but did not regard them as insurmountable. Libeskind also acknowledges the “seemingly impossible dichotomy” in acknowledging the human tragedy that occurred there, while also “looking to the future with hope”. He sought a way to bring them together in “unexpected unity”. His design proposal rings the site with five towers of ascending height, the smallest at 230 metres and the tallest 478 metres. This last tower will be united with a spire that rises to 541 metres, or 1776 feet, and is called “Freedom Tower”—invoking two great symbols of American patriotism. The glass spire will be filled with gardens as “a constant affirmation of life”. At its foot will be a museum to commemorate the attacks, descending into the basement of the former complex. The “great slurry wall” that holds back the Hudson River and is the most dramatic element to survive the towers’ collapse is left exposed as a memorial. In the shadow of the new towers will be a “Park of Heroes”, where the names of the rescueworkers who perished in the attacks are remembered.

The design has not been without criticism. Some saw Libeskind’s success in the design competition as a victory of the avantgarde, requisitioning the space from the wider New York community. Because the emotional potency of his various symbols is undeniable, gaining the support of survivors and victim’s family, some critics have attacked the design for being overly sentimental—in fact serving to constantly remind New Yorkers of the terrifying “enemy assault” that occurred in the heart of their city. The continuing verdicts on the design, up to and beyond its projected date of completion on 11 September 2008, will be left to New Yorkers.

It is in the approach to Ground Zero that the magnitude of creative energy New Yorkers have developed through introspection and shared reflection on their changed, charged city, finds its narrowing focus. The great reflexive documentary process of New Yorkers has preserved for them something they all intuited needed preserving. In writing, drama, music, visual art and (more gradually) film, the city finds oblique and important conduits through which a slow restoration of its nowfractured identity has begun. But the hole at Ground Zero, in the earth and in the sky, represents the ongoing creative challenge to all of the city’s inhabitants.

There is an element of the proposed design which has been taken up by New Yorkers: a large plaza into which, on September 11th each year between the time the first plane hit and the second tower fell, the sun will shine without shadows. It is a gesture marked by absences.

Appendix

Recommended Websites on New York after September 11

September 11 and the Internet

Pew Internet & American Life Project — September 11 and the Internet
A comprehensive study of the impact of September 11 on the Internet, and the impact of the Internet on the experience of September 11.
http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=69

Artistic responses to New York and September 11

Art Now — Commemorating September 11
A comprehensive listing of major artistic projects instigated as a response to September 11.
http://www.ncac.org/projects/art_now/commemorating.html

Personal accounts

Mr Beller’s Neighborhood
A large collection of stories about New York, including a section on “September 11 and its aftershocks.”
http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/

Fray — Missing Pieces
A short collection of testimonies and accounts of the day, with an additional visitor-submitted page.
http://www.fray.com/hope/pieces

Dichotomy—a matter of time and place
A site with a large collection of “witness” and “participant” accounts of September 11, and the unusual idea of pairing them up, so that one reads the account of someone who saw the towers fall on the television side-by-side with the story of the brother of one of the pilots, for instance.
http://outtacontext.com/dichotomy/intro.php

9/11 Digital Archives — Stories of September 11
Probably the largest repository of personal accounts of September 11, with over 10,000 submitted.
http://www.911digitalarchive.org/stories/

NYC Bloggers — September 11 posts
A directory of New York City bloggers, with links to posts by bloggers on September 11 and its anniversaries.
http://www.nycbloggers.com/911.asp

September 11 Archived Sites
Personal and news sites which the Library of Congress requested be archived for posterity.
http://september11.archive.org/

Wherewereyou.org
Another vast store of personal narratives of September 11 from across the USA, largely submitted by young people. Over 2,500 narratives as of October 2003.
http://www.wherewereyou.org/

Stories from the September 11, 2001 Attack on America
A collection of 350 personal accounts of September 11.
http://mystory.inter.net

Document New York — NYC 9.11.01
Story and image collection, with over 200 contributors.
http://www.documentnewyork.com/archives.php

Photos

Here is New York
A “democracy of photographs” with September 11 and its aftermath as subjects; this project evolved into a massive book.
http://hereisnewyork.org/index2.asp

The September 11 Photo Project
A collection of photographs contributed by NY citizens to a gallery in New York in the days after the attacks, which also became a book.
http://www.sep11photo.org

Ground Zero
200 perspectives of the WTC site by a professional photographer.
http://www.septembereleven.net

New York City After the Fall
A multimedia site that attempts to capture the mood in New York in the days and weeks after the towers fell.
http://www.hillerphoto.com/nyc/nycatf.html

Magnum Photography — 9/11
The accompanying website of Magnum Photography, Inc.’s exhibition of September 11 photographs.
http://www.nyhistory.org/magnum911/index.html

Pilgrimage — Looking at Ground Zero
A website companion to a professional photographer’s exhibition of images of Ground Zero.
http://www.nyhistory.org/bubrinski/

Twin Towers Remembered: The Photography of Camilo Jose Vergara
Another exhibition website.
http://www.nyhistory.org/vergara/

New York popular digital journalism since 9/11

Gothamist
An excellent collaborative weblog that provides frequent information on the news, events and life of the city, with opinion and visitor comments.
http://www.gothamist.com

Everything New York
Another collaborative weblog, less frequently updated, but with headlines from all the major New York media institutions.
http://www.everythingny.com/

Gotham Gazette
NYC news and policy; published daily by Citizens Union Foundation.
http://www.gothamgazette.com/

Bibliography

Referenced books

9/11: Artists Respond. Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 2002.

Baer, Ulrich, ed. 110 Stories; New York writes after September 11. New York: New York University Press, 2002.

Beller, Thomas, ed. Before and After; Stories from New York. New York: Mr Beller’s Neighborhood Books, 2002.

Feldschuh, Michael, ed. The September 11 Photo Project. New York: Harper-Collins, 2002.

George, Alice, ed. Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs. Zurich: Scalo, 2002.

Mason, Jeff, ed. 9/11: Emergency Relief. Florida: Alternative Comics, 2002.

Murphy, Dean E. September 11: An Oral History. New York: Doubleday, 2002.

Nelson, Anne. The Guys. New York: Random House, 2002.

Magnum Photos, Inc. New York September 11: by Magnum Photographers. New York: Powerhouse Books, 2001.

Richards, Eugene, Janine Altongy. Stepping Through the Ashes. New York: Aperture, 2002.

Sorkin, Michael, Sharon Zukin, eds. After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Referenced websites and online articles

Aisling, Kythryne. “Saturday, 14 September 2002 8:40 p.m”. Online at http://kythryne.swiftweb.com/journal/pages/091402-1.html. Last accessed 16 October 2003.

Beller, Thomas, ed. Mr Beller’s Neighborhood; 9/11 and its Aftershocks. Online at http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/cgi-bin/bellersearch.cgi?keyword=11. Last accessed 16 October 2003.

Center for History and New Media, American Social History Project. “Stories of September 11”, 9/11 Digital Archives. Online at http://www.911digitalarchive.org/stories/. Last accessed 16 October 2003.

“Comparing what critics said about the two finalists” in USA Today. Online at http://www.usatoday.com/news/2003-02-27-critics-comments.htm. Last ac-cessed 17 October 2003.

Cooper, Charles. “When blogging came of age”. Online at http://news.com.com/2010-1071_3-281560.html. Last accessed 16 October 2003.

Libeskind, Daniel. “Memory Foundations”. Online at http://wtc.e27.com/press/index.html. Last accessed 16 October 2003.

NYC Bloggers. Online at http://www.nycbloggers.com. Last accessed 16 October 2003.

Powazek, Derek, ed. Fray—Missing Pieces. Online at http://www.fray.com/hope/pieces/index.html. Last accessed 16 October 2003.

Richardson, Vicky. “That Libeskind Touch” in Spiked. Online at http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DCB7.htm. Last accessed 17 October 2003.

Wherewereyou.org. Online at http://www.wherewereyou.org/. Last accessed 16 October 2003.