On the morning of
September 11, 2001 I was back in the States, waking up in my apartment on
Claremont Avenue. In those days I
was traveling frequently between the Dominican Republic and the US. As I prepared my coffee I listened in
puzzlement to the news coming over 1010 WINS radio. A plane had struck one of the Twin Towers at 8:46. As my mind became more alert and I
began to absorb the news, another plane hit the other tower. It was immediately clear that this was
no accident. I jumped into my jeans,
grabbed my camera bag, and ran to my car.
I raced down the Henry Hudson until I was stopped at Forty Second Street
by a blockade composed of UPS trucks commandeered by the police, so I parked
carelessly nearby and ran the rest of the way down 10th avenue. Crowds of panicked people ran toward
and past me, but I continued against the tide. It was a considerable distance but I arrived just after the
second tower collapsed, enveloping the entire neighborhood in a poisonous heavy
dust. I took some time to catch my
breath and survey the surroundings.
The police had cordoned off the area and scores of photographers and
journalists milled about snapping photographs and interviewing passersby. Undeterred by the police barricades and
the officers who turned back all comers, with or without a press pass, I snuck
around the edge and continued down to the complex of apartment buildings across
the street from the western edge of the World Trade Center complex. The scene was frantic, people were
running everywhere, firemen were rushing to the site of the towers, and fire
boats were anchored nearby in order to evacuate people and ferry supplies to
the site. Their hoses were at the ready in case the fire should spread to the
west.
Paper was floating
everywhere in the air. Reams and
reams of legal forms and business letters rained upon the lawns. It resembled a mad ticker tape parade
with unruly throngs of directionless people instead of orderly marching
bands. People were shouting,
police were blocking off the site, and firemen ran back and forth. In the midst of this madness, I spotted
a woman reclining in her bathing suit on a lawn chair. She seemed utterly unconcerned except
insofar as the commotion was spoiling her ability to tan herself. I looked at her in stunned
amazement. Was she so self
absorbed that she dismissed the whole affair as irrelevant? Was she oblivious? Was she in some perversely heroic
manner asserting the value of daily routine over the gross inhumanity of this
enormous disruptive event? Was she
simply a mad bourgeoise like those in a Buñuel film? I never could decide and I never knew what became of
her. A cop came along and tried to
arrest me, and the need to evade him diverted my attention. To this day I regret that I did not
photograph that woman, but of all the mad things that had happened to me prior
to that moment, this was what temporarily deranged me and caused me to forget
myself and my reason for being there.
I photographed the
ruins from various angles, getting as close as I could, and trying with
difficulty to contact my agency, which was not at all cooperative. I vowed to ignore every impediment and
simply get those pictures. I
photographed all the busted cars with their windows blown out, the frenetic
firemen, the shafts of water showering onto the pile, the ubiquitous litter and
detritus of modern construction, but I didn’t get anything that managed to sum
up or even halfway explain or capture the feeling of this event. That would come much later in the
evening of that first day.
I wasted time evading
the police who were aggressively clearing people out of the zone, even the
reporters who had a right to be there.
A press pass is an illusory thing.
It permits you to enter areas otherwise off limits to the public, but
since it is issued by the police, they in turn may deny access. It always stuck me as odd that the
police rather than a civic body should be in charge of controlling journalistic
access. During that day and all
the next week they worked hard to ensure that no one crossed the line. I played cat and mouse with them the
whole time. At one point that
morning another cop made it quite clear that he was going to arrest me, and as
I didn’t want to interrupt my coverage I made a quick getaway. Once back outside the cordon on West
Street I took a break to recollect myself and chat with some other photographers
I knew and some I didn’t. Everyone
pretty much had the same sort of images.
In those days most of them were already using digital cameras so we
could review the pictures immediately.
I was shooting Tri X.
One of the
photographers there had arrived before the attack on an unrelated assignment
and had been trapped in an underground subway station. After being rescued, he shook off his
fear and immediately went to work, though there was little he could do behind
the barricade. I hooked up with
another guy who was not a professional photographer but had real energy, which
revived mine. We went along the
line testing it for points of penetration, but it was practically impervious. In the late afternoon at 5:20 while we
were standing only a couple blocks away, Building #7 collapsed so suddenly that
we were all shocked.
My sidekick and I
eventually came to rest a little to the east around Church Street. The police were using that corner as a
staging ground and we watched as patrol after patrol were swallowed by fluid
brown fog beyond. It was getting
late and I was getting restless. I
started looking hawkeyed down Church street, waiting for my opportunity to
escape the police cordon. We had
been chatting up the cops, making friends, asking whether they might let us
pass. Then I noticed that the
ambulance crews were also camped there and occasionally one would enter the
zone headed for ground zero. So I
made friends with them instead and one of the crews offered me a ride. My fellow photographer and I snuck
aboard and hid in the back while they revved the engine, called in, and drove
down Broadway – circuitously it seemed for some reason I could not fathom from
my hiding spot – turning finally toward Church Street near the Millenium Hotel.
We had to get out fast and run
because the cops were everywhere and indeed after I took a few photographs, one
of them spied me and set off in pursuit.
I eluded him by ducking down a ramp off Cortland Street. I emerged soon thereafter because the
cop was really too busy to bother with me and had given up.
The rest of the night
the cops paid me no heed, and I mingled freely among the firemen. I learned later that week that
many policemen milling about then and afterward had no business being there. They had not been assigned, they had
merely taken advantage of their privileged access in order to see what was
going on. They were tourists just
like the rest of the people who came everyday to the barricades to catch a
glimpse of something memorable. For
the most part the police and firemen acted with admirable restraint and a sense
of purpose. But the emotions
stirred up by the destruction and disorder, along with intense fatigue and
disorientation, caused some of them to lose control and become violent. On a subsequent night, while I was
trying to photograph the scene from a distance, in order to capture the eerie
mix of light and darkness, a fire chief screamed obscenities at me and
assaulted me physically. I
protested, showed him my pass, but he would have none of it. He had to be restrained by others with
him, and I had to leave.
Church Street was an
unbelievable mess. I
knew the area well because I had worked in offices near there. I couldn’t square what I was seeing
with what I had known – sunlight glittering off the bits of mica in the
sidewalks, throngs of suited workers disgorged from the subway exits, the salty
bite in the morning air from off the Hudson, an occasional whiff of eggs on a
roll and coffee. All of that was
blotted out. I felt that I had
been dropped onto the streets of some firebombed city during World War II. Night had fallen quickly on this part
of the city. The world had become
black and white.
The area was filled
with debris and water. Shadowy
figures moved in and out of the isolated lights in operation. There were shells of cars and fire
engines that had been destroyed by falling debris. The pile of smoldering metal and plastic and concrete that
was once Tower 2 and Building 4 was now only a few stories high and over it the
rescuers scrambled like ants looking for people trapped under the rubble.
Across the street the Brooks Brothers store at 1 Liberty Plaza had been turned
into a makeshift triage center and morgue where masked doctors waited for
bodies. Very few if any
turned up; the stupendous weight of floor upon floor had obliterated the
offices. Though people who were on
the scene early, while the towers burned and no one could guess what was about
to happen, spoke later with horror about the bodies that fell into the street
around them, at this late point I saw few signs of the dead, which in a way
made it all seem more apocalyptic.
The dead had left no trace; they had been absorbed into the overwhelming
destruction. The only witnesses to
their once having been there at all were the families and friends waiting at
home who would later testify that their loved ones had never come back. The fine ash in the air was there to
remind us that we were attending a macabre funeral.
The most frightening
and disorienting aspect of the scene was its scale. We have seen buildings collapsed by bombs, embassy
buildings, Oklahoma City – but none was as titanic in its scope. Broad thoroughfares had disappeared;
barely passable lanes traversed the rubble. The vast expanse of the World Trade Center’s plaza had
become a wasteland of smoking shattered detritus, like a dumpsite that had long
ago overflowed its boundaries and grown out of control. Shards of the original walls still
stood here and there like the ghostly fingers of some ancient behemoth that had
tried to claw out of the grave.
Garbage was strewn everywhere.
Firemen scanned the pile with flashlights in hand or search lights
mounted on Hook and Ladder trucks, but they could illuminate only little
patches of the destruction, the darkness was so thick. Others were busy with acetylene
torches, large jaw-cutters or buzz saws cutting through metal, trying to get
down to the people who may have been trapped below.
I passed a fire
engine where a fatigued fireman sat on the bumper, the doctors looking on from
their perch in Brooks Brothers.
They seemed stunned by the inert weight of an event that defied the
powers of the mind to comprehend it.
Throughout the night these were the typical reactions: some staggered by the enormity of what
they were seeing, forced by fatigue and bewilderment to step away from the
scene and try to get a perspective on it; others who sought to forget their
fear in frantic activity, so caught up in what they were doing that their minds
remained clear for being focused on small comprehensible tasks. What I took to be a command center was
on the corner of Church and Liberty.
I watched the frazzled men struggle to organize and supply all the
different outposts of frantic search and rescue. A tangle of firehoses and electric lines powering the lights
and torches and saws covered the surface, making it hard to walk without
stumbling. In spite of all the
confusion and the lack of resources, their concentration and efficiency were
remarkable. Watching them work,
one could almost believe that the situation could be brought under control.
Further west on
Liberty Street another post had been set up giving the teams of rescuers a base
from which they could scale the remains of the South Tower. An EMT truck stood at the ready to
receive any victim that would need rushing to a hospital. For most of the night no body was
recovered and the EMT van didn’t budge.
A thick mass of rescuers streamed over the pile, the bulk concentrated
on the more level ground nearest the path that had been cleared through what
was once Liberty Street. Toward
the north the ground rose higher and higher, and it became more difficult to keep
one’s footing. As each column of
rescuers climbed the plateau of detritus, it became smaller and smaller, the
line twisting through swaths of light and blotches of inky blackness, gradually
obscured by the enfolding gloom until all one could see was the glint of the
reflective bands across the backs of their black turn-out coats, and then each
point of light snuffed out as the dwarfed column crossed the far rim of steel
shards and disappeared into the sink beyond our ken, erasing their existence
from our minds, which were called back to life by the commotion of the teeming
throng at the base. The powerful
klieg lights pierced a gloom that was more than just darkness. It had a plastic
quality, like a cloudy substance.
It was not an absence of light; it was a gaseous soup. The lights fixed on the pile were like
outstretched hands clearing away cobwebs.
Some of the rescuers wore gauze masks, but most of us there were exposed
without protection to the poisons swirling in the air. A couple nights later I met a Con
Edison worker emerging from one of the buildings across West Street. He was dressed in a biohazard suit, the
sort that one sees in movies about viral outbreaks. I asked him why he was suited up like that, and he told me
point blank, “man, you have no idea the kind of poison that is out here.” I knew then that we were all at risk,
and that the government had lied when it told us there were no contaminants in
the area.
That first night as
the rescuers worked frantically to get at the trapped people, no one thought
much about the risk. Everyone was
fixed on one sole idea: save whom they could. As the hours slipped by the firemen tirelessly cut the
steel, excavated the concrete, cleared the amalgamated alloy of noxious
construction material, fighting against time so that the people trapped below,
if any were still to be found whole and hale, might not slip away into the void
presaged by the darkness. The
rubble they cleared was like the jagged grains of an hourglass sifting through
their hands as they clawed at the bits and pieces they managed to dislodge from
the pile, and all the while the sifted jetsam slipped and ran through their
hands and meted out the diminishing hours that they could not arrest in their
flight. The search involved more
than just saving lives, that prospect now becoming less and less hopeful; it
was driven by a desire to retrieve the remains of the dead so that their
existence might not be wholly lost to that uncanny gulf into which the workaday
world and the daily routines that cleave us to a familiar reality had so
abruptly disappeared. The enemy
then was not terrorism; it was oblivion.
At one point late
into the night, the monotony of turning over stone after stone was interrupted
by the tremendous good luck of finding a survivor, which sent a ripple of
excitement through the crowd. A
column of rescuers extricated the individual and relayed him down the line to
the base, where he was quickly stretchered and hauled off in the
ambulance. It appeared that he was
indeed alive, and this renewed everyone’s hopes. They kept at it with admirable determination, even though
during the couple hours that I remained there no other bodies were found. As the end of the night approached I
began to feel the kind of fatigue that one experiences only after working long hours
at a feverish pitch; the adrenalin I had been feeding on was giving out. I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything the
entire time I was there. The
noxious air was causing my eyes to burn and my nose to run. My throat was scratchy. The fine dust had penetrated my lungs
and even my lens. It is still there
in both places ten years later.
After shooting my last frame, I realized I should leave, but I lingered
a while, unwilling to let go.
I walked out of there
proceeding north along Church Street.
The city by then had acquired an eerie calm. Except for the streetlamps there was no sign of energy or
life. Such emptiness in a big city
is almost entirely unknown and when it occurs, it induces a disagreeable sense
of solipsism and extreme loneliness.
I headed over to Chinatown hoping to find an open store where I could
maybe buy a drink or something to restore my flagging energy. I had a long walk home ahead of
me. Nothing was open, but
somewhere around Delancey street I heard a ruckus issuing from a sort of
storefront underneath the stairs leading up to the main floor of a
tenement. It turned out to be a
brothel, and I settled in for a beer and some diversion. I was just too tired either to continue
on my way or to participate, but I slowly revived as I watched a very different
kind of scene from the one I had left behind. Despite a vague mood of cynicism and disaffection, the heat
of human desire and the singleminded pursuit of illicit pleasure heartened me
somewhat. When I left there after
the beer, I was strong enough to walk the 50 odd blocks to my abandoned car,
which thankfully was not ticketed.
I don’t remember seeing anyone along the way, which was punctuated by
storefronts with TV sets broadcasting video of the planes hitting the Towers. A live television in dead space is an
uncanny thing. The image was
repeated endlessly up and down the avenues, no one to receive, no one to
transmit, a news flash for the end of the world. I drove up the West Side without encountering any other
cars, and when I parked on Claremont I saw no one up and about. By then the sun had begun to turn the
dark into a soft grey, and the first notes of birdsong floated in the air.
The next day I woke up to a very different world,
but I had as yet no inkling of the coming changes. They announced themselves later that winter when I
experienced the first of several subsequent respiratory crises and, on
returning to the Dominican Republic, I was harassed by airport security. From then on I would never be at home
again either in my own body or the country of my birth.
