Displaced Residents Feel Like Refugees

These are New York’s refugees.

A few hundred of the thousands of people evacuated from their homes near the World Trade Center were given a brief chance Saturday to retrieve things from their apartments. Police divided residents into groups of 50 at a staging center two miles away, gave them face masks and marched them in solemn lines down to their buildings.

Officer Gee gave the orders: “You have 15 minutes. Anything longer than that and you will be trespassing. Get what you need, not what you want.”

And what is it that one really, truly, needs at a time like this? Given only 15 minutes, what do you choose? For most people, the first answer was their pets. Others surprised themselves by grabbing things like “His and Hers” oven mitts. Unfinished knitting. Or nothing at all.

In Gateway Plaza, a luxury housing complex interposed between the twin towers’ site and New York Harbor, many of the windows were blown out, and there was no power. Inside were layers of gray concrete dust, singed papers, a crushed shoe. But it is still home, full of memories and necessities, the touchstones of normality and icons of Life Before.

Oscar Santiago, a musician, went first for his “mutt cat” Boo Boo, who meowed loudly in a cardboard carrier provided by the Humane Society. “She hates me, but I love her,” he said. He strapped his guitar to his back, “in case I need to sell it. And I got some clothes. I have to get away from New York to forget this all happened. I’m just going to get in a car and drive.”

Oliver Pacifica, a doctor dressed in his blue scrubs from nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital, said all he wanted were things for his month-old daughter. He stuffed a baby stroller with baby clothes, his wife’s breast-milk pump, and medical equipment for tending victims of the disaster. And he carried his wife’s wedding ring, tenderly wrapped in tissue.

Arthur and Minna Land made a careful list before they went in. For 75-year-old Arthur, who had carried out nothing but his cane on Tuesday: his hearing aid, medication and orthopedic shoes. For 70-year-old Minna: the housing insurance, credit cards and her makeup case. But other things ended up in their wheeled suitcase: photos of the grandkids. And--they don’t know why--the matching oven mitts.

All their planning didn’t prepare Rich and Marcy Shinder for how they would feel returning to their home after the blast, trodding on a morbid walkway covered with inches of ashes, dust and thousands of papers blown out of the towers’ offices. When they got inside their apartment, they were suddenly stumped.

“I was in the apartment, and I decided to take--nothing,” said Marcy, who worked at the American Express office building across the street from the World Trade Center. “I just thought, there’s nothing material that’s important in this situation.”

Her husband, Rich, decided to take a checkbook, his passport and laptop, but drew the line at clothes. “When you think of all the people who have nothing left, you don’t want to be greedy,” he said.

It was the sweaters she was knitting for her grandchildren that Gerda Reynolds wanted most. Her husband, Dick, said he wishes he had taken her advice when she said they should retire to Los Angeles. “I told her we’re not going there because of the earthquakes. I said we’re safe here.”

Hope Levine stood outside her building with its facade scorched and windows shattered and she cried, empty-handed. As inspectors were about to escort residents up the darkened stairways, investigators rushed out of the building and declared it a crime scene. They had found airplane wreckage inside and hoped to locate a still-missing “black box” flight recorder.

“I can see my apartment. It’s right there on the fourth floor,” she said, pointing. “And I have nothing. Not my ID, not a credit card. It’s all just right there.”

Lee, who didn’t want to give her last name because she is breaking her building’s rules by keeping seven cats in her apartment, tried to sneak back to Battery Park City several times last week. Camouflaged in a face mask like rescue volunteers were wearing, she used her knowledge of back streets to zigzag around police lines.

“I got all the way down to the building next door, but the overpass had crashed down to street level, and I couldn’t get around it. That’s when a National Guardsman stopped me. He said if I went any farther, he’d have to shoot me in the leg.”

But like Levine, she still couldn’t get in Saturday. She doesn’t care about her things, she said. Just the cats. And even though she’s lost much, she says she’s gained a better understanding of remote tragedies she once watched on television.

“I never thought I’d be a victim,” she said, wearing a borrowed outfit for the third day in a row. “I’m always giving clothes and stuff to people in Third World countries after earthquakes and floods. And now here we are. Refugees.”