Ghostly Neighborhood Draws Residents Home

There are no shadows where southern Manhattan once bustled under two long rectangles of shade from the World Trade Center.

Hank Harvey squints into the dawn light from the roof of the 31-story building he manages nearby. “I still haven’t processed it,” he says. “I look over there and I keep expecting to see the towers. Nothing. It’s a mirage, my mind playing tricks on me.”

Throughout most of last week, southern Manhattan was a ghost town, largely empty of its 27,000 regular residents as rescuers poked through the embers of five-story-high swales of debris. The area includes the shuttered trading houses of New York’s financial district and the evacuated lofts of TriBeCa.

Inside a restricted zone of 40 square blocks, little remained as it had been. Cordoned off by police and bereft of commerce, life for the hardy few who stayed around became an exercise in coping.

Some made the best of it, bonding with the exhausted crews who vainly sifted the rubble for survivors. Others retreated into confusion and isolation, desperate for the yellow crowd-control tape to fall and a neighborhood to replenish itself.

Anxious to return, the zone’s displaced neighbors keep themselves informed by gathering by the hundreds on an open-air basketball court--sharing their fortune and misery and demanding civic action.

Residents Gather in Search of Information

Inside the basketball cages at 6th and Canal, just beyond police lines, 400 TriBeCans huddle in a babble of rumor and outrage. Some want to know how to contact federal emergency workers. Others plead for information about when they might return to their apartments. Mothers cradle sleeping infants. Couples ask about absent neighbors.

Bob Townley, a hulking city worker who runs after-school programs in south Manhattan, leads the meeting. For 36 hours, he wandered the deserted streets of TriBeCa, posting fliers on every wall and light pole he could find. “Community Gathering!” the pamphlets read. “We’re Still Here!”

When he shows up promptly at 10 a.m., people rush at him as if he were the next mayor of New York. They tug impatiently at his jacket while he talks to complainers. Scores of excited, displaced TriBeCans--chattering, wailing, desperate to get home.

The lucky who slip inside the police lines at night move warily along empty streets. They crouch like stark figures in an Expressionist painting, burglars in their own darkened lofts and apartments. Some carry cans of food for abandoned pets. Some carry flashlights to check on their powerless buildings. Shafts of light rake the dimmed windows like strobes.

“We’re living day by day, and we’re walking on quicksand,” says Mark Dimor, an advertising man cut off from his business by police tape. “My wife told me if I can’t find her a hot shower today, she’s going to sell me.”

Police and state troopers cordoned off lower Manhattan in a shrinking vise. During the weekend--first at 14th Street, then southward at Canal--residents and visitors were allowed to file into 150-year-old neighborhoods that had been silent since the towers crumbled.

As the police lines drew further south Sunday, crowds of gawkers massed blocks from the search crews.

Residents start to straggle back. They move in a sleepwalk of the stunned, their lives as pulverized as the debris hills nearby.

As Ann Zemaitas walks down Reade Street wheeling her 2 1/2-year-old son, Nicholas, in a stroller. She seems lost, even though she knows where she is going. Her husband, Michael Santiago, is back at the hotel where they have taken refuge with their two dogs. A neighbor took them in for a few days, but the woman’s apartment was too crowded. They begged off.

Zemaitas is returning to retrieve some medicine for Nicholas and a fresh supply of clothes and food for their two Shar-Peis. She and Santiago run a dog-walking business. Their clients include actor Robert DeNiro, whose Bernese mountain dog, Fluff, is a regular.

Some Refugees Flee to Second Homes

TriBeCa became a prime real estate destination 20 years ago. Now, it is home to stock traders, gallery owners, hot artists. “This is as well-heeled as it gets,” Zemaitas says.

Panicked, most of her clients headed out soon after the blast to second homes uptown or out on Long Island. Returning each day, Zemaitas began running into other residents as they checked in on their places. Strangers for years were suddenly bonding--even if they had no idea of each other’s names. “I know your face, honey,” they told her. “The dog lady, right?”

She is a little unnerved as she opens the apartment door. A friend and fellow tenant, Dimor is there too. He wears a U.S. flag in a buttonhole in his black denim jacket. It is a new affectation for a man who chucked rocks at police 30 years ago during antiwar protests. Now he, too, is overcome by the welling patriotism that has swept New Yorkers--even in bohemian TriBeCa.

Standing Ovations for Police, Firefighters

Everywhere cops walk here, people applaud. Firefighters are cheered like rock stars. At Walker’s, a reopened tavern on North Moore, the entire bar joined in a standing ovation when a cadaver-sniffing German shepherd trotted in, trailed by his handler, a New York police officer.

It is not until the weekend that most bar owners, grocers and gallery owners straggle back to revive the sector’s dormant commerce. Merchants heave bulging sacks of trash and rotted food out onto the sidewalks. They move slowly, gingerly, like guests afraid they are no longer welcome.

At Morgan’s, a Korean produce market, 53-year-old owner John Yun is one of the few who has stayed open since the blasts. He’s handed out bottled water and snacks to rescue workers. For five days, his lush rows of mums, daisies and carnations have wilted in silt-caked water, petals gray with blast dust. “No good,” Yun says. “All dead. I lost too much.”

On Saturday morning, he finally sells a few newspapers. His is the southernmost vestige of capitalism on the island of Manhattan. “We got to make some money,” he says.

Among his clients are Susan Barbero, one of the few TriBeCa residents who had refused to leave. She is lucky: She had no cable, but the power stayed on in her building. Most other lofts were blacked out. The Parsons design student bought candles, water and food from Yun hours after the blast, then holed up in her apartment. Unnerved after the first hijacked jet roared overhead and exploded into Tower One, she now is spooked by any loud noise.

“You get sleep but you keep waking up,” she says. “Every siren you hear, you jump out of bed. You hear footsteps on the street, and your mind races. Yesterday was my 40th birthday. The only thing good about it is that I’m still here.”

Sneaking Home to Feed Fish

Her neighbors are returning in cautious baby steps. Some stay a few hours to relish the comforts of home, then drift back to police lines. Others look in on bewildered pets. Steve Lewis, a 48-year-old club owner, makes the long trek down from the Canal checkpoints to his TriBeCa apartment each night to feed his fish.

“It’s dark as night in there,” he says.

Lewis worries every time he climbs his creaking stairs. TriBeCa, an acronym for the triangular tract running from Canal Street toward the Battery, is studded with renovated lofts carved out of old factories that date back to the mid-1800s. The blast, Lewis figures, has weakened their aged frames.

Thierry Despont, a French architect who worked on renovating the Statue of Liberty for its centennial celebration in 1986, dismisses those fears.

“We are too far away from the explosion. These factories are tough old buildings,” he says while sipping coffee at Yaffa’s, a TriBeCa restaurant that has become a way station for exhausted firefighters who tramp inside in dusty coveralls. The owner, Yafa Faro, a 40-year-old Israeli native, greets them with magenta-streaked hair and a cobalt-blue feather boa.

“Somebody has to find a bed and some food for these poor boys!” she says. “They drove here like maniacs.”

Three young North Carolina firefighters stumbled out onto the street near Yaffa’s on Wednesday night after driving all day from Raleigh. Stephen Welch, Tracy Morgan and Matt Harrison are curled up in blankets in the room Faro normally uses as her cafe. Harrison has found a companion--one of Faro’s waitresses.

Endless Work in the Rubble

There is little time for love amid the ruins. The three firefighters slog down to the blast site, where they join the bucket brigades, removing shanks of metal and chunks of concrete.

Their stints are unrelenting. All day, the 23-year-old Welch scampers up and down the sloping obstacle course. Beneath his feet, sheet rock seems as spongy as pudding. As the unsteady mound beneath him shifts, weakened by the thud of earthmovers and cranes, jagged metal and rebar rise up like fun-house perils.

Boots ripped, he joins searchers hefting debris down, man by man, pail by pail. Some stop to pick out what Long Island firefighter Kevin Madigan calls “pieces.” The two he scoops up, tenderly, are human remains.

Tourists, Patriots at the Barricades

When they have had enough, the firefighters and cops trudge back up Church Street and West Broadway. Some talk in hoarse whispers. Others look off in the distance with thousand-yard stares.

For five days, they make the long walk in silence, taking comfort only in one another’s exhaustion. But as TriBeCa’s residents return, as the work crews prime Wall Street for its opening today, as tourists and patriots cluster at the police barricades for a view of the fiery Pit, they erupt in endless rounds of applause for the slouching crewmen.

Mute, ignoring the claps, one Newark firefighter stops at a Salvation Army catering truck on his way out. Waiting for a sandwich, he reads a tattered blanket of letters taped on the side of the truck. They were stuffed inside care packages sent by elementary schoolchildren from Greenwich, Conn.

“Dear hero, thank you for fighting these fires. I relly appreciate it. You are using your energy for all of us. Sincerely, Luke Lorentzen.” The Parkway School first-grader has drawn a firefighter, his mouth turned down.

The Newark firefighter smiles tightly when he finishes and hitches up his heavy overalls. Then, alone, he walks on.