A Sense of Responsibility Keeps One Building’s Supers on Job

Call them the Secret Supers. Or even the Super Supers. But don’t, they insist, call them heroes.

They are a group of superintendents who stayed behind at an apartment complex across the street from the World Trade Center, at first to tend to tenants who couldn’t--or wouldn’t--leave. A week after the towers crumbled, all the residents are gone, except for the lady holding out in the penthouse who cooks them dinner with a propane blowtorch. But they are still hiding out in their building with no power or water--to fend off looters, feed abandoned pets, empty rotting garbage and lend a hand any way they can.

For the residents of the Regatta, Tony, Willie, Jerry, Juan and Eric are not just the uniformed men who keep the place running. In New York, where apartment buildings are like vertical villages, these guys are like family. They’re the couriers of gossip, the ones who bring in groceries when snowstorms shut down the city, the ones who arrange for women in labor to get to the hospital in the middle of the night.

So last Tuesday, when the terror across the street made Doris Moinester’s heart stop, it was only appropriate that Tony Hernandez, 44, and 42-year-old William Correa were her makeshift pallbearers--gently carrying her body down the stairs and turning it over to emergency workers when no ambulances would stop and no hearses could get through.

Hernandez was the one who carried the Gopsteins’ baby out the emergency exit and shepherded families onto the evacuation boat headed for New Jersey. And he was the guy who made sure that everyone stuck in the blacked-out building, such as Beverly DiNapoli in her wheelchair on the sixth floor, had candles and food and a comforting listener.

“Hey, these people are good to us,” said Hernandez, who has worked at the Regatta for 13 years. “It’s nice to be able to give something back. This is when it counts.”

On Wednesday night, Hernandez hadn’t slept since the planes hit the towers just hundreds of yards away the morning before. He kept seeing the fireball and falling bodies when he shut his eyes.

“I was tired,” he said. “I was nervous and I was wired. But there were people who needed help more than me.”

And then Jerry Colon and Correa showed up. After getting safely home to their families, they decided they had to come back. “I couldn’t stand just sitting there watching it on TV,” Correa said. Juan Lopez and Eric Rodriguez returned too, reporting for duty.

There is plenty to do. They carried DiNapoli in her wheelchair down six flights and escorted her to safety. They chased away looters who had broken into the corner grocery store and were casing the building. For the past week, they’ve fed pets and carted out garbage. At night, they eat torch-fired meals in the lobby, then lock the doors and sleep on the sofas while one of them stands guard.

“It’s like camping out,” Correa said. “We sit around with candles and snacks . . . and we talk.”

But they aren’t supposed to be there. At first, the police allowed them to stay to help locate a gas leak in the building because they had a passkey to the apartments. They lay low during the day, when the National Guard came by looking for stragglers. But when the Emergency Medical Services took over their lobby as a triage center, then the front of the building as a makeshift morgue, they emerged to help out.

As they sorted through pieces of debris, unloaded emergency supplies and offered their sofas for exhausted workers to rest, a camaraderie built among those who chose to stay and toil in the ghost town.

“We’re not doing anything special,” Hernandez said. “The true heroes are the professionals out there digging for those bodies. We see them with their heads down, walking tired. Some of them are crying and saying [they] can’t find anybody. I ask them if it’s still a search and rescue, and they say it will continue to be a search and rescue until they can’t do it no more.”

Hernandez and the rest of the crew said they too will stay and do whatever they can until the building reopens or they’re carried out. They are the caretakers.

“We feel, right now, the worst has passed,” Hernandez said. “But if you sit right there at the window in the lobby, you can see that building’s skeleton, you can see the workers so tired, and you cry. I try to be a man. I want to play that macho role, but every now and then, you know, you just can’t help it. The tears just come down.”