Of Tears, Tourists and a Return to Ground Zero

For the last five months, I’ve never stopped thinking about it. Now and then in my sleep, I’ll wake up dreaming about being there, reporting atop the rubble of the World Trade Center, sometimes swallowed by it. Or, while walking my dog, I’ll panic at the sound of an airplane, look up and watch it fade into the clouds. I never saw a therapist, never consulted a counselor. I didn’t even discuss my feelings with my mom.

So when I returned to the city last week, I deliberately avoided the site. Yet on my last night, I found myself meandering the streets around ground zero instead of watching a Broadway show.

At the exact spot on Church Street where all I encountered was confusion and utter destruction on the night of Sept. 11, now there are tourists posing for photographs against a blank backdrop where the towers once stood. It strikes me as disrespectful. And when I hear a teenager in a group whining about how she’s bored and hungry and cold, I just want to shake her and tell her to grow up.

Instead, I walk away, crying until I find a quiet spot against a wall facing the gouged area and let go of my anger. Then suddenly I realize why I have returned--to resolve an overwhelming sense of helplessness that I felt back then when all I could do was report about the scene.

The night before the attacks, my colleague, Booth Moore, and I attended a lavish party at Pier 54 with the rest of the fashion pack, guests of designer Marc Jacobs. We sipped wine, ate finger food, spoke with Christy Turlington, met Hilary Swank and were awed by Deborah Harry. Later, we left with a goody bag filled with samples of a new perfume and body lotion.

By midmorning the next day we roamed the city on foot, trying to figure out how to get into hospitals and the morgue. By midnight, we stood near the toppled towers, phoning in details of the ravaged landscape.

The next night, we were in the middle of the devastation at what became known as the Pit, watching the firefighters, police and volunteers as they gently sifted through concrete and metal debris--and body parts.

This was where we spent the next four nights, from dusk to sunrise, reporting on the recovery efforts, and like so many others, barely comprehending what had happened.

Now as I walk, certain images flash back: A sidewalk fruit vendor’s scale filled with strawberries that measured exactly 1 pound, each covered in thick white ash, looking as if they had been dipped in white chocolate. Another cart with a plexiglass box on top had two stacks of 25 bagels inside. I had counted them and was struck how two concrete and steel towers were gone and here stood two stacks of baked goods, untouched, unscathed.

I remember Jason Rodriguez, a 30-year-old highway construction worker who headed for Manhattan to help after he saw flames spewing from the towers while on a job miles away. He used to come to the World Trade Center as a bicycle messenger, and now, for 18 hours, was pulling pieces of bodies from the site. I offered him some water after he collapsed to his knees and sobbed. I told him I was a reporter and I’d get him to a first-aid station. Instead, he offered to take me to where he found a woman folded in half.

“It was right here,” he said, standing where he made the grisly discovery. In other spots, he said he found an ear, a foot, a scalp with hair. Amid the debris he noticed a fabric patch that looked like the back pocket of someone’s pants. With his own pocketknife, he cut through the fabric and pulled out a billfold that he gave to investigators. They attached it to a body bag containing remains.

I scribbled notes on my hand and palm and arm, afraid to pull out a reporter’s notebook as Rodriguez walked me through a long, dark corridor inside the World Financial Center, a building next to the twin towers that was partially destroyed. The few dangling bulbs cast shadows of men and women in protective jumpsuits and gear that made them look otherworldly. No one spoke. They were too busy and too tired. Outside, we walked past boxes stacked against a dust-covered glass wall, finger scribbled with “Body Bags.”

Those horrific recollections overshadow what I see now on Church Street. There’s a marker, the size of a movie poster, that reads:

“What has 200 elevators, 1,200 restrooms, 40,000 doorknobs, 200,000 lighting fixtures, 7 million square feet of acoustical tile ceiling, more structural steel than the Verrazano Narrows Bridge--and was built for a final cost of one billion 1970s dollars? That’s right, the World Trade Center.” A woman and two men from Arizona ask if I’d take three photos: one of them next to the marker, another in front of ground zero with the cranes in the background, and finally, one that shows a building with blown-out windows.

Then the trio gather over a manhole cover to warm themselves with the billowing steam as they peer through barricades to watch the excavation because the viewing platform is closed. Other Church Street visitors seem disappointed that they can’t get a better view, so they tippy-toe and jump and lean over barricades with a curiosity that reminds me of motorists rubbernecking a wreck.

The atmosphere bothers me, taking me back to the chatter of a fashion crowd earlier in the week. The group was organizing a trip to the site--followed by dinner. Just as disappointing was the conversation of some other fashion insiders trying to schedule the next round of shows around the Sept. 11 anniversary. They mention nothing about a commemoration but settle on a possible plan: staging men’s shows two days before and starting the women’s on the 12th. Sounds good, they agreed.

“More wine, anyone?” someone asked.

Hearing that angered me and made me feel very alone. I decided then I had to return to the site.

The first thing I see: two intersecting steel girders that have become known as the Cross at Ground Zero.

While walking I find solace at a sidewalk memorial for the dead and missing strewn with fresh and dried flowers. Candles flicker illuminating posters, photographs and remembrances. I stop to read a modest notebook filled with condolences from around the world, several written in foreign languages. I add my own with a pen tied to a music stand holding the book.

I touch T-shirts and jackets with names on them. For an hour I read prayer cards left on makeshift altars and messages that covered the wall and others taped onto police barricades. “You will always be remembered,” one says, “never forgotten.”

Many of the fliers are so crisp and new--as if they have just been printed and placed there by family and friends who believe their loved ones are missing, not dead. They remind me of the family of William Valcarcel, who was on the 87th floor of one of the towers. His daughter, Melissa, invited me to her parents’ home because she believed her father was alive five days after the attack. She wanted him home back in the Bronx to complete the family photo gallery he was compiling on the refrigerator door.

It was the last story I reported from here in September. Last month, Valcarcel was moved from the missing list to the “reported dead” category.