‘Everything Has Changed’ in N.Y.

Minutes after two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, a packed subway train crawling into Midtown Manhattan showed how the city had changed in a heartbeat: Commuters who normally wouldn’t look at each other were hugging emotionally.

A year after the terrorist attacks, those same subway cars are filled with busy people minding their own business, and the Big Apple hums with its old manic energy. But New York is not back in the groove. Sept. 11 profoundly transformed the city, triggering psychological, political, economic and cultural changes that are only now beginning to be understood.

Proud New Yorkers got back to work in a hurry after Sept. 11, yet the economic effect of the attacks has been devastating: More than 100,000 people lost their jobs, and hundreds of shops closed in such neighborhoods as Chinatown and TriBeCa. Controller William Thompson estimated last week that the financial loss to New York could total $95 billion.

Although tourism and culture have rebounded, the city’s creative life is haunted by a growing sense of mortality. New York’s grinding development battles continue, but the biggest planning controversy in 50 years--what to do with 16 acres at ground zero and how to design a lasting memorial--has focused on spiritual as well as real-estate values.

“What I tell people is that, outwardly, nothing dramatic here seems to have changed except for the absence of two very big buildings downtown,” said author and sociologist Todd Gitlin. “But everything has changed. We’re living in a different world now, and there’s no map to describe it.”

Much the same could be said about the nation as a whole. Yet New York--along with Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pa.--experienced the trauma of the attacks more immediately and personally than the rest of America. Indeed, a majority of New Yorkers view them as the biggest life-changing event of the last year, compared with 38% of the rest of Americans, according to a new national poll on attitudes toward Sept. 11 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

“For the vast majority of Americans, the attacks were a terrible thing they saw on television,” said Kenneth Jackson, president of the New York Historical Society and author of the Encyclopedia of New York City. “But millions of people in this area saw the towers burning. They smelled the terrible toxic residue of it for months to come. It was totally real.”

As the anniversary approaches, Americans are immersed in remembrance and memorials. Yet the grieving here never stopped. Beyond a giant hole in the sky, Jackson said, “there are many other wounds that have yet to heal.”

The psychological damage from Sept. 11 may be the most lasting.

From the beginning, proximity to the event--how close any New Yorkers or anyone they knew came to the towers that day--has determined how it affected them. Thus, 500,000 adults in the New York area now suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a study reported in the Aug. 7 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Assn. And that does not account for the 75,000 New York City public-school children also suffering from the disorder. More than two-thirds of them have received no treatment.

Ronnie Hirsh, a Manhattan psychotherapist, has monitored the mental health of many New Yorkers: their resilience and down-ticks, their denial and revelations. He has counseled numerous police officers who saw the falling bodies, and ordinary residents who fled the rushing billows of dust.

He has also had to walk west every morning to get to his office from his Greenwich Village apartment and has looked downtown for the missing towers. Now, at age 52, this New Yorker is determined to leave, to uproot, to relocate. He and his wife are considering moving to Virginia Beach, Va., or working overseas. The stock market decline has foiled any early retirement plans.

“I had a former patient who came back, whose young son was killed in the towers,” Hirsh said. “To lose a child in any circumstance is extremely devastating. But this was too much.

“I feel more inadequate in this city, and not just professionally. I don’t know what to tell people anymore.”

Just how jittery are some New Yorkers?

Matt Roshkow, a screenwriter, and his wife, Helaine Olen, a journalist, recently bought their 2 1/2-year-old son, Jake, a bunch of balloons, then stopped for pizza in a Manhattan restaurant.

“Jake let go of the balloons and they hit a ceiling fan. They went off one by one,” Roshkow said. “The young guy in front of us ducked for cover under the table. There was a kind of jumpiness in the air.”

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Tighter Security

Wariness. Vigilance. Suspicion. These are increasingly common responses to life here, and security precautions are more visible. Most high-rise office buildings now screen visitors, asking for ID; some have installed metal detectors. New York police routinely close off downtown intersections if suspicious packages are left unattended on the sidewalk.

The NYPD has strengthened its intelligence divisions--which Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said “in essence was an escort service for VIPS” before the towers collapsed. It also has sent detectives to Canada, Israel, England and France to act as liaison with those nations’ intelligence services.

Ordinary residents have also beefed up security. A year after the attacks, Gary Hugo, owner of the Trader--a store that sells gas masks, chemical protective garments and other safety equipment--is doing a thriving business.

“People are very nervous,” he said. “They laugh a little bit, giggle. But it is a nervous giggle when they talk. They remember and hear all the news and they get worried, really worried. I explain to everybody--better safe than sorry.”

Rachel Winslow, a Midtown office worker, said she always keeps a full tank of gas in her car for a sudden emergency. “You go about your business in New York just like before,” she said. “But you’re always looking over your shoulder, just in case. Only a fool could ignore what happened here.”

No one could ignore the city’s apparent new respect for civility either. Given the new climate of personal vulnerability, New York’s rough-and-tumble political world has changed. Campaigns are still hard-fought, but people wounded by terrorism have less appetite for mean-spirited attacks, veteran observers say.

“Rancor doesn’t play well in New York now,” said Democratic consultant Jeff Plaut. “Beating up your political opponents is traditionally one of this city’s favorite intramural sports, yet it’s become less appealing.”

The most notorious example is the recently aborted campaign by former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Last spring, hoping to make political hay out of the attacks, he accused GOP Gov. George Pataki of doing little in the aftermath, saying he essentially “held [then-Mayor Rudolph W.] Giuliani’s coat,” while Giuliani did all the hard work.

Democrats and Republicans alike blasted these comments, and Cuomo never recovered in the polls. Last week, he ended his candidacy.

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Surprise Victory

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s surprise election in November was an early example of how political winds have shifted. Boosted by an endorsement from Giuliani--whose image soared after the terror attacks--the little-known Bloomberg stressed his credentials as a businessman and shunned harsh campaign attacks on his liberal Democratic opponent, Mark Green.

He has continued this low-key tone in office, avoiding recriminations against many opponents and refusing to play the traditional role of a mayor who locks horns with the governor and Legislature over fiscal issues. Where Giuliani thrived on confrontation, Bloomberg has brought a quieter, less flamboyant tone to City Hall that has struck a chord with New Yorkers.

If the political world has quieted somewhat, New York’s cultural life teemed with energy after Sept. 11. The city’s artists have groped for ways to address an attack that changed their lives; some were paralyzed by the enormity of the event, while others plunged into a creative frenzy. Many artists here are now wrestling with new artistic questions: How has this destructive event altered art? And does death look different now?

For nearly three months after the attacks, artist Donna Levinstone went to her Upper East Side studio every day and just sat there. Known for her serene pastel landscapes, she felt tentative and vulnerable, too raw to return to “pretty pictures,” too overwhelmed to create something new.

One winter day, she started out in a different direction, drawing clouds of smoke billowing within a frame of silhouetted buildings, as if witnessing September’s disaster from a window in downtown Manhattan. “Ascending Spirit” was the bleakest landscape Levinstone had ever done, but there was a defiant, radiant light that emanated from within the dark clouds.

“There was something very horrible but mystical that so many people disappeared,” she said. “I’m still struggling with ‘Is it going to happen again?’ And I still can’t believe that it did happen. I revisit it every time I do a piece.”

Ulrich Baer, a New York University literature professor who compiled “110 Stories,” an anthology of writing sparked by the attacks, said many authors are just beginning to present the opening lines and initial images of the day and how it will be remembered.

“I was interested in how people would come back to language and expression,” he said. “Ultimately, literature will be one of the main conduits to grasp this event. It won’t only be history and politics. Literature allows people to address it without having to confront it immediately.”

New York publishers report that a flood of 9/11-related fiction is in the works, and Baer’s literary anthology is one of the first to emerge. The book, which includes one chapter for each of the World Trade Center’s 110 stories, is an effort “to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space,” according to novelist and essayist Don DeLillo.

The author was speaking metaphorically, but an even greater howling has erupted over the future of the 16 acres where the World Trade Center once stood. The two towers symbolized America’s financial preeminence, and they anchored Manhattan’s world-famous skyline. But now, as the task of rebuilding begins, a chorus of discordant voices threatens any consensus.

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Ground Zero Struggle

In the past, New York’s big development battles have typically pitted neighborhood activists and environmentalists against powerful real-estate developers. Yet the struggle over ground zero defies such easy labels, because it is as much about ideas and ethics as dollars and cents.

Weeks before he left office, Giuliani said the area should be reserved for a memorial and a museum. The resulting landmark, he said recently on NBC’s “Today” show, “would create its own economic development,” bringing millions each year to the site. “This is a burial ground; it’s hallowed ground,” Giuliani said, echoing a sentiment held by victims’ families.

Bloomberg, however, believes the city’s main priority should be to determine the proper mixture of retail and office space at ground zero, and to build a memorial. New York needs to revive the area, he said, and “send a message” to the rest of the world that it has rebounded.

Victims’ families have threatened legal action if the city ignores their demands for a large memorial, while activists in areas bordering ground zero complain that they don’t want to live next door to a virtual graveyard. Advocates for each position increasingly frame their arguments in spiritual terms, which could make it difficult for the city and state officials overseeing the process to reach a satisfactory compromise.

It all adds up to a giant headache for the Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corp., the lead planning agency, which recently had to discard six draft proposals for the site after they were greeted with nearly universal disdain. Few are willing to predict the outcome of such an unusual debate in New York, but given the new forces at play after Sept. 11, some residents are not overly worried.

“New Yorkers watched so many people die senselessly a year ago, and it’s forced us to take another look at our lives,” Jackson said. “We’ve changed, and the city has changed. Hopefully, in the long run, for the better.”

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Times staff writers Maggie Farley, John J. Goldman and Elizabeth Jensen contributed to this report.

Additional coverage of the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, along with photos, video and archival material, are available at: latimes.com/911.