Posted on: Sunday, March 10, 2002
THE SEPTEMBER 11TH ATTACK | SIX MONTHS LATER
Residents weary of influx of tourists
| • | Six months after Sept. 11, a new kind of normal |
| • | Getting back to business |
| • | Rudy Giuliani: Americans remain unterrorized |
By Greg Barrett
Gannett News Service
NEW YORK — Six months later, Ground Zero has become a home video.
This depresses one so young as New York's Betsy Costikyan. She was 12 years old and in school three blocks away when that first jet exploded into the first tower of the World Trade Center. She was walking the streets leading out of Lower Manhattan when she saw the second tower implode.
And she is standing at a street corner near the World Trade Center site when she has finally seen enough. It's a blustery March day and the wait is one hour for tourists to view the bland remains of Sept. 11. The ground is flat, most of the debris is gone, and the bulldozers and cranes go about the day's work in a way that would be unremarkable in any other place.
Yet people jockey for a view and Betsy sounds disgusted: "All they can do is mourn the loss of people. All they can see is the loss of buildings. They can't understand."
This is her neighborhood and she wants it back. She wishes for it to all go away. The tourists. The media. The carnival atmosphere. She is unhappy with us all.
Thank heavens she didn't hear the guy who was scalping a free ticket to the Ground Zero viewing ramp for $5.
Anyone who didn't live within earshot of the attacks can't understand what this neighborhood called Battery Park City once was, and what was lost, she believes. Betsy has lived the vibrant life next to the World Financial Center, which once stood next to the bustling World Trade Center, which now seems like something from many lifetimes ago — which, sadly, it was.
She is standing in line at the Ground Zero viewing ramp just for an opportunity to see what all the fuss is about. People with digital cameras and disposable cameras and video cameras are crammed to the curb. Betsy will be bumped and jostled making her way up the ramp.
She tries over and over to put words to her feelings and then stops, frustrated, even though she is considered her family's poet. Her father's girlfriend later explains:
"You see, people coming down here, even the relatives of the victims, don't have a concept of what this was as a neighborhood, and that people actually live here," says Eleanor Lang, who saw the second tower pancake and then crest toward her, and who still flinches at most sounds overhead."People don't understand what it is like to have your neighborhood attacked. ... To be personally attacked."
To Betsy, in ways far more subtle and benign, it feels like the neighborhood is still being attacked.
Many of the tourists crowding her on the ramp are quiet and reverent; others are loud and rude. Lines are skipped, elbows and hips are plied as crowbars. The occasional laughter sounds boisterous and wildly inappropriate.
Across the street from the ramp is a prayer kiosk. Strung along the wrought iron fences of the adjoining St. Paul's Chapel are T-shirts from fire stations nationwide, and baseball caps and stuffed animals and origami and flags and banners.
The scripture, the prayers, the tributes, the gifts are desperate attempts to personally connect with something that is impossible to know, Betsy says. Both Betsy and Lang believe you can't fully know Sept. 11 unless you lived it and survived it.
Early in the morning of Sept. 11, as Betsy's mother was driving her to school, Betsy told her, "I can't imagine living anywhere but in New York."
That was before the attacks. Before the neighborhood burned for months. Before the street merchants began hawking photos of something dubbed Ground Zero.
"I still can't imagine living anywhere else," she says today.
Lang smiles.
"Good for you."
