“The sublest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overheard, in the black headlines of the latest edition.”

10 years ago today this born-and-bred New Yorker was an early twentysomething who worked for a newspaper with “New York” in its name. He attended and reviewed nightly concerts of the Philharmonic he had grown up romanticizing at Lincoln Center. He rewatched films in old theaters with “Manhattan” in their title. A Woody Allen/Neil Simon disciple, he had dreams of making his life in the city, because of the city, listening to music about the city, creating within the boundless boundaries of the city.

He’d grown up reading the Times Magazine with his father, visiting the Met with his mother, seeing the Yankees lose with his friends. His maternal grandfather, a religious Jew who had escaped the Holocaust, took him for Coney Island hot dogs, even during Passover. 10 years ago today this young man watched Seinfeld reruns, wondering how the show could possibly appeal to anyone outside the metro area, so close did it hit home. He had attended college outside New York but could not stomach life elsewhere and returned promptly after some professional experimentation in the nation’s capital. Not even the pull of a high-paying national media job felt right on the Potomac river. America’s capitol was on the Hudson.

As I wrote on this website, later  in a book published by the site’s founder, about 9/11, I watched planes decimate the towers from a family home on Long Island. I had not yet stepped onto the train for a job interview that was supposed to happen that day in the financial district, two blocks from the towers. Later that day I watched a burly stock trader return to the suburbs covered in white powder. He could have been a baker or piece of art at the Brooklyn Museum. But he was not to be objectified. He was crying, tears melting the power away in choice spots on his sharky suit.

I didn’t cry on 9/11. I didn’t cry afterwards or feel particularly scared that the attacks would happen again. I was perhaps still fueled by the naïve invincibility of a young man who had just survived a near-death medical battle. But plenty of people, young and old and healthy, in New York felt as I did. The terrorists got lucky. It would never happen again. I’m not scared. I’m going to work. I’m going to that concert. Why are we going to war? This wasn’t an act of war, it was an act of serial murder.

Less than three years later I found myself living in Los Angeles, the polar opposite of New York City. I started a west-coast life despite having already met the lovely woman who would become my wife, who I left in New York, at least in body, to make my claim on the other coast. I moved from NY to LA for work, a different kind of life, less stress, more canyon. Not because New York no longer promised the hope it had instilled in me from birth. I wasn't scared to be in New York, after 9/11/01, throughout those few following years of multicolored terrorism-potential announcements (e.g., "Today's level: orange"). I didn't feel trapped on the subways, suddenly claustrophobic; that was just job-related tension. I didn’t think about what else could happen, if my parents were safe on Long Island, where so many people could become so easily trapped by another attack. I wasn’t terribly angry that Stockhausen, the avant-garde composer, had called 9/11 “the greatest work of art ever.” The guy wrote a quartet for helicopter.

I was living in denial, and I wasn’t the only one.

Plenty of young adults, right out of college, observed 9/11 in New York and subsequently journeyed to worlds beyond, in many cases, the west coast, California. One of my closest friends ended up in San Francisco by 2002. Another few went to Portland in 2003, and when I went to LA there were more recent New York transplants than the Jewish delis could handle.

Suddenly people were writing LA articles with anger about the bad bagels, worse pizza, lackluster Cantonese food in a city that set the stage for a film called “Chinatown.” This wasn’t the average NYC expat ragging that had gone on for decades. It was rage.

Soon, LA became what one prominent magazine called the new cultural capital of America. Did that have anything to do with how many New Yorkers flocked there in the years following 9/11? I am not a census-taker or infographic designer. I do not have the numbers. But all of a sudden there were better, if still inferior, bagels, attempts to make pizza with “New York Water,” an indie music scene that rivaled Brooklyn, pasta from Italians new to America who in decades prior might have went to New York straightaway.

Suddenly East Coast rap fused with West Coast, a savory beat-mash served up warm and fertile. Anything could happen in the design galleries, and before I could say Guggenheim the art museums of LA were written up everywhere. Hip young American adults were no longer going for New York-inspired loft-like or pre-war interiors; obsessed with midcentury modernism, as practiced by Richard Neutra and John Lautner, they were turning their apartments into 1960s California. Everyone bought Eames chairs and Saarinen furniture, and everyone gawked at Taschen books about Palm Springs living.

Where was New York?

It didn’t go anywhere, of course. I returned to visit many times, but now all my friends were gone. My family remained, but the young people who would become prominent artists, writers, musicians, technologists had moved on, lived. Young people still flocked to New York, but it was Gens Y and Z. Kids who were too disconnected from reality on 9/11/01 to know what they were moving into, the life that sent us across the country, away.

It was an adventure for this new crop of twentysomethings, something bold. To move to New York in the middle aughts or closer to 2010 seemed positively safe in its audaciousness. Anesthetics in the form of video games and bad 3D movies had already created a generation of new young New Yorkers who would make comfortable lives in the city because they feared nothing, felt less.

Tweeting out of a Bushwick apartment isn’t meeting every night for drinks in the same Tribeca bar, as my newspaper colleagues had liked to do. Digital, the virtual world and social networks, created a safety zone, an invisible buffer. Don’t leave your house as much, and your chances of being poisoned with Anthrax on the A Train decrease.

I recently returned from a week in New York. I sojourned there for my brother’s wedding. I quoted the aforementioned E.B. White essay in my Best Man’s Speech. I repeated the line: “No one should move to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”

That statement makes more sense now than ever. For no matter how much security-insulation our government-funded protectors wrap around the city, still America’s best, just getting by to see tomorrow is an entirely different kind of feat in 2011.

I long to return to New York but enjoy my California life too much. I’ve softened, weakened, calmed down. I’ve incorporated New York into my LA persona, and NYC Me works because it's real. My professional output shows changes, though: I don’t want and go for It as much. I meditate more. But I remain proud of the instinct to think critically, ask questions. That’s good in many respects; it sets me apart at times, reminds me where I’m from: what real people are like, and that I come from a place where you don't need a Ph.D. to have some sense about you. But I know that I’m quite different than I was 10 years ago, when I traded NYC air and clouds for LA sun and smog. I know that I'm more in-the-moment, more foggy, and less interested in performing, sharing. Now I watch "Manhattan" at home on a flatscreen next to windows with a view of the sun setting over the Pacific ocean; it's a little unholy. I wrote more, played more music, created more art, and had deeper conversations in New York before 9/11 than I did anywhere.

That will always be the truth. Until They hit the Hollywood Sign. Because, someday, They will.

Adam Baer (@glassshallot) is a writer in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in Harper's, the New York Times, and on NPR.

In a way, I coudn’t help myself. Anderson’s beautiful weirdness, melancholic narrative fog, and tales of co-dependence were good companions for someone who’d just moved to Manhattan and didn’t quite know how to get his life on some sort of track. Someone who just felt a little off. Someone with a few talents in his back pocket but little confidence that he still knew how to use them, or that he’d want to even if he could. Someone who longed to feel at home again — somewhere.

Which is why, when out of Saturday morning boredom I found myself driving downtown from my new neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, I began to think: Maybe I can find the Tenenbaum house, the actual one the movie was filmed in. Anderson had said it was in Harlem, and here I was — on Broadway between 125th and 150th — a view of the Hudson to my right, blocks and blocks of tree-lined streets to my left. City College was somewhere around here, I remembered. Maybe some nice brownstones were in the vicinity. The rooftop views of the river definitely came from this angle. And the streets were rather flat and green, not like the slopes west of Broadway. It has to be east.

“Between here and here,” I said to my friend, Lina, who looked like she thought I was psycho.

I made a left into the City College area and met my Manhattan real-estate dream: one gorgeous stone home after the other, replete with gothic architectural embellishments, gardens, and a feeling of solidity that made similar houses on the Upper West Side or in the Village look like garden sheds. From the look of it on film, the Tenenbaum house was a home I could live in, its attractive narrative symbolism and kitsch factor aside. The conical turrets, circular rooms, dark red blocks, and stylistic black iron gate made it seem like a fortress. Like a place that could protect you.

The only problem was that I’d probably never find it. There had to be a million of these houses in Manhattan, I thought. What really were the chances I’d make a random turn onto the right block?

Pretty good, as it turned out.

Rolling down the street at no more than five m.p.h., I pointed to a building.

“That’s it,” I said to Lina.

Look at the short half-block behind it. Picture the trees without leaves. The street empty. Ben Stiller tapping his chin as he peers down at the street from a third-floor window. Owen Wilson crashing into the front gate in a vintage convertible. Luke Wilson letting his falcon go from the elaborately tiled roof. Gene Hackman hiding behind the huge built-in staircase, ready to surprise someone with the line: “I’m not talkin’ about… dance lessons. I’m talkin’ about… puttin’ a brick through the other guy’s windshield; I’m talkin’ about… taking it out and choppin’it up.”

Lina agreed this was the place and I parked. We got out and walked toward the house. I noticed that the windows had blue-taped outlines, that the doors were brand new but designed to appear very old, and the front yard looked as if it had been gutted of foliage. On the side of the house were a few planks of wood and a construction hat. And on the windows were white pieces of paper that said New York City would allow the house to be converted into a two-family dwelling following a substantial renovation.

I walked up the stairs and peeked through the mail slot, to see a very familiar wood-paneled foyer.

“Put your hand in there and see if you can unlock the door,” I said.

Lina gave me another look, then bent down and slid her hand in.

“There’s something blocking the lock,” she said.

We descended the stairs. No breaking and entering today.

Then I saw a woman with a laundry bag exit the building next door.

“Did someone shoot a movie in this house a year or two ago?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” she said. “Something with Gwyneth Paltrow. I heard it was supposed to be funny.”

Some thirty minutes later, after a layover in a home built by Alexander Hamilton, now a museum, Lina and I returned to the Tenenbaum house, still determined to find our way in. Waiting was smart: A man with a beeper and work gloves was there, carrying in wood and construction materials. Lina and I decided to go for it.

He opened the door after a few knocks. He didn’t look surprised. Lina mumbled something about an interest in real estate, feigned surprise, as if we were at the wrong house. “Wait,” I said, speaking pre-arranged lines, “is this house that Wes Anderson –”

“Yeah,” said the man, scrunching up his eyes but still managing to appear friendly.

“Are you renovating it?” I asked.

“Yeah, I own it.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling a little silly at this point.

“Are you looking for an apartment?” he asked.

“Are you renting one?”

“We’re splitting the place up into a two-family. But there’s one rental unit in the back with a separate entrance.”

The man showd me the rental, where Richie, the Luke Wilson character, came in through a back window after checking himself out of the hospital. I asked the man if we could tour the house, maybe even peek upstairs. He said yes. Lina and I followed him inside and walked around the foyer. We saw the makeshift phonebooth where Angelica Houston spoke Italian. The living room where Gwyneth and Luke listened to the Stones together in a tent. The closet full of board games where Ben Stiller hid Gene Hackman’s stuffed Javalina and Dalmatian mice ran free. It was all there, despite the new flooring, and a massive amount of new decorative woodwork and restructuring.

“How’d your house end up in the movie?”

“One day I came home and there was a note from Wes in my mailbox,” he said. “Simple as that.”

“You only dealt with him?”

“Yeah. Very nice, very down-to-earth guy. Paid in cash.”

“People love the movie in part because of all the cool things he did to your house,” I said. “He’s pretty interested in the details.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t that hard undoing it all. Disney paid for it. Decent job, they did.”

My inner groupie was on fire.

“So are you really interested in the apartment?” he said, perhaps knowing the real reason I was standing in his living room.

“Well, I just moved into a new place not long ago, but I’ve always wanted to live somewhere like this.”

“That’s how me and my wife felt when we first saw it, too,” the man said as he took down my name and number. “There’s something about it. It just sort of feels the way a home should.”

I looked at him and smiled. Then I looked around the house again and realized that it was just that: a house – someone else’s. My new home was waiting for me fifty blocks north, ready to be a character in my life. Suddenly, the quest was over. The credits rolled.

It started as child, thrust into a culture that coddled me. My friends never understood why I, as a music student, craved visits to the city. To them, Long Island offered everything Manhattan did with added bonuses: sprawling houses, trees, yacht clubs, beaches, and clay tennis courts.

But Long Island also offered something else the city couldn’t, something which drove our parents to raise us here, something I’d taken for granted until now: safety.

I haven’t been in Manhattan for over a week. I was supposed to travel in this past Tuesday–to take the LIRR commuter train 45 minutes or so into Penn Station at 34th Street and 7th Avenue–for a job interview. That is, until my mother called at around 9 am.

“A plane crashed into the Twin Towers.”

Immediately, I discounted her concern. My mother doesn’t like to drive in the rain; my parents cancelled a trip to California this summer, fearful of experiencing a power outage.

Then, however, I turned on the radio, got acquainted with the truth, and, like a native Long Islander, averted danger, canceling my interview via e-mail before the second plane hit. I would not be putting myself in harm’s way today, I said to myself. I’m not going anywhere near that city.

Some people–and rightfully so–consider the life of a freelance writer a boring one, an existence that doesn’t make for riveting reflection. We awake, drink coffee, visit the gym, return home, check our e-mail, surf the Net, and finish whatever assignment we’re currently at work on.

The problem with that existence, though, the riveting nature of it, this time–living on Long Island and being a freelance writer who considers himself a New Yorker–is that I haven’t been able to pull myself away from the one channel–CBS 2–my television currently receives. I haven’t been able to stop viewing what I, and my locale, have sheltered me from. I watch all day and night. And I’m not planning to stop.

Like many people, I saw Tower 2 leveled live from the safety of my suburb. And since, I’ve had a sharp pain in my left shoulder, right at its meeting-point with my neck, been short of breath, and mildly nauseated. Why? Not entirely because of the tragedy. Because I can’t feel what I should about it, because I’m not there, because I can’t really help.

See, I can’t give blood (health reasons). I write about the arts and technology (not news). And I live on Long Island, to boot, a strip of land safely cut off from the city.

Am I still a New Yorker? Part of what’s happened? Or a spoiled bystander?

I’m told not to donate food or clothes. The Red Cross doesn’t need it.

So what’s a guilty Long Islander to do besides donate cash?

My answer? Watch. Listen to the same information reported over and over again. Meet those who recount their escape. Force myself to experience the pain of my neighbors until my eyes give out on me.

It’s a small price to pay for safety.

Adam Baer writes for The New York Times, Slate, NPR, and various other publications.

My car is one of four in the lot that does not have an American flag affixed to it in some way. It’s weird, but I’m sort of proud.

Since the redneck rhetoric of President Bush has permanently ingrained itself in Long Island’s collective entertainment center–oops! I mean unconscious–it has become the thing to do, the thing to be, this patriotism. Before, Long Island was about simpler things. Nice cars. El Salvadorian cleaning ladies. Seafood. Strip Malls. New homes designed by general contractors from the Tony Soprano School of Masonry.

I’ve come to the market to fetch this homeopathic remedy I’ve started to need. I live about thirty minutes from the Fresh Fields. My neighborhood’s a little less tasteful. More Chevy Suburbans and Mercedes tanks, less Jaguars and James Bond BMWs. It’s not any different there, though. Almost every splanch or neo-colonial has a flag waving in front of it, its post stabbed into the peat moss of its front-yard botanical garden. Patriotism abounds. We are brothers. And yet I’m still cut off by a forty-year-old fake blonde in a Jeep Cherokee before passing the first intersection of my development.

I know it’s probably bullshit, but the medicine I’m here to buy works. It’s for that reason I’ve decided to embrace the psychosomatic tendencies of driving thirty minutes for little pills filled with an herb I don’t know anything about. My ailments disappear when I take these pills. I’ve been taking them now for three months and have not developed a symptom since.

Inside the Fresh Fields, things are quiet. I wonder if I should buy fish for dinner. It’s been a while since I’ve had fish. Fish feign camaraderie. A school of fish, right? That’s how they swim.

What does the American flag show support for? It’s too easy to say “America.” Are Long Islanders overnight flag-wavers because they were shopping for Chilean sea bass and homeopathic remedies when they heard the two skyscrapers their neighbor’s friend’s wife worked in were leveled to the ground?

I happen to think that the flag doesn’t show support for the loss America incurred. It shows support for America’s collective attitude about what happened. And since America’s collective attitude about what happened–its public attitude, that is–has to be that of George W. Bush’s, then, to me, these flags support the fact that George Bush wants Osama Bin Ladin “dead or alive” and that our country accepts the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center as an “act of war” and that we are ready to bomb the people who did this, and that they are a people, even though they’re not a nation, and that we are ready to hurt the innocents who live near them too. Because we lost more people in the World Trade Center, more Americans, than in a single historic battle.

So the American flag means militancy. And this, for the first time in our lives, is something that we’re supposed to feel, supposed to support. It’s alright to want people dead. They killed us.

I don’t know. I feel empty as the man behind the counter weighs my pound of snow-white fish flesh. Two minutes later, I’m back in the herbal remedies section. Maybe there’s a pill for this.