You are currently browsing the stories about the “World Trade Center” neighborhood.
They say everything happens for a reason. Construction began on the World Trade Center in August of 1968. Some months before that when I was in the second grade, our teacher, Miss Spellman, handed out a Weekly Reader, an eight-page magazine with short articles designed to encourage the habit of reading in elementary school students. The only story from [...]
As the wheels hit the ground and the pilot stopped the airplane at Newark airport, I felt right at home. I was landing in the city that was going to be my new home, at least for a couple of years. People had always told me that I should live in New York once, but leave before the city made me [...]
I stumbled bleary-eyed out of my building still hours before the sun would rise over the East River. Allen Street was black and still. The bars were closed and the morning rush hadn’t yet begun. The homeless slept soundly in the street-median park. Waiting in her car in front of my building was Maggie, 40ish with a bowl cut and [...]
I’d just spent a month back in Kentucky, trying it on like an old outfit to see if it still fit. I was unemployed, unattached, poor, frustrated, and I wanted to make sure living in the most complicated, and challenging, city in the world was still worth it. I contemplated this as the plane bisected the isle of Manhattan. For [...]
In 2002 we published Before & After: Stories from New York; a collection of stories in two halves - the first taking place in the city before the 9/11 attacks, the second being comprised of testimonials from the day itself and its immediate aftermath. Recently, we asked for submissions for the site, to explore the evolution of emotions which surround [...]
September 2010 Dear Jon, They want to build a mosque where you were murdered. I want to do the right thing. So I’m having a debate in my head taking on the two sides. What would you want I wonder. See, that’s the hard thing. I’d think after knowing you for such a long time, it would be easy to [...]
I was born in Manhattan, have lived there most of my life, but my last look at the twin towers of the World Trade Center was from the front deck of a Staten Island ferry moving through the dark waters after a Staten Island Yankees night game, July, 2001. I’d boarded the boat alone, was somehow all alone on the [...]
She was my cousin, in that by-the-way, six times removed way that a lot of cousins seem to be in the Jamaican-American Seventh-day Adventist community. You find one another when you’re 12 or 14 because everyone migrates to the same part of New York, belongs to the same cluster of churches, drive upstate every spring for camp meeting; you run [...]
An Update to my April 2002 story, The Visit. For me, a native Manhattanite who has never in my 72 years been off the island for more than two consecutive months, normalcy has never returned since 9.11. There's a permanent emptiness in the skyline - the towers missing from the views from the Throgg's Neck Bridge, from Ellis Island and [...]
The thing that intrigues me about photographs is not the spontaneity in which they’re taken, nor the way they freeze time, but the fact that in the split second when the shutter snaps, one doesn’t know which moments will become meaningful until much later. Capturing chance moments and random events, we can’t know the value of an image until life [...]
Their hands were clasped. She had on a skirt suit and he had a tie around his neck. In my mind, their arms are down, right hand holding left between the balls of their hips. But I know this can’t be right. Another impossibility: her hair. It was long, brown, and fell below her shoulders. But her hair, like their [...]
These pictures were taken from Spring Street and Lafayette Street. And some from "before..."
Dear Jon, An airplane crashes into The World Trade Center where you’ve been working for only six days. 97th floor. We are told— incinerated. A friend calls to wake me— turn on the radio. I get through to Erika and ask her how she is. It’s not me, it’s Jon. A memorial service, suicide attempts, rage, denial— grief’s harder to [...]
With the groundbreaking of the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero, this past Fourth of July marked the latest phase of post- 9-11 recovery. “As we commemorate the foundation of our nation we will lay the foundation for our resurgence,” Gov. George Pataki hopefully explained about the event. But while Pataki may feel it is high time for new beginnings, to [...]
The View From the Seventieth Floor by Sandy Gelpieryn Death Masks at Ground Zero by Kendra Hurley The Numbers by Bryan Charles The View From Silver Lake Park by Gabrielle Walter Don't Look Back by Kevin McLeod Scenes From The Brooklyn Bridge by Jim Merlis The View From Long Island Part Ii by Adam Baer Ob Gyn Wtc by [...]
Another September as bright as a dime. Another morning of clear air, another day of hearing shrieking jets and watching strangers acting strange in the streets. Another day of firefighters in their FDNY T-shirts and brotherhoods of policemen in their dress blues, this time like old war veterans dressed up for the parade, assuming a public identity that seemed to [...]
I am not a firefighter, police officer or paramedic, but when a nurse at the Red Cross barricade mistook me for one and asked, "Are you coming?" I said, "Yes." That was 8:45 P.M. on September 11th. What followed was a two-day odyssey at Ground Zero. I worked with many good-willed people on bucket brigades and setting up triages. I [...]
I am a skeptic when it comes to psychics like John Edward, the hunky television charlatan, who claims he is able to communicate with “The Other Side.” When I have a premonition I tend to deny it. I denied one in late August of last year when I was seven months pregnant. While organizing my wallet, I paused on two [...]
Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood was started in the year 2000, and we have published many stories about what happened in New York on 9/11/2001 and the months that followed. Today is the 24th anniversary of that day. This story was first published on March 11, 2002. (JM) Here was a morning like any other. I got up at 6:40, took a [...]
It's a trick of the light. Depending on where you stand, the "Tribute in Light" memorial looks more like a pillar of fire descending from heaven than a recreation of the World Trade Center. You’d be forgiven if, after 9/11, you thought you’d never crane your neck to look that high up again, because there it is, against all gods, [...]
My class started the fall semester in the beautiful rooms of newly renovated Fiterman Hall, the south annex of Borough of Manhattan Community College, and finished in a trailer on West Street across from the barge port where trucks dump debris from the World Trade Center. "Have a good weekend and keep up with your reading," I said to my [...]
"America. Boom. America. Boom. Boeki Centaa. Boom." During my time in Japan, I had grown quite used to not understanding what the hell people were trying to tell me. But this was a new one. Usually you can decipher the broken English of the Japanese by taking an abstract view of the words and changing a few L's and R's [...]
Some South Jersey friends and I have a Christmas evening tradition of ditching our families and meeting for drinks in a dive near Atlantic City. There was a time when most of us lived in New York, but we’ve since scattered, some further afield and others, like my friend Paul, back to NJ. This year talk turned inevitably to September [...]
Two weeks after the shock of September 11th, I was sent to "ground zero" by the Parks Department Commissioner to make a quick evaluation of the damage to the plant life in the area. The Commissioner wanted to know what had survived, what plants would need to be replaced, how much it would all cost. He was eager to help [...]
“Spirit is Life. It flows thru the death of me endlessly like a river unafraid of becoming the sea”--Gregory Corso I ate my breakfast at a leisurely pace, mopping up the last traces of ketchup on the plate with my muffin. Glancing at the clock on the wall, I saw that it was eight forty five. A moment or two [...]
It was supposed to start with a mandated early-morning appointment with an "employment specialist" from the New York Department of Labor and end with me shaking my ass to minimal techno at Centro-Fly. Between these, I was going to vote in the primaries, work at the international DJ academy, and see Matthew Herbert, on of this year's best musicians, perform [...]
My grandfather, a Russian-Jewish émigré and New York painter named Raphael Soyer, used to say, in his wonderful old-world accent, “New York is my country.” The year 2001 finds me living in Boston in the eighteenth year of my self-imposed exile from the island of Manhattan, the village of my childhood. I am the only one in my family to [...]
It is Rosh Hashanah. Today I learned that my father was named for his grandfather, a pious Ocean Avenue Jew my father does not remember. Still, he carries the name: a mysterious, permanent burden attached to so many of the tribe. We are named only for the dead, never the living, so as not to risk confusing the angel of [...]
There is the sense that we are doing something wrong, Diana Wall and I, as we walk south from Franklin Street toward what is arguably Manhattan’s most compelling dig site, the hill of rubble that was, until recently, the World Trade Center. Wall is a New York-based archaeologist, whose book, "Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York," co-authored with Anne-Marie [...]
I came from Chicago to do a reading on Thursday. The guy I was staying with, Bryan, couldn't make it, so I arranged to meet him at the World Trade Center the next day--he worked for Morgan Stanley on the 70th floor of the 2nd tower. At about 5:00 I waited for him with my friend Jay. We ate Krispy [...]
In the silence, ash and smoke and dust snowing down, right before I felt and heard the second collapse, there was the teenage girl, with blond hair that should have been shining in the sun but for the pieces of the Towers in the air, and hiphuggers, and a boyfriend listening to her read from Revelations. I walked past them [...]
On the first day of October, the Windows on the World community held a memorial service for those lost in the WTC tragedy. Held at the breathtaking and enormous Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the simple and touching service managed to make everyone feel as one in love, loss and sorrow. The renowned restaurant also had many fans who [...]
A friend of mine in Seattle recently sent me an email, asking me how I was doing in these weeks after September 11th. She wrote me the following: "I imagine you’ve been dealing with the horrific events in NYC since the 11th -- I’ve been thinking about you. Where is the Comedy Central bldg in relation to ground zero (do [...]
I remember... the sound and the smoke... the terror of the crowds rushing past... a dark cloud billowing toward me in a wave of debris, determined, absolute... Searching for a meaning in this memory, I look at other stories born on September 11 and see a shared vocabulary that is at once horrifying and epiphanic: "It was the apocalypse." "Like [...]
I worked on the 54th Floor World Trade Center 2. On Tuesday 9/11, I was on the plaza of the World Trade Center when I saw the first plane hit WTC 1. It was 8:43 am. Since Labor Day we had been very busy and the entire office had been arriving very early for work. On Monday 9/10 I worked [...]
« Older Entries
