I managed to stay away from my home on Roosevelt Island for more than a week after the terrible destruction that occurred on September 11th.  Then, nine days later, on September 20th I ventured in.  My Dad is 86 years old and lives in Queens.  I had been talking to him daily on the phone.  I knew he was all right, but I needed to see him.

I did not know, however, if I wanted to see the devastation of that neighborhood I am so very familiar with, that neighborhood I wander around in almost every day after work when I walk from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge.  I was scared to see in reality what I had seen on TV.

So I stayed uptown for the first two days getting my feet wet, getting back into a New York City that was irreparably changed.  Then, on the third day home, I ventured to Union Square to see the street activity my neighbor had told me about.  "It's like the sixties," she said.  And in a way it was.

Groups of people were playing music and singing solemnly.  Many were just wandering around.  There were signs and drawings depicting people's sorrow at the senseless death of the many workers in the Towers.  There were posters announcing future gatherings and town meetings.  There were pleas to the government to think outside the box, not to react to violence with more violence.  Some of these were written over with admonishments not to support the enemy by criticizing the government.

I had found a place in New York where people were coming together to express their remorse at the loss of so many lives, and to express their fear of further devastation.  I had found a place where people were expressing their sadness, and I needed that.  The overriding emotions I had been feeling were sadness and fear – sadness at the loss of so many lives and fear of the loss of so many more.  Milling around Union Square with its signs and posters expressing these very emotions gave me an infusion of a kind of peace and perhaps even a little strength.

Then a friend, who lives on Chambers Street a few blocks north of where the Towers stood, suggested I might want to see something very different.  I might want to see what is going on at ground zero.  I was immediately filled with trepidation.  I had kind of decided that I was not going to do that, that I was going to return to my beach house at the Jersey shore without having done that on this trip to New York.  Then, in a flash, I just knew I had to do it.  I had to see it with my own eyes, to try to somehow reconcile all the turbulent feelings inside me.

We walked down lower Broadway, which was packed with traffic.  A few blocks before we reached Canal Street, we could see the empty streets beyond, where no traffic was allowed.  It looked eerie and yet nice – calm and quiet – so unlike the streets of Manhattan.  I was flooded with memories of a night last December when my family and I went downtown after a major snowstorm and walked the eerily quiet streets in the whiteness of the newly-fallen snow with not a car in sight.  What a treat that was.  But somehow this was not a treat.  It was too ominous.  Knowing why the streets were so empty made it not something to be enjoyed, but rather an experience that somehow had to be endured and understood.

That was nothing compared to what came next.  Walking down to Duane Street, we came upon a second police barricade.  No one was allowed south of that point except those living there.  We joined the gawkers jammed up against the police barricade – adults and children alike trying to get a glimpse of the devastation.  Many were taking photos.  We could see the remains of building #7, the 50-story building that was the third to collapse.  It was charred and mangled. 

I stood there speechless, feeling a little foolish amid all those people straining to see the horror.  But when I said that to my friend, she replied that maybe they needed to see it to try to make some sense of it all.  And perhaps I did, too.

We were carded and allowed to pass through, since she resides down there.  The next two blocks going south were even more chilling.  Now only residents, of which there were few in the streets, and police and soldiers were to be seen – that and the hundreds of closed stores, many of which will never reopen.

As we plodded on I was thinking how hard it must be for my friend to live down here in the midst of this barrenness.  But the worst was yet to come.  Upon reaching Chambers Street I saw it – the DMZ.

A chain-link rent-a-fence was set up to close off everything beginning at the south side of Chambers Street.  Right across from my friend's building is the final barricade – the barricade closing off lower Manhattan from us all, the barricade drawing a line at the beginning of the crime scene.  It hit me hard.

Every day when my friend and her daughter leave their house they see this fence.  They see the soldiers, the police, the emergency vehicles.  They see it in front of their noses every day.  How can one survive that emotionally?

I declined the invitation to go upstairs, as I saw no reason to socialize under those circumstances.  I continued walking east on Chambers Street to Broadway, where you could then walk south to Fulton Street.  It got even worse.

At the corner of Broadway and Fulton, no one was allowed to stop, but anyone who wanted was allowed to take a photo as long as they would "keep walking."  There you could see the giant that was taken down.  Those majestic Towers were reduced to a pile of rubble no more than a few stories high.  It was inconceivable.

Even as I looked at it, even as I saw the empty space – the sky where the Towers used to rise – even as I looked at the blackened lower level where Borders Bookstore used to be, I was not believing that it was real.  I was looking at the empty space, but I was not believing that the Towers were gone.  It was just too much for my mind to process in that quick glimpse.  I needed more time, but we could not loiter.  We were told to keep moving.

As I shuffled with the crowd, I began to feel it in the air.  Handkerchiefs and face masks – in my case a tissue – were brought up to our mouths and noses.  The soot and dust of the rubble were heavy in the air here.  We veered farther east through the dark, narrow Wall Street area keeping our noses covered, keeping our mouths shut.  We were sobered by the sight, quiet as we moved away, needing to get back uptown, needing to get away from the horror we could not register in our brains.  The buildings there were covered with a gray dust.  Nothing had yet been done to clean them.  They showed the evidence we refused to swallow.

Now the streets of lower Manhattan are unclogged like the quiet streets of my beach town in winter.  There is more light now that the Towers are gone.  But at what a horrible price.

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