American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  People who came to the site in those early days often had the same first sensation, of leaving the city and walking into a dream. Many also felt when they saw the extent of the destruction that they had stumbled into a war zone. “It’s like something you’d see in the movies,” people said. Probably so, but my own reaction was different when I first went in, soon after the attacks. After years of traveling through the back corners of the world, I had an unexpected sense not of the strangeness of this scene but of its familiarity. Wading through the debris on the streets, climbing through the newly torn landscapes, breathing in the mixture of smoke and dust, it was as if I had wandered again into the special havoc that failing societies tend to visit upon themselves. This time they had visited it upon us. The message seemed to be “Here’s a sample of our political science.” I was impressed by how faithfully the effects had been reproduced on the ground.

  But you could never confuse New York with a back corner of the world, and the ruins did not actually look like a war zone either. There was sadness to the site, to be sure, and anger, but there was none of the emptiness—the ghostly quality of abandonment—that lurks in the aftermath of battle. In fact, quite the opposite quality materialized here: within hours of the collapse, as the rescuers rushed in and resources were marshaled, the disaster was smothered in an exuberant and distinctly American embrace. Despite the apocalyptic nature of the scene, the response was unhesitant and almost childishly optimistic: it was simply understood that you would find survivors, and then that you would find the dead, and that this would help their families to get on with their lives, and that your resources were unlimited, and that you would work night and day to clean up the mess, and that this would allow the world’s greatest city to rebuild quickly, and maybe even to make itself into something better than before. From the first hours these assumptions were never far away.

  For a few days the site was out of control. The bucket brigades were ineffectual, and barely scratched the surface of the ruins—not through lack of trying, God knows, but because of the overwhelming weight of the debris. In the end it probably didn’t matter, because, as later became apparent, the dead did not die lingering deaths. At the time, however, this was neither known nor knowable. Very little was. Rumors swept the exhausted crowds of workers, and on multiple occasions caused dangerous stampedes away from the imagined reach of One Liberty Plaza, a perfectly sound building that was said to be falling. People were hurt in those panics. There were too many volunteers and too few heavy machines.

  But then, rather quickly, a crude management structure was agreed upon, and most of the volunteers were eased out to the ruins’ periphery, to be replaced at the core by a professional labor force that might loosely respond to direction—firemen and cops on overtime, structural and civil engineers, and up to 3,000 unionized construction workers.

  The city government ran the show. The agency charged with managing the physical work was an unlikely one. It was the Department of Design and Construction (DDC), an obscure bureaucracy 1,300 strong whose normal responsibility was to oversee municipal construction contracts—for sidewalk and street repairs, jails, and the like—and whose offices were not even in Manhattan but in Queens. The DDC was given the lead for the simple reason that its two top officials, a man named Kenneth Holden and his lieutenant, Michael Burton, had emerged from the chaos of September 11 as the most effective of the responders. Now they found themselves running a billion-dollar operation with the focus of the nation upon them.

  Nearly everyone at the site was well paid. The money for the effort came from federal emergency funds, and it flowed freely. But despite some cases of corruption and greed, money was not the main motivation here—at least not until almost the end. Throughout the winter and into the spring the workers rarely forgot the original act of aggression, or the fact that nearly 3,000 people had died there, including the friends and relatives of some who were toiling in the debris. They were reminded of this constantly, not only by the frequent discovery of human remains, and the somber visits from grieving families, but also by the emotional response of America as a whole, and the powerful new iconography that was associated with the disaster—these New York firemen as tragic heroes, these skeletal walls, these smoking ruins as America’s hallowed ground. Whether correctly or not, the workers believed that an important piece of history was playing out, and they wanted to participate in it—often fervently, and past the point of fatigue. From the start that was the norm. There were some who could not stand the stress, and they had to leave. But among the thousands who stayed, almost all sought greater involvement rather than less.

  The truth is that people relished the experience. It’s obvious that they would never have wished this calamity on themselves or others, but inside the perimeter lines and beyond the public’s view it served for many of them as an unexpected liberation—a national tragedy, to be sure, but one that was contained, unambiguous, and surprisingly energizing. Was this not war, after all? Probably it was, though at some early and willing stage of the fight: the workers believed wholeheartedly that they were righting a wrong, and that it was their duty to act quickly. The urgency of the job swept away ordinary responsibilities and the everyday dullness of family life, and it made nonsense of office paperwork and tedious professional routines. Traditional hierarchies broke down too. The problems that had to be solved were largely unprecedented. Action and invention were required on every level, often with no need or possibility of asking permission. As a result, within the vital new culture that grew up at the Trade Center site even the lowliest laborers and firemen were given power. Many of them rose to it, and some of them sank. Among those who gained the greatest influence were people without previous rank who discovered balance and ability within themselves, and who in turn were discovered by others. The unexpected ones were front-line firemen and construction workers, young engineers, and obscure city employees. Their success in the midst of chaos was an odd twist in the story of these monolithic buildings that in the final stretch of the twentieth century had stood so visibly for the totalitarian ideals of planning and control. But the buildings were not buildings anymore, and the place where they fell had become a blank slate for the United States. Among the ruins now, an unscripted experiment in American life had gotten under way.

  The site roared twenty-four hours a day for nine full months and beyond. From autumn through winter and into spring the crews labored in twelve-hour shifts, got some sleep, and came back for more. The enormous scale of their workplace is difficult to convey. Under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s insistence that New York return quickly to normal, the restricted zone had shrunk by late September to forty downtown blocks bounded by Chambers, Broadway, Rector, and the Hudson River—which was still a large area to be out of commission. At the heart of it, under the skeletal walls rising to 150 feet above the street, the debris spread across seventeen acres in smoldering mounds. It was dangerous ground, of course. Workers at the site called it simply “the pile.” In detail the topography was complex, with strange craters and caves, unstable cliffs, and unexpected remnants of the World Trade Center as it had been before—the torn sculptural sphere on the ruined plaza, the amputated stores with their displays of goods no longer for sale, a row of bicycles still securely chained to a rack, a lamppost here or there still standing.

  Passersby peering at the ruins from afar, from beyond the perimeter fences along Broadway or Chambers, sometimes expressed amazement that two 110-story buildings could collapse into a mass that was relatively so small. But there was no mystery to the dimensions. Because the Twin Towers had been as much as 90 percent air and 10 percent structure, they had contained the equivalent of approximately eleven solid stories of steel and concrete—and beneath these uneven mounds, which stood five stories high and spilled into the streets, their remnants filled the foundation hole to bedrock, six levels down.

  Indeed, from the workers’ close-in view, the ruins accounted for the former buildings all too precisely. It bec
ame apparent that the initial release of powdered concrete into the air, however large it had been, had amounted to an insignificant proportion of the total weight, and that almost every pound of the original structure remained to be extracted, inspected, and hauled away. So the ruins were not small at all. On the scale of people at the site they were in fact gargantuan—not mounds but mountains that reduced the expeditions venturing out across them to ant-sized columns traversing steel slopes. More than 1.5 million tons of heavy steel and debris lay densely compacted there, tied together like steel wool and complicated by the existence of human remains.

  The weight alone defied imagination. What does a chaos of 1.5 million tons really mean? What does it even look like? The scene up close was so large that no one quite knew. In other countries clear answers would have been sought before action was taken. Learned committees would have been formed, and high authorities consulted. The ruins would have been pondered, and a tightly scripted response would have been imposed. Barring that, soldiers would have assumed control. But for whatever reasons, probably cultural, probably profound, little of the sort happened here, where the learned committees were excluded, and the soldiers were relegated to the unhappy role of guarding the perimeter, and civilians in heavy machines simply rolled in and took on the unknown.

  The most effective of these machines were giant diesel excavators—tracked monsters with hydraulic arms and grappler claws that could tear tangles or close around sections of heavy beams and worry them clear of the pile’s embrace. They were voracious, incautious, ignorant, and unstoppable. Soon there were dozens of them in action, painted orange or yellow, working in tandem to “daisy chain” the debris down to the trucking operation in the streets, straining under their loads, with smoke and dust rising around them, and flames licking their claws. For months this was how the unbuilding went—like a dance of dinosaurs in a volcanic land of steel, with men there too, moving through, restlessly searching for their kind. The effects were astonishing. Though the enormousness of the ruins made the final goal of “a clean hole” seem remote and difficult to imagine, the surface features of the pile changed so fast that time itself was compressed, and memories just a week old grew faint. People got caught up in that. Many of the core group were camped in hotels or temporary apartments nearby. The smart ones reminded themselves that they had recently led ordinary lives, and that they would return to them. But weeks felt like months, and months felt like years, and as winter came, it was ordinary life, and not the site, that began to seem dreamlike and far away.

  Early on I found a piece of high ground from which to watch the changes taking place. It was inside the severely damaged and deserted Bankers Trust building, a black steel structure forty floors high, which stood across Liberty Street from the ruins and was eventually draped in dark safety netting and hung with a large American flag. In 1999 the German company Deutsche Bank had absorbed the Bankers Trust Corporation, and with it had acquired this building, whose offices it had occupied until the attack. During the South Tower’s collapse steel spears and column sections had plunged into Bankers Trust, tearing a huge gash in its north face, destroying a load-bearing column for ten floors, spilling tons of office innards, and leaving the partially demolished floor slabs to sag like hammocks over a deadly void. In a crater at the base a mound of rubble lay laced with the remains of people who had been killed in the South Tower or on the street. There was serious concern at first that the building would not stand, but it did, and sturdily, because of redundancies in its design. The back offices, away from the Trade Center, were fine. Apparently only one person had died inside. Firemen checked the empty spaces quickly, leaving their fluorescent-orange graffiti—SEARCHED—on each floor. In the dust that coated one wood-paneled wall someone, I assumed from the Boston Fire Department, drew a sad face and scrawled,

  Kill All Muslims

  9-11-01

  B.F.D.

  Then for a long time the Bankers Trust building was left alone.

  I went there first one afternoon, and climbed a broken escalator to a ruined entranceway that was lit through blasted walls and shattered windows, and strewn with rubble. The air inside was hazy with smoke from the fires across the street. Wearing gloves and a rubber respirator mask, I stirred through the rubble like an archaeologist on contaminated ground, searching for traces of its former inhabitants—in this case the bankers of just a few weeks before. The search was disappointing, because the forces of destruction had swept the entranceway clear of their presence. But then I climbed a dead dark stairwell, and several floors higher emerged into a scene richly preserved from their lives.

  It was the Deutsche Bank executive dining area, torn open at one end and covered in the gray Trade Center dust, but otherwise intact—a narrow hallway, hung with art, giving onto a string of small private dining rooms that were acoustically damped and intended to facilitate privileged conversation. In a foyer, by a vase of plastic flowers, a menu dated September 11, 2001, showed the morning’s breakfast: smoked-salmon omelets and chocolate-filled pancakes, among other offerings. The business cards of the host, a man named Mohamed Idrissi, lay on a countertop next to a telephone and a closed reservation book. I explored the hallway, moving carefully out of respect for the museumlike quality of the scenes, some of which, judging from the pristine condition of the dust, had remained untouched since the Trade Center’s collapse. Each little dining room was furnished austerely with a table and four straight-backed chairs, a button for summoning service, and a telephone. It was clear that most of the rooms had been unoccupied at the time of the attack. They were set for lunch—with fresh place mats, plates and utensils, and sets of stemmed glasses, some of which had been capsized and broken by the pressure waves and lay now as they had fallen, like everything else here, under a feathery gauze of the Twin Towers’ remains.

  Down the hallway I discovered a dining room that had been in use, evidently by two people, whose breakfast still sat on the table as they had left it. At the center of the table was a platter of fruit—oranges, apples, and a stem of withering grapes. Beyond it lay the remains of the meal in progress—an omelet mostly eaten, a bowl of cereal mostly not, pastries in a napkin bed, two nearly finished coffees (one creamy, one black), two types of sugar cubes (both brown and white), a toasted English muffin, four little unopened jars of jam, a display of artfully overlaid butter patties, and two glasses of orange juice, half drunk and now darkening with age. The former occupants had a ghostly presence that was hinted at by the patterns they had left behind. They seemed to have maintained their poise at the time of their escape. The silverware was laid carefully aside, the napkins were on the table, the chairs were pushed just slightly back. It looked as if they had slipped politely away. It appeared to be a mutual thing, as if they had encouraged in each other a sense of decorum and calm.

  The opposite was true at the end of the hall, where in a conference room I came upon a scene of mass panic and flight. It was the remnant of a breakfast meeting for about twenty people—a U-shaped array of tables facing a display board, and a varied buffet with the food looking almost still edible. Somehow the attendees must have known that the evacuation was no drill. In their haste to escape they had abandoned their briefcases and overnight bags, and even dropped some car keys and purses. I poked through the detritus, knowing from the disturbed dust that I was not the first visitor to have done so. Indeed, it became obvious from the traces where laptops had been, and from all the opened bags, that the room had been systematically rifled for valuables—whether by errant firemen, policemen, or construction workers hardly mattered. All three groups were at various times implicated in a widespread pattern of looting that started even before the towers fell, and was to peak around Christmas with the brazen theft of office computers from this very building. The psychology involved was complex, and had more to do with the breakdown of the social order—a sense of crisis and of special privilege—than with any particularly criminal inclination to steal. People urinated on the carp
ets in Deutsche Bank as well. And presumably the same people who had robbed this room had also written “Fuck Bin Laden” on the display board, because a righteous sense of war was part of the package too.

  But to me none of that seemed important anyway. Whether they had been violated or remained pure, the Deutsche Bank dining rooms were artifacts from an event that, within the inner world of the World Trade Center, seemed already to exist in distant history. Through the winter I kept returning to them, these set pieces from the past, and with every visit I felt satisfaction that they remained untouched. The pastries petrified. The juices slowly evaporated and, like the coffee, turned into black crusts. The fresh fruits fermented. For a while they were infested with gnats and other bugs, and then not. I never found out why the rooms were neglected, in part because Deutsche Bank responded to the September 11 attacks in a cowed Neither-we-nor-our-employees-will-comment style. The City of New York eventually shored up Bankers Trust for the safety of the streets below, but otherwise the building was left alone. No one was sure whether ultimately it would be torn down or restored; stories flew back and forth, and settled finally on a rumor about an insurance standoff over mold.

  Fine. Bankers Trust was at its best as a ghost building anyway. You could use it to go back in time to a little bridge that spanned a sudden change in the story of the United States—not the grand “loss of innocence” proclaimed that fall in the press but, more modestly, a shift from an era of complacency preceding the attack to a period of creative turbulence just afterward. You could also then go upstairs, stand in the building’s open wound, and look out at the turbulence in action across the magnificent smoking terrain of the Trade Center site—this ever changing American geography. If there were others standing beside you, the conversation would often be about memory. Do you remember when the pile was high, and then higher than now? When all the skeletal walls stood, or when one or another came down? When the upper road was built, or the lower road, or the first Tully ramp, or the second? When the Liberty Street wall sagged, or when the outline of the foundation hole became visible from above, or when we dove underground along the east wall by the escalator box—where is that now? Do you remember the day when there were twenty bodies, and the week when there were none? Or even, Do you remember the Twin Towers themselves? Can you really quite imagine them anymore?