American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  The larger mood at the site was based more on the recovery process itself than on the attack, and it was a complex mixture of nostalgia, satisfaction, and regret. People felt that this had been the peak experience of their lives, that they had “gone to the moon,” as they said, and that they would never do anything to equal it again. Bill Cote told me about an encounter he had with Jim Miller, the big, blunt, blue-collar founder of a small company named Angel Aerial, normally in the business of producing theatrical rain (Victoria’s Secret ads, for instance, or the fishmarket scene in Godzilla), who through sheer force of personality had busted into the dust-suppression role at the site. In the spring, with dust no longer such a problem, Cote required Miller to lower his prices or leave the job. Miller did not complain. Rather, he came up to thank Cote for the opportunity to stay. He said, “You don’t understand what this means to me. I won’t even bargain with you on it. I’ll lower my price right now—what do you want it to be? Because I don’t want to leave. I can’t leave.”

  Of course, everyone eventually did have to leave, and it was that certainty coming into view that defined the final mood. Ken Holden was dealing with the consequences back at DDC headquarters in Queens, to which most of his emergency team had already returned. The people who were feeling listless and depressed were not necessarily those who had been most exposed to destruction and death on the pile but, rather, those who had worked in the classrooms of PS 89 and were faced now with returning to a workplace of fluorescent-lit cubicles and networked computers—an environment that, paradoxically, was all too much like that of the World Trade Center before the collapse.

  Holden himself was riding high. During the last months of the Giuliani administration he had played a dangerous defense against the powerful and politically connected Bechtel Corporation, the San Francisco–based civil-engineering giant. Through mechanisms that were never made clear but presumably had to do with Republican contacts in Washington, Bechtel had gained backing within City Hall, and had repeatedly and aggressively attempted to insert itself into the Trade Center operation as an additional (and costly) management layer between the DDC and the construction companies. This was widely seen at the Trade Center site as an intrusion so unnecessary that it could be understood only as the worst kind of opportunism. Holden fought back hard, using a variety of tactics, including indiscreetly wondering how the “sweetheart deal” headlines might read. And he won, though at considerable risk to his own career. For several months afterward, during which Bloomberg took office, Holden was on ice—managing the DDC and the Trade Center operation on a “transition” basis, and rather miserably looking for a job. By late winter, however, with a flurry of favorable reports mentioning his name in the press, things took a turn for the better and he was reappointed. Now again he was a happy man, swimming in the sea of New York politics, and with the Trade Center recovery to his credit, was full of new plans and ambitions for his beloved DDC.

  Mike Burton was having a harder time letting go. One of his friends had warned him of the difficulty he now faced: as the publicly anointed Trade Center Czar, he would find it hard when someone said to his face, “Mike who?”—and that day would come soon. By the spring Bovis had taken over the day-to-day management of the operation, and though Burton was still in charge, he had fewer decisions to make; there were times now when he seemed cut off and alone. What was left of the DDC team had moved out of PS 89 and into temporary quarters high in the American Express building overlooking the site. I found Burton there one afternoon among the silent, empty cubicles, standing at a window as if he had nothing to do. I stood beside him, looking down at the hole, where the once entombed PATH train now stood in daylight. I’d been gone for a few days, and I asked him if anything had changed in my absence. He answered, “Oh, yeah, a lot!” But the truth was, nothing had. Things were slowing down.

  Still, it was Burton’s prerogative to see this job through. On that point even Ken Holden agreed. Of course Burton was never going to return to DDC headquarters. Neither he nor Holden could have stood it anymore. Holden tried to be gracious. When the Bloomberg administration called to inquire about Burton, Holden recommended him for higher public office—though perhaps with reservations. In the spring Bloomberg offered Burton a position as head of the city’s Department of Buildings, considered an intractable bureaucracy in need of reform. Burton wisely turned it down. He talked to me a little dreamily about starting a company to respond to emergencies worldwide—he seemed to be searching for a way to relive the experience of the first few months. Many people at the site had that same wistful thought. In the end, though, Burton had his family and ambitions to look after. With Holden’s blessing, he stayed on for several weeks beyond the closing ceremony, and in the summer finally quit the DDC to become a senior vice-president for the same large construction company he had worked for before joining the city government. It was the standard revolving-door arrangement. He would be based in New York and responsible for regional operations, along with the company’s growing “homeland security” business. He would also make a lot of money. And that, too, had been predictable for months.

  Sam Melisi ended the job in some ways worse off than he had begun: as the emotions had continued to intensify at the site, he had come under attack by some of the more extreme firemen and widows, who felt that he had turned on them—that the very act of listening to their opponents was a form of betrayal. Unwilling to see the search come to an end, some of them began hunting for traitors in their midst—and as often happens, they turned on the mediator. Melisi was tainted by association. Of course they completely misjudged the man. He was an empathetic person, it was true, and because of his own background in construction he understood the mentality of the unbuilders at the site, but his only real allegiances had always been to the firemen and the families of the dead. Though he refused to complain about the accusations now, they must have been difficult for him to bear. No doubt, however, it was for more physical reasons—call it absolute exhaustion—that in April he suffered a mild heart attack. He was put on medical leave, and had to withdraw from the site. I went to see him for dinner one evening at his house on Staten Island. He told me he wanted nothing more now than to get a clean bill of health and return to being a front-line fireman. His plan was to join one of the heavily hit rescue squads in Brooklyn, even though this would mean a cut in pay, because he felt he could be of use there. But the truth was that even such humble goals were now in doubt. After dinner the conversation drifted to the meaning of it all, and the subject of history came up. He said he hadn’t cared about it before, but cared about it now. He said he sometimes worried about an apocalyptic future. The conversation might then have become too lofty for either of our tastes, were it not for the children at the table, Melisi’s young son and daughter, who were bored by all the talk. They wanted their chocolate cake. The boy showed us a card trick. Melisi forgot about history, and simply got on with living.

  The next morning I went to the pier of a company called Metal Management, on the shores of Newark Bay, to watch the Trade Center being sent away. It was steel that was going—a load of the heavy perimeter columns from both of the Twin Towers. Cutting crews were torching them into three-foot sections, sized to fit into the charge boxes of steel-mill furnaces overseas. The sections they cut lay in hills on the pier, with rust already setting in. An old diesel loader rumbled back and forth, moving them into a huge wedge-shaped pan, which was then lifted by crane and tilted to dump the steel into the cargo holds of an aging 500-foot ship that lay alongside the pier. With the exception of a few samples that had been held for the engineering investigations, this was the fate of almost all of the World Trade Center’s 200,000 tons of structural steel, the columns and girders that had given the buildings their strength and then, wounded, allowed them to fall. It was exceptional steel, some of the purest these cutters had ever seen, but too expensive for American mills to reuse, because of the high costs of recycling in the United States. Costs were lower elsewhe
re, of course, and labor and environmental rules were more relaxed. For better or worse, the scrap-metal market is famously global.

  The ship was the Osman Mete, which hailed from Istanbul with a Turkish crew, and not by chance. Turkish shippers were said to be less sensitive than others to the damage that could be done to their vessels by such ultra-heavy scraps. At the very least, they were accustomed to such cargoes, since Turkish mills had been among the first to acquire and melt down some of the Trade Center’s structure. With this load now, however, the Osman Mete was heading in the opposite direction, forty days through the Panama Canal and on to China, which along with India had turned out to be the principal destination for the Twin Towers. I scrambled up the pilot ladder and onto the deck, and for several hours just stood there and watched. The ship was rusty and badly maintained. Its deck machinery looked like it had been broken for years. The crew was filthy, and obviously indifferent to the meaning of this load. The hatches lay wide open. Seen from above, the holds were cavernous and badly battered. Every few minutes the crane brought the loaded pan overhead and emptied it. The steel tumbled down with a roar, and sent shudders through the ship. The dust that rose had the old sweet smell of the pile. After it cleared, the steel became visible again, lying haphazardly where it had fallen, already in foreign hands, and destined for furnaces on the far side of the globe. It was a strangely appropriate fate for these buildings. Unmade or re-made, whether as appliances or cars or simple rebar, they would eventually find their way into every corner of the world.

  AFTERWORD TO

  THE PAPERBACK EDITION

  American Ground was originally an Atlantic Monthly series, and an attempt to respond usefully to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As it became clear that the magazine was committed to a long and heavily charged project about the deconstruction of the World Trade Center ruins, I wanted to take some emotional distance from the tragedy, and to approach the narrative as if I were looking back on current events from several decades into the future. The result would be, I hoped, like a “history in the present tense.” It was a formulation that came often to mind as I proceeded.

  My unwillingness to participate in the public displays of grief was partly just personal. But I also believed that the emotionalism surrounding the site, though at its origins genuine and necessary, had grown into something less healthy—an overindulgence, sustained by political forces and the media, that rather than serving as a catharsis only deepened the social anguish. And I thought that if American Ground was to have lasting value, readers should not be manipulated; they would bring their own feelings and thoughts to the text. My job was to observe for them, not as an “objective” journalist or an earnest encyclopedist, but more openly in the first person, as their agent on the ground. I spent six months immersed at the site, usually seven days a week, and another five months writing. I witnessed many sad moments, particularly when accompanying some of the families of the dead who came to contemplate their loss—but I did not write about that, because their grief was private, or should have been, and it was not my subject. My subject was construction, or more precisely deconstruction—the dismantling of the tangled steel and concrete, and all that this entailed. Now, nearly two years after the World Trade Center collapses, I still believe that the only way to communicate the essence of the cleanup, including the complexity of the emotions involved, was to maintain the narrative’s detachment. In American Ground the idea was to catch a glimpse of America itself, or of a certain slice of it at a certain time—unruly, unscripted, and in action. In the mix lay the bad as well as the good, but the book turned out to be hopeful—even celebratory—and all the more so because it wasn’t trying to be. Judging from the overwhelmingly positive response that followed publication, the narrative detachment did not diminish the book’s meaning to readers, or its emotional impact.

  But the responses ran the other way, too. Some readers interpreted my refusal to embrace heroic imagery as disrespectful of the dead, or fundamentally biased against firefighters. They were also angry because the book mentioned looting at the site by firemen as well as by policemen and construction workers, and in particular described a confrontation that broke out when a crushed fire truck was discovered with new blue jeans inside. The street demonstrations in New York that followed the publication of American Ground were local, union-driven affairs, but when some of the press picked up on the story, American Ground became “controversial.”

  In New York I was asked by reporters if I found the reaction surprising, and I answered no. I had seen and described these very same emotions in action on the pile, as the ruins were known. Moreover, the emotions were not unusual. Solidarity with a group, the possessive embrace of disaster, a sense of privilege, the searing or bittersweet sensation of sorrow—to various degrees most of us have known these feelings. I knew that the protesters had been through a tough and disorienting experience—the deaths of friends, co-workers, and in a few cases family, followed by the distorting glare of publicity and hype. Now time had moved on, but the feelings remained strong. I had written that the cool-blooded engineers had needed to learn a lesson—that the various emotions at the site had to be accommodated if the larger community was to function and the work was to proceed. America is a dynamic mess, not a dictatorship of rationalists. Now I was learning something, too, about writing nonfiction. “History in the present tense” can be so fresh that it’s alive—and still very raw. The book was becoming a small part of the story it told.

  But the book was always just a partial history. Had a calm and open conversation been possible, I would readily have admitted that the account was biased in a particular way—in its emphasis on the deconstruction job. That is not to say that it was biased in favor of one group over another. When I first arrived at the site, I had warned DDC commissioner Ken Holden and Mike Burton, the construction “czar,” that my presence represented a risk to them, because I would write about the project’s failure—if such it proved to be—as readily as I would write about the project’s success. Though I ended by admiring both men for their performance at the site, for many months this was not a sure thing, any more than success itself was guaranteed. Indeed, some of the principal construction men (and Burton in particular) were taken aback by the candor with which I described their motivations and work.

  But for better or worse I certainly did pay more attention to the construction leaders than to anyone else. They were my subject, and this was no secret. From the very start I saw their role as interesting and forward-looking, in part because their challenges all lay ahead. That was the premise of my initial approach, and of the book that resulted, which, as the subtitle indicates, is about the “unbuilding” process. I wanted to tell the story fully, and this sometimes required me to grapple with implications and cross-connections, most significantly the extraction of the dead and the increasingly volatile social dynamics on the pile. But whenever possible I avoided straying into unrelated areas, of which there were many.

  It has been suggested that I must have been glad to be the only writer with free access to the inner world of the Trade Center site, but the opposite is true. There was obviously more happening there than I alone could know or describe. More important, exclusivity is a cheap trick; transparency is good for everyone, and I would have preferred it. The presence of the daily press would have served the useful role not only of informing the public but also of clarifying the participants’ views of themselves. It is worth remembering that the Trade Center site was an intensely chaotic place. A huge number of worthy efforts were being pursued in all directions and almost spontaneously, in many cases with admirably little direction from above. For the first few weeks there must have been two dozen chiefs, each doing good work and believing to varying degrees that he or she was the one in charge. Certainly there was room for a variety of experiences and impressions. Volunteers working in the food lines would have had a very different view from that of the telephone repair people, the National Guard, th
e police officers at the perimeter gates, or the sanitation crews working ferociously to clean up the surrounding neighborhoods. All of them would correctly have seen their roles as necessary for the functioning of the whole. But I was not writing about them.

  I would hardly have mentioned the firemen either, had they not played such a pivotal role in the process of the unbuilding. Despite what the public believed, after the search for survivors ended, and the dust and smoke suppression was taken over by civilian water crews, the firemen’s role was not primarily physical. Beyond the increasingly careful raking of fine debris, and the immediate handling of human remains, which others could have done, the firemen’s position was largely symbolic. Their presence was crucial nonetheless, a forceful reminder of the human consequences of the attack, and of the importance of keeping people’s emotions in mind; it was also, as I have described, a source of friction and resentment on the pile, and ultimately a political challenge to the progress of the deconstruction. But in the climate of the times in New York, even short and neutral descriptions of any role or action that was not “heroic” constituted dangerous territory.

  The demonstrators’ anger was real, and though it often seemed based on misunderstandings of the book, it also grew from a fundamentally different view of the Trade Center experience. This was to be expected, and there will surely be other, different versions, in print, of the story that I told. In the meantime, the demonstrating firefighters legitimately wanted to register their opinion that American Ground was wrong and unfair. I was doing my job, and they were doing theirs. They chanted and held up signs for the cameras, inflated a giant plastic rat (a well-worn union prop), and went home.