CHAPTER 1

PEOPLE COME
ARK LIVED THREE BLOCKS FROM THE WORLD TRADE

Center, on Church Street. He was a twenty-seven-yearold screenplay writer, and on the Tuesday morning of September 11, he was at home, as usual, working on

his computer. When the rst plane hit the North Tower, the impact jolted him from his desk chair and threw him onto the oor. He rushed outside, where he saw people screaming and running away from the towers. Soon ambulances raced toward them, driving down the wrong side of the road. When the second plane hit the South Tower, a piece of the planes engine, larger than the size of a keg of beer, as he put it, landed on his street corner. Mark did not ee his apartment immediately. He had a friend who worked in the South Tower and an ex-girlfriend who also worked in the area. I thought one of them might come by, he said. The guy was my best friend. They were close people. Mark decided it was time to leave his apartment after both towers collapsed, but unlike the thousands of neighbors evacuating, he instinctively wanted to stay as close to home as possible.

BATTLE FOR GROUND ZERO

He headed to a friends place in SoHo, the next neighborhood

up, and then went to his favorite bar near his apartment building to look for his friend. He did not nd him. That night, he tried to get back into his apartment, but the police had padlocked it. So, instead, he climbed the stairs leading to the roof of his ve-story building and sat alone, watching as teams of rescue workers covered with gray dust maneuvered on top of twisted steel beams. Angled spotlights lit up the mounds of craggy, ery wreckage. Earlier that day, National Guard troops armed with machine guns had led onto 14th Street, about a mile north of the wreckage, to control the ow of people into Lower Manhattan. No one could cross below the militarized line without ofcial permission. This is why thousands of New Yorkers congregated in Union Square that afternoon; it was the closest any of them could get. The guards left 14th Street a few days after the attacks, but, for Mark, the boundary had been set. Fourteenth Street was his line, the temporary edge to his new New York. His sister lived uptown, on 86th Street, but he refused to visit her. My sister kept telling me to come up there, he said. But that was like a different city. Mark found Lower Manhattan weird and unsettlingThere were cops everywhere, people in streets, people stapling up memorial signs, Mark saidbut this was precisely why he wanted to stay. Downtown was the only place that felt normal, he said. It was the only place that felt like you did. Completely fucked up. For weeks, 14th Street was the farthest Mark would go before turning around and heading back toward Ground Zero. Almost everyone I spoke to in those rst weeks and months after 9/11 had their own sense of this line, the invisible boundary that separated the destruction from the rest of New York City. Most in Manhattan lived north of their line, outside the disaster zone, and the question they faced was how close to travel to it. Some kept their distance, observing the line from afar, while others made regular

PEOPLE COME

pilgrimages, spending a few minutes each day at their chosen boundary marker to reect on the violence and destruction. As time passed, peoples lines shifted and moved closer to the site. Two months after 9/11, I walked to Ground Zero from Midtown to see where I would rst notice something akin to a line. When I mentioned my plans to a friend who lived in New York, he said two words: Canal Street. Canal Street was south of 14th Street, about three-quarters of a mile from the wreckage. I wouldnt see the destruction, he said, but this is where I would smell it. For him, this was the de facto border: the place where the smell began. When I arrived at Marks line, at 14th Street, Union Square was back to normal. The only traces of the thousands of people who had gathered here in early September were spots of colored wax, speckled with an occasional burnt wick, stuck to concrete walkways. Police had cleared the thousands of bouquets, candles, and handwritten notes weeks earlier. Likewise, at Canal Street, the odor had already disappeared. The sidewalks were lled with customers walking in and out of electronics shops and looking over street vendors designer knockoffs. It wasnt until Chambers Street, about six blocks away from the sixteen-acre site, that I rst noticed a smell of stale dust lling the air and heard the constant, heavy hum of machinery and high-pitched jackhammers. Most of the streets within this six-block radius were closed to car trafc and packed with people. Rescue workers in full re gear, covered in ash, walked slowly from the site, taking breaks from their shifts. Downtown workers in suits carried briefcases and often wore white face masks to lter the air as they maneuvered around slower movers. The vendors were the most ubiquitous. Some wandered corner to corner selling American ags and patriotic banners from black trays hanging around their necks, while others hawked a greater assortment of goods, including full-color books on the Twin Towers and hats and T-shirts branded with FDNY (Fire Department, New York), from

BATTLE FOR GROUND ZERO

rickety card tables. Handfuls of tourists, some with American-ag bandannas tied around foreheads and biceps, encircled their tables negotiating for better prices. The wreckage was surrounded by a series of tarp-covered, chainlink fences and plywood walls. The ad hoc structure blocked nearly all ground-level views of the destruction; all you could see from street level were the pieces of jagged facade, a bit distant, that rose up from the center of the sixteen-acre hole. But people wanted to see more. Some bent down on hands and knees, necks twisted, cheeks against the sidewalk, to look through slivers of space where the tarps were not quite long enough to touch the ground. Others stood on tiptoes or balanced on top of emergency railings, necks arched, to peer over. And some went to even greater lengths. Later in the afternoon, I came upon a man shimmying his way up a streetlight just outside the walls. We were at the intersection of Fulton Street and Broadway, which featured a large break in the fencing and a close, unobstructed view of the serrated remnants of the North Tower. At least fty people stood shoulder to shoulder in silence. Meanwhile, the climber inched his way up the streetlight, a camera bumping against his chest. When he reached the top, he teetered and cautiously extended an arm to take a few snapshots. It was impossible not to watch him, and soon a series of ashes popped below him, which prompted the man to smile and wave his camera-lled hand in recognition. It was a little shocking to watch and be a part of such a spectacle: rescue workers were still searching for bodies. But I instinctively began to take a picture of the teetering man too. The only reason I didnt was because I had already lled the exposures on my quickly purchased disposable camera. I was a graduate student from Philadelphia, and the year before I had become interested in cities and how they rebuilt in the wake of violence and war. I had read books about Berlin and Hiroshima and Oklahoma City and the contentious reconstruction efforts that went on