The wax figures in
Madame Tussaud’s
window don’t have
tears on their cheeks.
“You’re looking at what isn’t there,” I accuse my husband, as he gazes toward downtown Manhattan while negotiating the New Jersey Turnpike. We both are. I half expect the sky to be punched out, surrounded by a dotted line marking the missing towers. But at a distance, all is strangely serene. In mid-town, the Empire State Building soars uncontested, a proud centerpiece with the city swirling at its feet, newly symmetrical.
Around us drivers honk and maneuver to wedge themselves into snaking tollbooth lines, just like they always did. Things are different, and oddly the same
The official purpose of our visit is to attend a wedding; unofficially, we have traveled from San Francisco with some trepidation to assess this “new” New York, to check up on the places and people that had made New York special to us. We’d lived here for one wild, maddening, wonderful year, but had packed up and said our goodbyes just a month before 9/11. To make matters even stranger, we were far away in Greece on that devastating day.
The tunnel spits us out and we inch across Manhattan at a pace that lets me examine the scene. Times Square seems as packed as ever, giant video screens blazing. Perhaps there are even more of these blinking monsters than before. Marquees tout “The Lion King” and other long-running Broadway favorites. The wax figures in Madame Tussaud’s window don’t have tears on their cheeks.
My husband, Paul, muscles the car through traffic until we reach our hotel. I have used Priceline.com to excellent results, getting us into the Waldorf-Astoria for $120 a night. When my bid was accepted and I discovered we would be ensconced at the Waldorf, my burst of elation was tempered by a pang of guilt. Were we preying on the lagging New York hotel market?
I feel less guilty as I stand in the 20-deep line waiting to check in. The lobby is packed. Weekend guests tote fistfuls of shopping bags and snap photos in front of a massive bouquet of cherry blossoms, the size of a full tree, minus its trunk.
As we leave the hotel to meet a friend for dinner, we feel the pulse of New York pounding along, fast as ever. Men in tuxes emerge from taxis, woman stride along in $400 spike-heeled shoes and delivery guys dart by on the crowded sidewalk, bringing just about any cuisine you could imagine to people whose kitchens are so tiny they are sometimes jettisoned and converted into closet space.
Our friend has suggested Spice, a skinny Thai restaurant wedged into a stretch of ethnic eateries along 2nd Avenue in the 70s. Over heaping platters of soft-shell crabs, crispy duck and Drunk Man noodles, we chat and secretly assess her psyche. Gretchen is the classic “young thing” from the Midwest who came to make it in the big city – and she is thriving. In October, she actually chose to move from the outer borough of Queens into the heart of Manhattan. She tells us about her friend Tiffany, though, who left New York after 9/11. She had been evacuated from her job in the World Financial Center. “It was just too much for her,” Gretchen confides.
Walking back to the hotel, Paul feels a rush of homesickness for New York. “Where else can you buy fruit outdoors at 10:30 at night?” he demands, gesturing at a pyramid of oranges outside a corner market. Of course, Paul never actually bought fruit at 10:30 at night when we lived here, but I smile and let him rhapsodize.
The next day, Saturday, is the sort that would send anyone spinning madly in love with New York. Warm sun, cool breeze and clear, blue sky. Spring flowers spilling out of planters and window boxes. We roll into Annie’s, an Upper East Side breakfast icon with a list of pancake specialties as long as your arm. Jill, the friend we meet here, has actually seen her public relations business pick up versus a year ago. Her husband reminds us we have a standing invitation to visit their weekend house. “We’ll throw a steak on the barbie,” he promises. “Not on my Barbie,” their six-year old daughter huffs. We are happy for them – all seems well.
If New York was covered in ashes a few months ago, on this day it is a phoenix. The whole world seems to be lolling in the fresh spring grass or strolling under leafing trees. A saxophonist grooves, buoyed by the natural acoustics of a pedestrian tunnel. A jazz band riffs next to a tulip bed and a folk singer strums to a crowd splayed on a hill.
We settle on a bench near the small band shell, where a mellow rock band entertains and roller skaters whirl around baby strollers, oblivious lovers and a group gathered to hear a bit of park history from a docent. While top theater seats hover at $100, we marvel again at how the best New York theater is free, all around us. (I once kissed my husband while waiting to cross a street. From behind us, a voice piped up, “I’m next!” I turned to see an older gentleman beaming at me. I was tempted to kiss him, but instead, summoned up a little New York attitude and retorted: “He had to marry me – what are you willing to do!?”)
Perhaps there was a time after 9/11 when people felt guilty about celebrating. At tonight’s wedding, Greg and Jeanne have chosen to celebrate New York as much as their union. Instead of numbers, their formally set tables bear the names of landmarks like the Empire State Building and Yankee Stadium. Place cards wear the skyline, and the favors are tiny marzipan apples. Late into the evening, the band gets a rousing response when the singer belts out “New York, New York.” I think about the fact that the bride’s office was in the World Trade Center, but thankfully, she hadn’t yet arrived when the terrorists attacked.
The next day, we check out Fifth Avenue, and discover H&M is packed with style-conscious bargain hunters. This three-floored Scandinavian chain store is the Ikea of clothing. The dressing room line snakes across the women’s fashion floor and a mom and her daughter are trying on clothes in a corner behind a display rack. “I’m not waiting on that line!” she exclaims. At the Japanese department store, Takashimaya, the crowds are sparser. Japanese tourists are conspicuously absent in the city. The floors of European clothing, candles and beauty products that cater to them are almost empty of customers. Strangely, the floor with pricey Japanese furniture, table settings and gift items is full of milling American shoppers.
That night, visiting with a friend deep in the borough of Brooklyn, the conversation drifts to 9/11. Jennie recounts how, from the subway, she saw the second tower get hit. The F-train passes above ground before it plunges below Manhattan, and that gave commuters a clear view of the tower’s top, enveloped in smoke. “The smoke was pure white,” Jennie says. “Why was it so white?”
Even more eerie, she found a single piece of paper in her back yard, blown there by the explosion; many of her Park Slope neighbors had discovered them. It was from the second tower. “I researched and found out that everyone in that office escaped. I was so relieved.” Jennie is sorry that the memorial beams of light shining up from Ground Zero were only temporary. “Somehow, it was so comforting,” she sighs.
Monday morning, we head to Greenwich Village, where we used to live. We don’t visit our old building, which was inside the restricted-access area after the attacks. But we do wander down Bleecker Street, which looks perfectly, absolutely normal – or at least Bleecker’s version of normal. We stop by Zitto’s Italian bakery and buy our favorite, a 12-inch ring of bread studded with chunks of prosciutto. Only the bag has changed. On it, a big American flag waves, above the words, “United We Stand.
We head down to Soho, where it now appears to be business as usual in an area that was particularly affected after 9/11. Curious about the new Prada store that had been under construction when we left town, we go to the corner of Prince and Broadway. In the architectural version of an unlisted phone number, the building still reads “Guggenheim” across its façade – a remnant of its past life as an annex to the uptown museum. Designed by superstar architect Rem Koolhaus with an extravagant excess of space, the store seems like an orphan of giddier times, born into a more sober world.
We never get any closer to Ground Zero. I have known I couldn’t, ever since seeing that chaotic 9/11 footage shot by two French videographers. It would just be too dreadful remembering the subway station, the Border’s book store, the half-price theater ticket booth, the Starbucks that was always jammed, the United Airlines office where we’d picked up our plane tickets before leaving town.
On our last evening, we meet a friend who manages real estate for the New York Port Authority. “I had cancelled a meeting that morning at my Kennedy Airport office,” he says. “One of the people who was supposed to attend worked in the Trade Center. I was so worried that my act of canceling a meeting could have…” he trails off. “Thank God, after it all happened, I paged her and she was OK.” But he adds, “We lost 75 people. For every good story, there’s a bad story; for every bad story, a good story.” Distilled, that dichotomy always has been – and always will be – the essence of New York.
Should you go there? Of course – for all the reasons anyone ever went to New York – the theater, the museums, the shopping, the restaurants, the sights, the sheer spectacle of it all. And for something else that has always been there, too. That strange combination of toughness and tenderness that makes New Yorkers extraordinary – the kind of the character that makes us all Americans.
© 2002 Gayle Keck
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