The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

USUALLY, YOU CAN’T GO WRONG TURNING TO E.B. White. His classic 1949 essay, “Here Is New York,” remains the touchstone for anyone seeking explication of Gotham’s mysteries.

  “New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along,” White wrote, and it does so “without inflicting the event on its inhabitants.”

  “So that every event is, in a sense, optional,” he said, “and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.”

  Not this time.

  This time, no New Yorker escaped the agony inflicted by the terrorists who hijacked passenger planes and turned them into missiles. Now, everyone knew the acrid smell of death. Now, they knew fear. There was no getting around the fact that New York’s knees buckled. But it did not fold, not for a second.

  No New Yorker escaped the agony inflicted by the terrorists.

  Over time, New Yorkers have banded fiercely together during subway strikes and blackouts. A notable exception was the power failure in 1977, with widespread looting and thousands of arrests. But normally New Yorkers come through, channeling their bruising, often coarse nature into a positive force. Nothing has changed that, including the great wave of immigration that been reshaping the city for 20 years. The accents may be different now, but not the spirit.

  No one embodied that spirit more than the mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, a complex man, capable of displaying extraordinary leadership one minute and breathtaking pettiness the next. His superb performance gave him one more claim to history.

  During his eight years, he has enabled residents and visitors to think of the city as a safe place, but “safe” is relative. A decade ago, New York’s perils grew out of its own flaws, its own criminals and drug addicts and street crazies. This week’s came out of its greatness, because it is America’s financial, cultural and communications capital, a worthy target.

  Improbable though it may seem, New Yorkers viewed their city with a certain innocence, living with small-town familiarity in self-sufficient neighborhoods and filling their basic needs without needing to travel more than a few blocks. That has now been shattered by the worst catastrophe in their history, far eclipsing the previous top disaster, the wreck of the General Slocum, an excursion boat that caught fire and then could not navigate the treacherous waters of Hell Gate. At least 1,021 people perished that day, June 15, 1904. The historian Kenneth T. Jackson says that funerals for the victims lasted more than a week. One procession of 156 hearses stretched for almost a mile.

  This time, the hearses could extend to the horizon.

  Melody Belkin, Noah, And the Kindness of Strangers

  By JIM DWYER | December 28, 2001

  AS ONE AMBULANCE AFTER ANOTHER WAILED past, Melody Belkin switched on the car radio. Plane crashes into tower. At that moment, she was under New York Harbor in the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, driving directly toward the World Trade Center.

  When Ms. Belkin reached the end of the tunnel, she abandoned the car, then grabbed her kids and the stroller. She put Noah, 4, under one arm. She put Ava, 22 months, into the yellow stroller, the one she had lobbied for last summer, when they shopped for a new stroller on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn.

  The day Noah was born, he underwent five hours of surgery. His esophagus did not connect to his stomach. He had a nonfunctioning kidney. By the time he was 4, he had gone through 13 operations. He takes nourishment through a feeding tube. He has had a tracheotomy to help him breathe. All this makes speech difficult for him, but not impossible. Noah, his family says, is a happy, peaceful child, who speaks English and uses sign, the language of the hearing or speech-impaired.

  “This total stranger overheard and handed me $100 in twenties.”

  Now, as they ran, a stranger—he looked college-age to Ms. Belkin, who is 35—ripped up his T-shirt and gave her pieces for protection from the filthy wind. At the Battery, a man passed out dust masks from the back of his truck. Through the cloud, he saw the bright yellow stroller.

  “Throw the babies in the front of the truck,” he yelled. They shared the cab with two young men and a woman. Ava sat on the woman’s lap. Ms. Belkin worked on Noah’s tracheotomy. He needed a fresh cover for the opening. One of the men, Drew, tore his shirt. “A Ralph Lauren,” Ms. Belkin said. “The piece he gave Noah had the logo on it.”

  The second tower collapsed. “Drew started saying that psalm,” Ms. Belkin said, “the one with ‘though I walk through the valley of death.’”

  The truck driver ran to the door of the American Park restaurant, which quickly became a shelter.

  The backpack with Noah’s formula and vacuum had gone astray. On his second trip back to the truck, Drew found it.

  A park ranger arrived. He escorted Ms. Belkin and her children onto the first ferry to New Jersey. There, while the emergency medical workers checked Noah, Ms. Belkin realized that she had left her purse on the stroller, back on some broken street across the river.

  “I was telling the E.M.T.’s I don’t have my insurance cards, I don’t even have any money,” Ms. Belkin said. “This total stranger overheard and handed me $100 in twenties. I kept $20 and gave the rest back. I tried to get his phone number to return it, but he wouldn’t hear of it.”

  The bright yellow stroller, it turned out, had been rescued by the truck driver, who left it and Ms. Belkin’s purse at the American Park restaurant. The restaurant returned a scrubbed-clean stroller to Noah’s father, Peter Klein, delighting Noah, who had picked it out in the first place.

  Since then, Noah has answered one question precisely the same way.

  “Noah,” Mr. Klein, said. “Did you see the buildings fall?”

  “No,” Noah said. “But I …”

  Then he stopped speaking with his mouth, and turned to the language of sign.

  The little boy lifted two fingers to the side of his head. He slammed them against his ear.

  No.

  But I

  HEARD

  “Them,” Noah said.

  Rescue Workers Rush In, Many Do Not Return

  By JANE FRITSCH | September 12, 2001

  NEW YORK FIREFIGHTERS, IMPELLED BY instinct and training, rushed to the World Trade Center to evacuate victims. Then the buildings fell down. The firefighters never came out.

  More than 300 firefighters were unaccounted for when the day ended. There was no trace of three of the fire department’s most elite units, Rescues 1, 2 and 4. Among those known to have died were Chief of Department Peter J. Ganci and First Deputy Fire Commissioner William M. Feehan. Also killed was one of the department’s Roman Catholic chaplains, Mychal Judge, who had rushed to the scene to comfort victims.

  With scores of firefighters and police suddenly missing, random groups of people took command. Building superintendents became lifesavers—guiding panicked residents to basements. Consolidated Edison workers guided people to safety. And small groups of people responding to calls from panicked friends—including one woman trapped with her twin children—descended on the neighborhood to help. In one spot, a jagged four-story section of the building jutted straight in the air. In another, a six-story section lay flat on its side. And all around them were 50-foot mounds of twisted metal, concrete chunks and shattered glass.

  By the time the buildings collapsed, more than 400 firefighters were at the scene. Many were from six-person units that specialize in building collapses, and many are now missing, presumed to have died when the buildings went down.

  “I managed to get out of the building just a few seconds before it collapsed,” he said Robert Byrne, from a fire company on Houston Street. “I don’t know what happened to the company. Just me and the lieutenant got out.”

  Report Says 9/11 Workers Not Getting Enough Care

  By ANTHONY DEPALMA | July 25, 2007

  NEARLY SIX YEARS AFTER THE 9/11 ATTACKS, the federal government still does not have an adequate array of health programs for ground zero workers—or a reliable estimate of how much treating their illnesse
s will cost—according to a federal report.

  The report, produced by the Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress, concluded that thousands of federal workers and responders who came to ground zero from other parts of the country do not have access to suitable health programs.

  The report also said that an estimate of health care costs made late last year by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health was based on questionable assumptions, inconsistent data and instances of double billing. As a result, the report concluded, “It is unclear whether the overall estimate overstated or understated the costs of monitoring and treating responders.”

  The institute’s revised estimate last week put this year’s costs at $195 million. But it said the total figure for 2007 and 2008 could be between $428 million and $712 million if more workers register to participate in the programs and a greater percentage of them need medical or mental health treatment. Treatment money from the federal government became available only last year.

  Just Regular Guys, Until the Bell Rings

  By MICHELLE O’DONNELL | September 23, 2001

  FIRE DEPARTMENTS, LIKE THE CITIES THAT foster them, have their own personalities. The New York Fire Department, like the dense, sprawling city itself, is both large and well ordered, turning on the same axis of planning and hope that moves New York forward each day.

  Like the residents they would die to protect, New York firefighters are brash and funny, loud and sentimental, opinionated and thoughtful. They have New Yorkers’ big-city edge, and they have their small-town sensibility and neighborly friendliness.

  New York’s firefighters live in houses named whimsically but proudly: Nuthouse, Pride of Midtown, Say No More and No Fear. They eat off mismatched plates, buy in bulk, sleep in dormitory-style rooms and eat in spare, industrial-size kitchens.

  They are regular guys: chewing on cigars, cracking jokes, planning fishing trips and ribbing each other constantly. Until the bells ring, that is, and they race to the emergency call that could be a false alarm or an all-hands disaster, ready to save lives while risking their own. It is not their willingness to take such risks that sets them apart from their colleagues around the nation, but the scale on which this city forces them to do it.

  They use humor like oxygen. They can be dead serious. They have take-charge attitudes. It is the shadow of terrible possibility that forces them to be so. One captain, who has seen scores of firefighters die on duty in his three-decade career, always says goodbye to special friends with, “I love you.” One never knows.

  It is the ordinary qualities of New York’s firefighters—men and women with families and mortgages and aging parents and long commutes on the Long Island Expressway—that make their contribution so staggering. It elevates those who could rush toward, not from, exploding twin towers. They gain a stature in our minds; we can hardly begin to imagine what drives them. Is it a job? Is it a calling? Must it be both?

  Last Monday night, almost one week after the World Trade Center attacks, it was back to work for Engine 33 of Greenwich Village. The engine company, which lost six men on Sept. 11, sped up Fifth Avenue against traffic, sirens screeching, and pulled up in front of a New York University apartment house. The officer hopped out of the rig and shined his flashlight high on the windows, looking for signs of smoke. Students milled in the entranceway, paying no attention to the firefighters.

  Finding no smoke, the officer signaled “all clear” and climbed back into his seat. Passers-by walking dogs and holding hands watched. A woman approached the engine and said, “Thank you.”

  “Yeah, yeah, we’re firemen,” the officer replied. “It’s what we do.”

  FIRES AND FIREFIGHTERS

  Oct. 17, Once the Fire Department’s Darkest Date

  By ROBERT F. WORTH | October 12, 2003

  ON OCT. 17, 1966, 12 FIREFIGHTERS DIED while responding to a catastrophic fire across Broadway from the Flatiron Building. For 35 years, the tragedy remained the New York Fire Department’s single greatest loss of life.

  Photographs from the ‘66 fire eerily foreshadow the images of Sept. 11. Thousands of haggard firefighters gathered at the scene as the dead were carried out of the blackened building. Thousands more lined Fifth Avenue during the funeral cortege four days later. The heroism of the dead men was proclaimed in headlines for weeks afterward.

  “It really stopped New York City,” said Daniel Andrews, who at the time followed Engine 18 as a teenage fire buff and now works in the Queens borough president’s office. “You could hear a pin drop on Fifth Avenue during those funerals.”

  It all began on a cool evening at 9:30 p.m. Manuel Fernandez, a former professional boxer who had been with Engine 18 on West 10th Street for six years, said that smoke was rising from one of the buildings along Broadway. But no flames were visible, and the firefighters were confused about the source of the fire.

  “I dropped them off on the 23rd Street side, and it was hazy in there, like a pool room,” Mr. Fernandez said. As the “chauffeur,” his duty was to man the motor pump on the engine. But he heard a dull roar and knew that something was wrong, so he went into the drugstore building where five of his fellow firefighters had gone. “You had about a foot of clear vision,” he recalled.

  He saw a burst of flame, and a tremendous wave of heat struck him in the face. He heard popping—the sound, he later realized, of drug or perfume bottles exploding—and turned to run out.

  He did not know it at the time, but a fire raging in the cellar had caused a vast section of the building’s first floor to collapse, taking 10 firefighters down with it and killing two others who had not fallen in. The flames he had seen were rising straight up from the cellar.

  A rescue party made heroic efforts to reach the doomed men, according to a history published in 1993 by the Uniformed Firefighters Association. One firefighter, stumbling forward in the darkness, reached the edge of the collapsed area and fell in. One hand clutched the nozzle of the hose as he fell, and for a few moments, he hung swaying over the abyss, flames licking at his body, before other firefighters pulled him to safety.

  The Living Search The Faces of the Dead

  By JAMES BARRON | March 26, 1990

  JEROME FORD STARED AT THE PHOTOGRAPHS spread on the table at Public School 67 in the Bronx yesterday. He recognized five faces: his wife’s three brothers, a teenage niece and a cousin. He realized what the photographs meant: the five had been trapped when an illegal social club was transformed from an oasis of dancing and drinking into an inferno.

  His eyes were red, his Sunday-morning stubble of a beard streaked with tears. Oblivious to the sirens and the police officers shouting into their bullhorns, keeping the crowd in line, he could think of nothing but the advice he wished his relatives had taken.

  “I told them not to go,” he said, “but kids are kids. I knew it was dangerous.”

  The awful ritual of identification was repeated time after time at P.S. 67. The corridors and classrooms, usually filled with the chatter of students, were filled with the sobs of relatives, friends, friends of friends, young and old.

  Like Mr. Ford, they knew the faces in the photographs—the photographs of the dead, snapshots the authorities had taken before the 87 bodies were sent to the morgue in Manhattan. Some of the loved ones screamed at the sight. Some grieved wordlessly.

  For many, the trip confirmed the terrible suspicions they had had since daybreak, when they realized that loved ones had never made it home. Over and over during the day, people who had seen the pictures would come out and tell others in line the sad truth: whoever they were looking for was dead. Kelly Mena found the photo of his 30-year-old brother, Rene. “He had on his black leather coat,” he said, blinking back tears.

  Some relatives brought photographs of their own. Alva Romero went to the school with snapshots of her 18-year-old daughter, Alva Escoto; her 32-year-old brother, Kerri Romero, and four cousins: Luis Manaiza, 22; Wendy Manaiza, 18; Norman Clarke, 17, and Isabel Christi
na Lopez, 17. The family had moved to the Bronx from Honduras over the last seven years, she said.

  “We came looking for a better life,” she said, tearfully. “We just found disappointment and disgrace.”

  87 Die in Blaze at Illegal Club

  By RALPH BLUMENTHAL | March 26, 1990

  EIGHTY-SEVEN PEOPLE, CRAMMED INTO AN illegal Bronx social club, were asphyxiated or burned to death within minutes in a flash fire early yesterday morning. The police later arrested a man who they said had set the blaze with gasoline after a quarrel there.

  It was the worst loss of life in a fire in New York City since the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911, exactly 79 years ago to the day.

  The club—the Happy Land Social Club, at 1959 Southern Boulevard, off East Tremont Avenue—had no state liquor license. City officials said it was ordered closed for fire hazards and building-code infractions 16 months ago, but had continued to operate.

  Police Commissioner Lee P. Brown identified the arrested suspect as Julio Gonzalez, 36 years old. Lieut. Raymond O’Donnell, a police spokesman, said Mr. Gonzalez had argued with a former girlfriend who worked at the club and had been ejected by a bouncer, but then returned with gasoline and set the fire.

  His girlfriend and at least three others survived. But the flames cut off the only open door and filled the club with smoke. Some victims suffocated so rapidly that they were found with drinks in their hands.

  It was the worst loss of life in a fire in New York City since the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911, exactly 79 years ago to the day.

  Detective Lieut. James Malvey of the 48th Precinct said last night that Mr. Gonzalez, in a videotaped statement for the District Attorney’s office, told of picking up a plastic jug at the club after threatening, “I’ll be back.” Mr. Gonzalez, the detective said, filled the jug with $1 worth of gasoline at a nearby service station and returned.