Matthew Engel reports on the strange silence that has gripped the city that never sleeps
By daybreak on Wednesday Manhattan had been divided into four zones. Like Berlin of old. The whole downtown area, below 14th Street, was officially sealed off by police, though residents, workers and anyone with ingenuity could get through.
It was only further down, past Greenwich Village, that the exclusion zone became truly severe, with families barred from their homes unless they acquired a permit. Beyond that, there was a fourth zone, a zone not merely out of bounds to ordinary humanity but beyond human imagination.
It was another warm summer’s day in New York, a day that in any other circumstances would be called perfect. Looking down Seventh Avenue, from afar, the smoke seemed merely like low clouds until you realised there were no clouds.
A bit closer, you could see it still emerging from ground level, like fog or that strange vapour that for some reason always billows from underground on the streets of New York City. Then it took on an even stranger shape. Because of the surrounding skyscrapers, still standing amid the debris, the smoke was forced upwards before fanning out. Thus in shape, as well as intent, power and effect, this was the nearest the modern world has got to a mushroom cloud.
And the city that never sleeps was almost silent. This was weird enough, even in midtown. A few commuters poured out of Pennsylvania station just before 7am, but there was a notable shortage of the men in suits whose early starts and late finishes have been such a vital component of the United States’s turn-of-the-century prosperity. With the markets closed, many were at home. Many were not.
In the exclusion zones, however, the silence was more profound: “I’ve lived in Manhattan all my life,” said Asher Jason, who was walking through the village, “and I’ve never seen it like this.”
The sounds will return but in this part of the city it was customary to look down the avenues towards the two towers, almost reflexively, if only to check that the tops were visible and the weather was clear. No one will ever do that again.
There were occasional noises, some of them very New York: the hum of air-conditioners, emergency sirens, policemen shouting and people swearing back. Some noises had never been heard in New York in decades, such as army trucks racing through the deserted streets.
This has been an ungraspable tragedy.
Normally, within a few hours, the media start to estimate the dead, however scant the evidence, so the world can calibrate the scale of its grief.
Normally, those close at hand soon have some sense of who might and might not have been involved. But just as there has been no precedent for this, there have been no numbers.
Many of the workers in the financial district, especially the younger, hipper and gayer types, live round Greenwich Village. But it was 24 hours before their friends could focus on the folks they had not yet seen.
“We’re all going to know someone,” said Nicky Perry, who runs Manhattan’s British hangout, Tea and Sympathy.
Her regulars were stopping by and just hugging each other. Like almost everyone else, they talked not just of this day’s silence but of the even stranger silence of the immediate aftermath.
“There were armies of people just walking past here, nobody saying anything,” said Perry.
“There was one guy just in his underpants, gashes all over him, zombie-like. One banker I know was just pacing up and down outside.”
Another man, Logan Wilmont, who runs a New York advertising agency, found himself spending yesterday morning with his wife, Beth, wheeling their 10-month-old, Charlotte, up and down Houston Street, unable not only to get a permit to return to their apartment, but even to get into the building where they were being dished out.
They were at home when the planes hit.
“We heard this roar overhead and we could tell from the angle of everyone’s heads on the street that something had happened at the World Trade Centre.
“Their expressions just seemed fake, though, as if they were acting. Then there was the second explosion and we knew it was terrorism. I sent a quick e-mail to everyone saying we were okay, grabbed Charlotte and got out. Outside, a policeman was just yelling ‘go north, go north’.”
Even in this immense catastrophe, one sensed that, as ever, the levels of courage were far, far greater nearest the centre. Others wanted to help but didn’t quite know how.
Eventually St Vincent’s hospital had to issue a warning that it really could not cope with any more donations of food.
On Tuesday night, even though there was not an available plane in the whole United States, the trains from Washington to New York, normally about the world’s busiest travel corridor, were deserted. Yet trains heading far away to cities such as New Orleans were suddenly booked solid.
By midday yesterday normality was getting closer again. Transport links were reopening and black humour was resurfacing as well.
One New Yorker noted grimly that the greatest beneficiaries will be landlords. The city has had a glut of office space: the loss of the World Trade Centre solves that problem.
And in the media corral outside St Vincent’s one cameraman was ringing his office: “There’s nothing happening here, because sadly, there’s not many people going in.”