City Streets Nearly Deserted

In aftermath, a numb New York seeks to make sense of tragedy

By Robert Polner | STAFF WRITER

September 13, 2001

The city was a stranger yesterday.

The huge dust cloud from the destruction of the World Trade Center chased scores of pedestrians through SoHo as the winds briefly blew northward.

A National Guard tank sat, ominously, under the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan, along with trucks for carrying troops.

People walked along nearly deserted streets usually jammed with buses and cars, even in the neon-lighted Times Square.

Bicyclists pedaled down the center lanes of wide avenues. Pedestrians - some teary-eyed - passed closed restaurants and shops.

"People are just numb," said Ed Gerstein, an accountant who lives in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.

Like so many of her fellow New Yorkers, Mei Chan stayed close to her Kew Gardens home because the Greenwich Village financial-services company where she works did not open.

She said she feels skittish.

"I had a nightmare last night: a helicopter came down and hovered in front of where I live," she said. "You just can't escape from these kind of dark thoughts."

One day after the incomprehensible had occurred, people struggled to come to make sense of it, or at least find what passes for a sense of security in a changed city.

Bill Lieberman, a Manhattan lawyer, said he cannot shake off the image of bodies falling from the burning tower, which he witnessed from his office before joining the mass exodus from lower Manhattan, fearing for his life.

Yesterday morning he found out that a friend's brother was among the casualties. He stayed away from TV news' death reports and the broadcast images that were repeated often. He then remembered the advice of his late father, a veteran of WWII combat, and "grabbed onto beauty": spent time with his daughter, Liana, 16, listened to classical music, and lingered for an hour in Riverside Park, gazing at pretty flowers.

It was a day when church services replaced baseball games and Broadway matinees, when sadness, anger, shock and contemplation substituted for the city's usually frenetic, almost mindless pace.

A man tried, in vain, to return to his apartment in the evacuated Battery Park City to retrieve his dog. But police told him that would have to wait - the area below Canal Street was closed.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani urged New Yorkers to return to business as usual, and there were signs that the message was beginning to take hold - even in a city so psychically wounded that some wonder if it will ever be the same again.

People snapped up newspapers at newsstands at a great clip. Restaurants filled, although without the typically deafening din. Teenagers laughed, played music. Passersby cursed their cell phones.

One of the most hopeful messages was scribbled on a wall outside the Public School 1 art museum in Long Island City. It read: "New York Lives On! - Sept. 11, 2001."

Staff writers Dan Janison and Chau Lam contributed to this story.