Below Ground, Eerie Reminders

Ray Sanchez

September 17, 2001

Half a cup of black coffee still sat on a counter yesterday in a token booth under what was once the World Trade Center. A gray hooded sweatshirt hung from the back of a chair.

A worried token booth clerk who stopped to count the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's money before abandoning the booth after the terrorist attacks had to be dragged out by transit workers.

This was one of the subway entrances to the World Trade Center Mall, where six mornings ago thousands poured from the subways and PATH trains. Here they could pick up coffee and bagels and pastries and newspapers on their way to the high-speed elevators that soared into twin towers 110 stories above New York.

Now everything had a thick coat of dust and ash and shards of glass. It was pitch black. Massive steel beams crumpled down on the escalators that rose into the mall with PATH train commuters from New Jersey.

Chunks of ceilings and lighting fixtures and heavy cable crashed to the ground outside the Strawberry and Casual Corner clothing stores.

Display windows at the Warner Bros. store were shattered. The trail of destruction continued deep into the vast mall. Down there you could see streams of daylight where the towers came crashing down.

The Cortlandt Street station on the 1 and 9 lines was filled with ash and water. It's been shut down. Still, someone wrote "No Service today!" in the dust that covered a MetroCard machine.

Walk three blocks north in the uptown tunnel at the Rector Street station on the 1/9 lines and the ceiling has caved in on the tracks. There is a solid wall of debris where the local once roared north toward TriBeCa.

All around the collapsed towers, small armies of rescue workers work frantically. There are firefighters and police officers from all over the country.

There are Con Ed workers and paramedics and ironworkers and hundreds of New York City Transit workers in their trademark fluorescent vests.

The lobbies of buildings left standing have been turned into warehouses where workers can restock on batteries, clean socks, flashlights and respirators. There are makeshift chapels where priests offer Mass and administer the sacraments.

Exhausted rescue workers sleep outside on the ground, on pieces of office furniture pulled together and on couches dragged out from building lobbies. A cruise ship is docked on the Hudson River with free food and beds for the men and women working amid the twisted, jumbled remains of the twin towers. Restaurants were delivering food for the workers.

"Some of my guys are having food from Balducci's and the Russian Tea Room for the first time," said Pete Foley, a 13-year veteran of the transit agency and officer with the Transport Workers Union Local 100, who helped with the bucket brigades.

"Don't forget," someone wrote on an ash-covered window. "Don't forgive."

There are boxes and boxes with thousands of black body bags waiting to be filled. It seems every rescue worker knows a person or two who perished in the towers.

"I lost two kids from my block and my niece's husband - all firemen," said Frank McNerney, 59, a signal maintainer with 31 years on the transit agency. "I must have spoken to 80 workers down here and they all knew somebody who died. We all have been touched by this."

Workers pulled dozens of bodies and parts of bodies from the twisted remains of the towers, taking them in body bags to the makeshift morgues in the shattered American Express building or in the World Financial Center.

There was another morgue set up at Brooks Brothers on Church Street, where two mounds of soaked, new clothing - jackets, shirts and slacks - could be seen at curbside.

"We were pulling out buckets of debris and occasionally there were ID cards, purses and wallets," said Kevin McCawley, a vice chairman with Transport Workers Union Local 100. "Someone would yell, 'Personal effects,' and then they bagged the item. The buckets were full of bricks, office supplies, computer keyboards. There was a personal planner with a person's name on it."

"On Wednesday ... there was cheering whenever somebody was pulled out alive. There hasn't been any cheering in days."