Daily Routine That Wasn't

Ray Sanchez

September 18, 2001

New Yorkers pouring out of subway stations in Manhattan's financial district yesterday all seemed to look up at the vast, hazy emptiness in the blue sky.

They emerged from the catacombs into a New World where armed troops roamed southern Manhattan's narrow streets, where pictures of the missing were plastered on tiled walls in train stations, where men and women in business suits walked around with respirators over their grief-stricken faces.

There were brokers and lawyers and clerical workers and financial analysts and traders and cafeteria employees and maintenance workers and executives and janitors.

There was nothing routine to this Monday morning routine.

There was Blanca Roman, 49, who took the subway down from the Bronx and now stood with dozens of others behind police barricades at the corner of Nassau and Liberty. She wiped tears, staring at the charred remains of the World Trade Center two blocks west.

Roman takes phone orders for Pastrami Club, a kosher restaurant at 47 Broadway. Most of her orders came from the Twin Towers, which now were gone along with so many of her favorite customers.

"It's so much worse when you see it in person," Roman was saying. "The people ... all those innocent people. Hundreds of them would call every day. I would take their orders. I never met them but I knew their voices."

On Fridays, the Pastrami Club's phones would ring off the hook. The Sabbath Specials were popular among the men and women in the towers. Roman delighted in guessing what her callers would order.

"I knew their names just by hearing their voices," she said. "I knew what they were going to order. I can still hear their voices."

All morning they poured out of the subways and stopped to gawk at what was left of a place they knew so well. Some took pictures. Others cried. One woman made the sign of the cross and prayed.

"Let's go!" a police officer implored. "Keep moving, people. Pictures on the sidewalk, please. Keep the street clear!"

So many people were stopping on the sidewalks outside Chase Manhattan Plaza for glimpses of the destruction that others had to trudge through the crowded street.

There were armed checkpoints near the New York Stock Exchange, and workers were being asked for two forms of identification to get through. Wooden planks covered one of the entrances to the Nos. 2 and 3 station at Wall and William streets. Someone taped a sign to one of the planks with a picture of a smiling young man.

"Kevin Bowser," the sign said. "Missing. World Trade Center. 97th Floor. Tower One. Marsh & Lennan."

"This is not the Wall Street we all knew," said Christopher Jackson, 26, an analyst with JP Morgan. "It will never be the same."

Jackson's day began on an overcrowded No. 5 train in Flatbush. The train sat in the station for almost an hour. A bomb scare on a Long Island Rail Road platform had closed the Atlantic Avenue station.

Since the suicide attacks on the Twin Towers, the pranksters and nuts of New York have been frantically making bomb threats, vowing mass destruction in the subway.

Jackson's subway ride took more than an hour and a half. When he finally made it to work, Jackson was immediately sent home. There was no power at JP Morgan.

"It's hard to get angry after what has happened," he said.

Jeanne Faulkner, director of an arts project for the Board of Education, yesterday saw her 35-minute commute to Downtown Brooklyn turn into a 90-minute ordeal. All trains were slowing down under lower Manhattan to reduce vibration on the street level, and further damage to buildings left standing. The subway system was backed up all day.

"The most important thing is for the subway to be safe - slow but safe," Faulkner was saying on a crowded A train.

While many New Yorkers were returning to work for the first time yesterday, Faulkner was back the day after the terrorists struck.

"The children needed reassurances," she said. "The teachers needed reassurances and hugs. We now have to recognize and confront terrorism. It is time to deal with it. I guess our kids will grow from this. We will grow, too."

When it comes to terrorism, New Yorkers are just learning to crawl.