To The Editor
Re “Memorial access is the elephant in the room” (Talking Point, May 4)
After reading Clive Burrow’s article about giving special access, for the area residents, to the September 11 Memorial, I felt a need to comment. It has bothered me for years that the residents of the neighborhoods surrounding the ‘Site” have never been treated with any kind of special acknowledgement. This huge area right in our backyards was once an integral part of our lives, especially for those of us who lived within a few blocks of the Trade Towers.
We not only lost the towers, we lost a way of life that will never return. We had all spent many hours playing in the plaza with our young children or on rainy days using the underground mall as a place to let the children run off their energy. When coming home from the airport, we would see the towers and look forward to getting back to homes so close beside them. When friends visited, we said “When you exit the subway, look up for the towers and go toward them to find our street” The towers were our beacon of light leading us home at the end of the day.
On September 11, 2001, we ran for our lives with our young children in tow, many in shock and in tears at what they had seen out their school windows, my eight year old shouting “We’re gonna die”, as we ran to safety. Many of these same children had to leave their homes, all left their schools behind for months and each one experienced the loss of their innocence. Once the fires were out and we could return home, our streets became a tourist destination, with thousands of people swarming our once quiet streets to get a glimpse of the destruction that lay two blocks south of our home.
We have all become tour guides and givers of directions in the years since. Our streets have been continuously torn up and put back together, and everywhere….construction, construction, construction.
Not once in the time immediately following or since that awful day has there been an opportunity for the residents to have a chance to come to the site and grieve our losses; an invitation to share our collective grief. The first time I got to look into the pit was when a raised platform was built for tourists to get a look. When I visited and first saw this vision, I was so upset that I asked the guard who was moving people through at five minutes a look, if I could stay a while longer since I lived so close by and had not yet seen the site. My request was granted, greatly appreciated and relished; the first time my loss had been honored. The chance to actually go down into the pit came on September 11 a few years after 2001 when I met a friend who was with a policeman she knew. I told him I had wanted for so long to have the chance to go into the site to really grieve the loss of our lives as we had known them. When he said he could take us down, I was so grateful for the opportunity, which proved a most meaningful experience and truly helped with my finding some peace with the events of that horrendous day.
I agree wholeheartedly that the residents of the areas surrounding the memorial, especially those of us whose lives were forever changed by this event, should be allowed to have our own time, apart from the masses, to enjoy the rebirth of this much loved center in our lives. No longer will children from our area skip around the fountain with the wonderful globe sculpture, no longer will our nearby streets be the quiet blocks almost totally free of pedestrians and traffic, no longer will I run over and get the best egg salad sandwich I ever had, no longer will I look out my windows and see the towers peeping above the buildings, knowing the time of day by when the sun goes behind the buildings.
Our streets have become overcrowded now with workers from the giant new buildings built to encourage growth, with pedestrians frequenting the new giant stores that have threatened and obliterated many of our long time neighborhood stores, with the proliferation of bars to accommodate the construction workers. There is no longer peace in the streets surrounding the site. Yet the residents are still not considered victims of this sad and terrifying event that changed our lives irreparably.
We are survivors too and deserve to be treated as such.
Loretta Thomas
Resident of Tribeca since 1981
