Gathering Places
Gathering Places
NEW YORK >> I write this from Kennedy Airport on my way back to Hawaii after a Thanksgiving stay with my father in New York City. Three hours of hard time in the airport makes me and many other travelers the smallest victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which have bullied and blasted the magic persona of Manhattan. Manhattan rumbles
with courage and
determination
to rise againOn my first night back to the city my dad walked me from his Tribeca apartment to the site of the World Trade Center. In the sandwiched atmosphere of chilly November air and huge, hot spotlights, I viewed what is no less than a vision of Dante's Inferno on Earth. As we crisscrossed our way around police barriers and closed streets, a watering truck rolled by. My 81-year-old father told me they spray the streets around Ground Zero to wash away the dust and reduce the stench.
In the 35 years since I left this city, it has cleaned itself up and become a friendlier, safer place. But this tough town is now fighting off the ropes in daily acts of psychic counter-punching.
Business is, well, oy vey. Particularly under the gun are the lower Manhattan neighborhoods of Little Italy with its hot sauces and tart ices, Chinatown with its knock-offs of everything under the sun and Tribeca with its ritzy restaurants. By New York standards, the streets are bare.
On Broadway there is a curtain call after the curtain call. Performers who have just thrilled us for hours become real people and thank us for bringing post-Sept. 11 life back to the theatre.
They ask us to contribute to charities, and they personally and graciously collect as we leave. Small acts of big-city aloha. Police seem to be everywhere. New Yorkers now know the answer to their own question: "Where's a cop when you need one?" But the feeling is different. Along with the firemen, whose stations are postered testaments to lost heroes, New York's finest are loved and celebrated in the streets.
Before Sept. 11 it was all about fighting crime. Now it's about giving people security.
The police let the street vendors vend. The hawkers' standard ware of brassy $10 watches guaranteed to tick for 10 consecutive minutes, almost semi-chic pocketbooks and amazingly itchy sweaters are joined by the latest in patriotic paraphernalia, most of it made in China.
As I look at the American flag pins, the vendor answers his cell phone and says in a Jamaican accent, "Hello, this is Thank You Incorporated."
My last evening in the city, I walked past a multipurpose police and Red Cross post by the Canal Street subway stop. Dozens of candles blazed near pictures of lost heroes. I sense this is a city with a bowed head. New Yorkers who for so long had a reputation for knowing the jugular have become the jugular. I soon find that my senses are a little wrong and a lot late.
I step out from the assembly-line undulation of sidewalk traffic, approach a large policeman and mumble dumbly, "I'm very sorry for all of this."
In an unmistakably New York voice emanating simultaneously from his chest and his nose, he responds, "Don't you be sorry. You didn't do this," Then, in words with a wink to them, he adds, "But we know who did."
He sticks out his hand and I shake it. It feels like I've just pounded a catcher's mitt.
I sit in JFK airport knowing that New York is in for hard times yet.
But it's breaking through loss in textbook style, which ain't an easy thing for one person to do, let alone a big city. There will be the grime of reality, inevitable failure and unforeseeable unknowns. This is neither a romance novel nor a James Stewart movie. But there is no denying a guiding Manhattan mana, a part of the pulse that beats out: "Hope for a better world starts with the belief that good things are coming."
Chuck Freedman works at Hawaiian Electric Co.
and is a 30-year resident of Hawaii.