Tunnel At the End of The Light

It was Memorial Day and I decided to go into NYC to visit with a friend and spend some time at the South Street Seaport. I hadn't been there since last summer and wondered what if anything had changed since 9/11.

 

I ascended to Fulton St and looked around. As I headed east, I began to notice the street vendors. They were always a fixture in that area, but today it was their wares that caught me off guard. On their tables were these photo albums, the small kind that are just large enough to hold one photo per page in their cellophane sleeves. And the photos were of the WTC. They were a pictorial collection of that horrible last hour in Sept. I leafed through one and was disgusted by what I saw. It is one thing to sell pictures of the Towers when they stood tall and stately as part of the skyline, or of the empty skyline with some patriotic wording written across. But this…As I proceeded further east there were vendors who sold individual photos. At $3 a pop you could get images not only of the flaming, smoking towers but of the ash covered people running from their collapse. At another table I picked up one of those albums and looked closely for a publisher. None. Some of the pictures were grainy, like they had been scanned from a magazine, others were very familiar to me, AP photographs lifted off some Web site. Now my disgust doubled. I asked the vendor who put these together and she said "independent photographers'. As I tossed the book back onto the table, I said in a loud enough voice for all to hear, "some of those are poor copies and you are violating copyrights".

 

But what could I do? I walked on to the South Street Seaport and decided to enjoy my afternoon. It was a nice couple of hours and upon leaving the area decided to avoid Fulton street and all those vendors. But to get to the subway, I was heading in the direction where once the Towers stood. As I walked this side street, I noticed how much more light was falling down between the buildings. Now that 'wall' at the end of the street - the Towers - was missing. The reminders were everywhere.

 

I got to Broadway (I was going to take the Lexington line uptown to have dinner with a friend) when I decided to investigate what was going on around Ground Zero. My last trip there was on Dec. 11. I had expected things would change. But not what I encountered. It was as if time had reversed and I was back on the Broadway of pre 9/11. The stores were all open, people were walking down the street in a normal fashion, gone were the tourists with their cameras, nothing even indicated that right around the corner on the next street was a big gaping hole where the WTC once existed. The only reminder of that time that I had once called the Mile of Tears, was St. Paul's and the memorials all around it. You could barely even see the viewing platform unless you were right in front of it! True, in October when I had first visited, the barricades were up on Broadway and the loss was only a month old. In Dec, the barricades had moved over to the west of Broadway but people were still making memorials out of any wall surface around. There were also Christian youths handing out literature and asking if you would like to join them in prayer for a lost loved one. Yes, most of the shops were open but the 'shop till you drop' atmosphere hadn't yet returned. So should I now be thrilled that 5 ½ months later 'normalcy' had returned?