7 November 2001

It’s 2am again, 24 hours after my last entry, and I’m sitting in my room, back from my daytrip to New York. After our press briefings ended, I decided to take a taxi downtown to ground zero, to take some pictures and maybe get a little better understanding of what happened.

Taxi map, with towers intact.

I think what struck me most about the whole experience is how fresh and raw and real the attacks still are in New York, nearly two months later. In Boston, and, I imagine, in other cities, the events of September 11th still loom heart-wrenching and terrible and very very significant, but some time ago they acquired the shiny gloss of a distant event which is now well-understood and defined and encapsulated by the media and about which it is now, finally, okay to be ironic and sarcastic and glib and oh-so-gen-y. To some degree, we’ve already moved on.

But that’s not at all the way things seem to be in New York. Everyone I talked to about the state of the city used the same phrase: “We’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

I think this is just to the right of where #2 WTC used to be.

Down at ground zero, the air is still rank with the odor of damp burnt wood and building materials, and in some places the dust is so thick in the air that it stings your eyes and throat. It’s hard to describe the smell precisely, mainly because we don’t have a lot of good words for describing odors, but it’s a little like what the steam would smell like if you set a bunch of wood and paper and drywall on fire, and then poured water over it. Sitting here in my bedroom in Boston nearly twelve hours after my visit downtown, the smell of it is still on my hands and face and clothing.

There were hundreds of other tourists like me, walking around taking pictures and talking into cell phones. Some people were crying. Most just stared. There are still tons of police and rescue workers too, and the nearby bars and restaurants were full of tired faces.

It was hard to get very many good pictures, since most of the area was cordoned off with tall, green-mesh fencing, and because, for many many people, ground zero is a crime scene, a place of work, and a place of mourning.

You have to zoom in to see the writing on the sign.

I tried to circumambulate the whole area, but it was so big, and I was tired, and I had to catch my return train. Overall the experience of visiting the WTC site made me feel like I’ve been insensitive and jaded in already thinking about what happened as “an important sociohistorical event,” and too quickly forgetting the human impact.

In a software store one block from ground zero.

I have a bunch more photos. If I get the time later this week, I may put them up.