What Draws Us Downtown

What Draws Us Downtown
We want to see the destruction for ourselves--and pay our respects.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, October 4, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

NEW YORK--For some folks in this stricken city, lower Manhattan has become mainly a place to avoid. For others, getting on with life seems to require visiting the wreck. Periodically over the past three weeks, that is what I have done--not with a press pass, or even with any particular plan. Some instinct has said "go," and I have gone, joining the people filing up and down the side streets, seeking a glimpse of the ruins.

Not that you can't see the site far more clearly on television, around the clock, in aerial shots or detailed close-ups, complete with diagrams, narratives and breaking news. Just flip through the channels.

But it is not the same as going there. A lot of life--and death--has been played out in this country during recent years at some virtual remove, served up on television or radio; over telephones and in cyberspace. That, at its best, yields its own large measure of wealth and ease. But it is also one reason that despite the warnings of evil abroad in the world, and aimed at us, we felt so safe. If it got too bad, you could change the channel. You could just click the switch, log off, hang up.

But on Sept. 11, there was no way to take it in, and no way to turn it off. Perhaps I keep trying to return to the place, to make it real, because on Sept. 11 I was not at my desk in our New York office. I was 300 miles upstate, and like many Americans, I watched it live on television that morning, unable to get a phone call through. Our building--as many of our readers already know--is diagonally across the street from where the towers stood. When those towers collapsed, I thought that many of my colleagues must be dead.

The Journal was lucky. All our staff survived. I know that some of my colleagues who were there that day feel--understandably--no urge to return right away. And there's no practical use to it. Our office building is for now inaccessible, part of a "crime scene" cordoned off by roadblocks and guards. It belongs for a time to a twilight place of recovery workers, shattered glass and smoking rubble.

Somehow, before I can move on, I have to see this place--as it now is. In this, I am far from alone. Every time I go downtown, I find, mixed in with the returning brokers, bankers and shopkeepers, a steady procession of visitors who have no business there but to look. I'm not talking about the politicians and movie stars we keep seeing on TV, wearing hardhats and touring ground zero. I mean the people not important enough to warrant an official escort past the police lines. Instead, they walk the perimeter of what is for now the forbidden zone, a buffer area of several blocks in all directions around what was once the World Trade Center.

It's an oddly frustrating business. The official assumption--partly a defense against any show of poor taste--is that though this scene may be haunting the imagination of the world, actual passersby should not be too interested. Police lines on many of the side streets are set well back from the work on the actual site. Guards shoo along anyone who lingers close to the barricades. On one street corner of lower Broadway, three camouflage ponchos hang from some old scaffolding; they were put there by security personnel to obscure what would otherwise be a wide view--lest people stop to stare.

There is no place from which ordinary pedestrians can get a full sense of the scale of the destruction. It is more a Lilliputian experience of peering from low in each city canyon toward distant segments of the devastation. You work your way from Fulton Street down to Battery Park, sometimes on Broadway, sometimes herded away to the east--seeking the next narrow, hurried view, trying to guess what the fallen giant, in its entirety, must look like.

Signs posted on the fences and roadblocks state: "Warning: No cameras or video equipment. Violators will be prosecuted and equipment seized." But while the ban on unauthorized photography applies only within the cordoned-off area, guards yell and wave at people on the open streets when they raise their cameras, until they stop filming. Like lingering by the roadblocks for a longer look, photography here becomes a furtive, harried deed--a small defiance of authority that is surely not what most of these folks are remotely after.

Perhaps there's no better way to handle all this at the moment. Initially, there was extremely good cause to keep the site as closed as possible, both for safety and to provide privacy and rapid care for any survivors who might be found in the rubble. And at this stage, it is still important that the public defer to the work of the crews now laboring in a terrible, sad and dangerous place, amid that pervasive reek of metallic soot.

But it seems worth noting that most of the folks who come here, trying to see, are not tourists in any usual sense. Nor are they simply the morbidly curious. For the most part, these are people who have come to pay their respects. They have come to persuade themselves that the events of Sept. 11 were real. Most are solemn. They are quiet. They know they are filing past the dead.

They walk up to the blue wooden roadblocks, or the crooked lines of metal fencing, and when they can't go any farther, they just stand for a while--if they are allowed to--and look. Some carry flags. Some leave flowers. Some weep. When they talk, it is usually to try to figure out what they are actually looking at--what building stood where, which gutted remnant was what. "You see it on television," one woman told me, but she had finally come in from Long Island because "you have to see it for yourself. You have to smell it. You have to be here."

But you can't quite get there.

Different people have different ways of absorbing the unacceptable. I think it would be worthwhile, as soon as the logistics allow, for the city to open a corridor that would provide a full view of the place, not only for visiting politicians, celebrities and the media, but for those ordinary Americans who clearly wish to come and in their own way honor what was lost and witness what remains. These people have stepped away deliberately from the sanitized sheen of TV, and come for something more grueling and respectful than a sidelong glance. Let them take pictures, let them gaze, let them see in full, and up close if they feel they must, what we are now dealing with.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."