[Photo(s) taken from the 18th Floor
Terrace of my building, late September.]
I moved back into my apartment on the afternoon of Friday, September
21. It was difficult, I could only take
a cab so far and then I had to carry all my stuff quite a ways. I checked that the power was on and
everything was in its place. I decided not
to reset the microwave and oven clocks, there were too many clocks in my life
as it was. I also drained my bathwater,
still there from the morning of September 11.
I scrubbed away the water rings it had left in the tub.
A cleaning crew hired by my building management came by and offered to
clean my apartment, which I turned down, even though there was thick white dust
on the windowsills, dust that had seeped in through the window seals and
vents. I cleaned it up myself.
Outside the building, most of the bushes and trees and streets had been
cleaned. Behind my building, however, in
that undeveloped park/field facing the WTC, there were cars and trucks parked,
some of them covered in ash, having been parked there in haste on September 11
by brave respondents to the first call for help and never retrieved. And there were thousands of pieces of office
paper that had blown from the World
Trade Center
I wanted to be helpful so I started picking up the papers. I spent hours filling trash bags but made
little progress in cleaning up the park.
After a while I became more interested in what I was picking up than in
the actual picking up, however.
There were memos, folders, people’s travel & expense reports,
microfiche of old employee stats, WTC
Observation Deck admission tickets, financial documents in several languages,
Port Authority papers. Photos of
children that had once sat on desks or maybe tacked to bulletin boards. And business cards of people whose offices
had been in the WTC. When I held the
items I wondered, who are these people?
How have their lives changed? Are
they even alive? Do these children still
have parents??
There were also the student art project signs. These signs were small pieces of metal with
various sayings stuck on them. They had
started popping up in August, on long thin metal rods stuck into the ground,
like non-biodegradable flowers. [I found
out later from a neighbor that they were part of a student art project,
protesting the development plans for this “last piece of undeveloped grass” in
NYC]. I hadn’t known what they were
then, I still don’t really know, but as I was picking them up and reading them,
they suddenly took on ominous, almost prophetic meanings. Most of them said things like, “it’s not easy
being green,” “i am the lorax and i speak
for the grass” and “viva la rye grass”.
Some of them, however, said things like “watch out, you’re on changing
ground, “ “this park can hold 2000
people lying down” and “this park will be destroyed.” These
phrases are understandable in the context of the fact that the park was going
to be developed, another building built on it and the rest of the wild lawn
“tamed”. But on September 22, they
suddenly seemed threatening.
The most incriminating one, however, the one that I still cannot figure
out what it could possibly mean, said “your
next park will arrive on :11”. On “
:11” ?? Now what could that possibly
mean? If I was a college-aged
environmentalist artist, what would I have meant by that? “:11” is not a train time, no one talks about
subway trains like that. “:11” might
have been some sort of default time, since all of the sign stickers were
time-stamped by the printer “AUG 06-01 02:11 P”. But it’s unlikely, since none of the other
sign messages include reference to a
time, that the author would have coded a date/time field into the text box of
this single sign, particularly one that only used “current seconds”. Also, there is another time stamp obscured by
the first, which looks like the result a sticker re-print, that shows “AUG
06-01 9:06 A”. In other words, it looks
like someone had typed this phrase before 2:11 PM and had deliberately written “:11” in the
phrase.
“:11” probably means something else entirely, but it
sure looked to me on that day – and to this day – like a reference to the date
9/11.
You can see the student art
project signs in the field behind my building in this pic from 9/11.
While I was standing in the park, pondering the suspicious signs and
displaced office papers, a man approached me.
“They’ve got you working, huh?”, he said. His name was Steve, he was an NYPD
Detective. I told him that I wasn’t
working officially, that I was a resident just trying to clean up. I showed him the suspicious art signs and
asked if he wanted to take them in for investigation. He said no, they probably didn’t mean
anything.
We talked for about 25 minutes.
He was working at the Site every day, very long days, looking for
bodies. He said they had found bodies of
firemen that morning, a lot of firemen, huddled together. He said that they mostly only found pieces of
bodies, and how awful it was to find and then give to a family something like a
charred torso of their loved one. What
do you do with that?
He had to go back to work, so I asked him again if he thought the signs
were suspicious. He said, they were
disturbing but probably not suspicious.
Maybe I should hold on to them and he should get my phone number, in
case they needed to see them at some point?
I wasn’t sure if this was really why he wanted my phone number, but I
wanted to give it to him anyway so I did.
[The Detective did call later, and not to get the suspicious art
signs. We talked a few times. Unfortunately, we were never able to connect again
in person.]
After two days with little progress I gave up on trying to clean the
park. I kept some of the papers that I
had picked up, however, and all of the business cards. Over the next few days, I searched online
lists of people reported missing and called and sent emails to the companies of
people whose cards I was holding. This
was a very emotional exercise and I never finished it. Though I did make contact with several people
or their companies or friends. I sent
one of the business cards to a woman’s friend.
This woman worked for Marsh, she had been killed. A few weeks later, I received a thank you
note from her parents, describing their daughter. The only person I made direct contact with
was a man named Joe who also worked for Marsh, he was alive because he wasn’t
in the building on September 11. More of
his story on October 10, when I had lunch with him.
Files and photos blown from the WTC offices to
the field behind my building
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