Decadence, Thy Name is Junior's

Mmmm!

Do you have a restaurant called the Cheesecake Factory where you live?

We have several in the Dallas - Fort Worth area, including one right here in Arlington. All of their restaurants feature a decor I call "California bling:" high on gaudy, and heavy on fake wood, fake palm trees, and painted glass. They're what a Beverly Hills IHOP might look like - if 90210's anorexic denizens actually ate breakfast - but with much better food.

Food which, even in a restaurant called Cheesecake Factory, doesn't relate much to cheesecake. Although, in all fairness, most of their menu items seem quite tasty, served in portions of surprisingly non-bikini-friendly sizes. And while Cheesecake Factories become a destination spot wherever they're located because of their entrees, they do have some serious diet-buster cheesecakes which defy the sleek California image.

Indeed, their cheesecakes boast an impressive listing of flavors, each with a rather fluffy texture, which I suppose fits with the chain's glitzy California bling decor. And sure, they taste good, but... they could be tastier, and their texture isn't what I grew up associating with cheesecakes. Because for the grand, solid, almost sticky original cheesecake experience, you can't beat the sumptuous delights found at Brooklyn's original Junior's Restaurant, at the gritty corner of Flatbush and DeKalb Avenues.

Yes, We Have Kosher Cheesecake

The flagship Junior's in downtown Brooklyn represents the old-school Jewish delicatessen at its urban - if not urbane - gastronomic best. With a faded bling of its own - gold chrome refrigerated cases and window frames, for example - this restaurant reeks of Brooklyn pragmatism and survivalism instead of West Coast indulgence. When Brooklyn's downtown area disintegrated into decay during the city's white flight of the past fifty years, Junior's was one of the few stalwarts, determined to make the most of whatever the city's most populous borough was becoming.

Turns out, Brooklyn was becoming a more vibrant multi-ethnic, multi-industry community, complete with revitalized arts institutions, universities, and a sprawling neighborhood of high-rise office towers housing back-office functions for major Manhattan corporations. More recently, residential skyscrapers have begun marching towards Junior's from Brooklyn's riverfront, while a controversial - and architecturally hideous - NBA arena gets built over one of North America's busiest rail stations.

Meaning that for all of the crime, blight, and worthless urban redesign programs Junior's has had to endure over the decades, maybe now it will really get to shine.

Especially good news, since the family of the restaurant's original owner still runs the place, and guards its recipes as staunchly as they've held their ground. Recipes which include the richest, most flavorful cheesecake I think you'll ever taste, each piece boasting a lightly golden top, and a crust that doesn't dare compete for the flavor. You can get it all dolled up with fruits and specialty toppings like you can at the Cheesecake Factory, but why would you want to adulterate the pure bliss of a Junior's original?

If you weren't hungry before you started today's essay, you should be by now!

It Wouldn't Be Christmas in Brooklyn Without It

I was reminded of Junior's several times this summer when some friends from Florida were visiting New York City and posted a photo of their table at Junior's - piled with food - on FaceBook. My sister-in-law e-mailed me a photo of two divine confections - slabs of cheesecake and chocolate cake - when she and my brother were visiting my aunt this summer.

Then last week, the New York Times ran a story about how consumers were managing to scrape together extra dollars for some of life's little pleasures, like cheesecake from the Junior's shop in Manhattan's remodeled Grand Central Station. Along with a photo. Not of cheesecakes, fortunately, or I would have likely drooled all over my laptop. But of some fanciful cupcakes and other pastries, as sweet-toothed customers struggled to decide on their order.

Years ago, when my father's mother was still alive, she and my aunt would host scrumptuous Christmas Day lunches at their airy apartment in Brooklyn. The pastor of their neighborhood's Finnish church and his wife and daughter would always attend, plus several of the older ladies in the church who didn't have family in the city, plus my family. And usually, although my grandmother did most of the cooking - including a delicately prepared lamb - she and my aunt would order deli trays and desserts from Junior's.

How I loved those bona-fide Christmas feasts!

One year in particular, I remember that my aunt hadn't managed to get by Junior's to pick up their order before Christmas Day. Fortunately, since Junior's is owned by Jews, they're open on Christmas (or, at least, they used to be), so that morning, my father and I drove downtown. I remember we found a parking space in front of the restaurant, loaded up the car with my grandmother's order, and started back to the apartment via Flatbush Avenue.

A few moments later, as we were pulling up to a stoplight, I noticed that somebody was running down the sidewalk, along with our car, waving wildly at us, and yelling. At first, my Dad, who grew up in Brooklyn and understood how rough it had become, warned me to ignore the guy. Probably some lunatic. But he came running right up to our car.

And we realized:  he was the clerk from Junior's!

We'd forgotten to take the most important part of our meal: the cheesecake! How could we possibly have done that? The clerk had noticed our mistake, scooped up the bakery boxes we'd left on the counter, and charged out into the cold Brooklyn morning, hoping to catch us as we drove away. He knew how bad we'd feel if we made it home without the day's ultimate dessert!

Back then, that kind of effort by the Junior's employee was called customer service. Today, in any business, it would likely be called a miracle.

Boy, I'd sure love a slice of Junior's cheesecake right about now to make sure it hasn't changed at all!
_____

Facing the Fact of 9/11

This essay has been adapted from an earlier post on March 4, 2010.

Hey - I admit it.

I'm skeptical of many things, and cynical about many others.

Not that I'm proud of the latter, or find that the former wins me friends.

But I'm neither skeptical nor cynical about whether our government perpetrated 9/11. One of the few things I can say with confidence, even as the 10-year anniversary of that event dawns this Sunday, is that there was no Washington conspiracy.

None. Nada. Zip.

Which, conversely, makes me incredibly cynical towards those folks who do still insist that American officials contrived to perpetrate those despicable events of September 11, 2001. I realize that many Americans harbor incredible animosity and vitriol against our own government. And none of us thinks Washington is scrupulously honest, or always looking out for the interests of the general public.

But planning 9/11?

Is it the sheer, stunning audacity of what happened that makes conspiracists unable to process it all? Has that much vile contempt for Washington been fomented over the years that people would rather suspect it of terrorism than Muslim extremists?

What kind of satisfaction do 9/11 conspiracy theorists expect to find in the knowledge that our own leaders masterminded the whole thing? If George W. Bush were to walk out onto the lawn of his Dallas home to a press conference and admit that, yeah, he and Clinton plotted the whole thing – would conspiracists rejoice?

Good grief – what kind of wacko, delusional fatalist does one have to be to believe our federal government is a sham? That it’s utterly despicable, full of brazen traitors and zombie killers?

Because that’s what having the US government plot 9/11 would have required.

No elite domestic terrorism cell within any covert agency or branch of the government would have been able to pull off the stunning scenario watched by people all over the world that awful Tuesday morning. No group of 10, 20, 100, or 500 people still run around the Pentagon, or live in some sort of witness protection program, sharing secret handshakes and holding alumni reunions underground in honor of their brazen plot.

For the level of cover-up required to pull off 9/11 as an inside job, trying to coordinate so many people of so many disciplines with so much equipment and such widespread access would have been sheer folly. Granted, Washington has known its share of folly, but not from a clandestine operation of that scale.

Look, we can’t safeguard normal state secrets any longer than it takes somebody to dial a phone. If anybody knew of the breathtaking plans for 9/11, wouldn't Moscow have been buzzing about it within hours? Our entire capital district is one giant sieve of confidential information.

Why the World Trade Center Wasn't an Inside Job

I don’t know much about the Pentagon, or whatever target Flight 93 was destined to destroy before passengers heroically forced it into a Pennsylvania field. But I do know something about New York’s World Trade Center (WTC). So let me help debunk at least one critical aspect about which many conspiracy advocates keep harping: the WTC's destruction being an inside job.

First, I’ve heard them say that since the WTC was a government facility, government operatives would have had easy access to plant explosives and other destructive devices.

Well, yes, it is a government facility, but the governments are the states of New York and New Jersey, not the federal government. It was – and still is – owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and a more over-bureaucratized and union-saturated organization you’ll never find. Absolutely nothing happened in that huge, 7-building complex without at least dozens of people knowing about it.

Not only did the Port Authority control the complex, but the City of New York, the New York governor’s office, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and any number of too-big-to-fail banks all had operations in the World Trade Center. These are organizations with lots of busybodies and redundant security protocols.

In addition, veteran Manhattan developer Larry Silverstein had just won a mammoth new management contract from the Port Authority to run the WTC. It's simply beyond reason to suspect such an experienced and shrewd operator as Silverstein would bungle his due diligence by ignoring telltale signs of sabotage on the WTC structures. It's also the apex of cynicism to suggest that he would be complicit with spies and play along with their grand charade, crafting an innocent diversion like a management contract so new, the paperwork hadn't even come back from the lawyers before September 11.

In addition to Silverstein and his executives, consider the sheer volume of people from whom the prep work for 9-11 would have had to be hidden. Over 50,000 people worked in or visited the WTC every day – that’s greater than the population of many cities. It had a shopping mall, restaurants, subway stations, and a commuter rail station – just in the basement levels. Do you honestly think somebody could hack away drywall and concrete to strap plastic explosives on a steel beam without one person noticing?

A favorite bit of “ah-ha!” evidence conspiracy theorists like to trot out is the odd collapse of 7 WTC late in the afternoon of September 11. They say that without warning, this newest addition to the Trade Center complex fell of its own accord, hours after all the other structures in the complex had already been obliterated. Look at the videos, they insist: you see puffs of smoke, indicating explosives being detonated floor by floor.

There are so many facts here that conspiracy theorists ignore, it’s hard to know where to start. Fortunately, I don’t have to go into all of them – I’ve found a fairly comprehensive and easy-to-read description of the fall of 7 WTC on Wikipedia. While I’m normally hesitant to recommend much on that site, this material has references and research notes to copious to be faked.

• You’ll recall that nobody died in the collapse of 7 WTC. But it wasn't because some spy had a change of heart and warned tenants; firefighters noticed the building becoming unstable hours earlier, and made sure it was completely evacuated and nearby streets cleared well in advance of its falling.
• Media images of the building taken throughout that day, plus official reports of the afternoon's recovery efforts, provide documented evidence that the building was significantly, structurally damaged from the fall of the WTC's north tower.
• Popping sounds (not explosions) could be heard inside the building well before it fell. These noises came from structural elements buckling and dislodging as the stricken building shifted in preparation for its collapse, not demolition detonations.
• The smoky puffs visible in photos and videos were from smoldering fires sparked when debris hit the building earlier in the day, whose smoke was released when windows popped out of their frames as the building facade crumbled.

Are You Smarter Than a Forensic Scientist?

Now, I suppose the most intransigent conspiracy theorist could insist that the news coverage was doctored, the fire department was running two sets of books when it documented events as the day unfolded, and that all of the scientists who have spent years studying the physics of this catastrophe are on the take.

But which is harder to imagine: that our government was audacious enough to orchestrate all of this and overcome so many prohibitive obstacles? Or that some ill-advised and desperately suspicious citizens are audacious enough to believe our government could do it?

Quite simply, no proof, no logic, and no motive exists to justify and explain such an outlandish accusation towards our government. For such theorists to continue hedging the possibility that legitimate questions remain over the planning, execution, and clean-up of 9-11 seems more than preposterous. It paints adherents to such suspicions with more than general silliness; it douses them with dismal acrylics of mean-spiritedness, spite, and absurdity.

We’ve moved past the time for such insipid speculation, and those who insist on perpetuating the fantasy of such unimaginable scales of state-sponsored terrorism need to cease and desist. Respecting those in authority – particularly within a democracy – remains our civic obligation unless we have proof to the contrary.

And if you believe you’ve got real proof, what makes you think a government that could pull off 9/11 is gonna let you spill the beans?
_____

Prelude to 9/11, Part 4

With the tenth anniversary of 9-11 rapidly approaching, I'd like to return to 1993, and the first attack on New York's World Trade Center. I was living and working in New York City at the time, and doubt I'll ever forget that strange, confusing day.

This essay was originally posted in September, 2010:

The First World Trade Center Attack: Friday, February 26, 1993

Part One - click here
Part Two - click here
Part Three - click here

Part Four: Conclusion

Back at the office, I discovered how brown-outs got their name.

The elevators worked just fine, but the fluorescent ceiling lights cast a decidedly dull glow. Combined with the leaden skies outside, our office actually had an eerie yellowish-brownish tinge when I walked in.

By now, the computers were completely useless. Several of my co-workers had simply turned off their desktops and were doing invoicing with our old - yet still not obsolete - typewriters.

Since we didn't know how long our building's elevators would keep running in the brown-out, we decided to take what invoices we could complete to the post office, and then call it a day. Our boss had called again from California, and having seen coverage of the evacuation from the Twin Towers on television himself, he encouraged us to wrap things up for the day.

Three of my co-workers lived on Staten Island, just a ferry’s ride away from the pier near our office building. After hearing my story about the damsels in distress at Burger King, a fourth co-worker who lived in New Jersey - and always commuted via the PATH train underneath the World Trade Center (WTC) - decided to take the ferry too. She called her boyfriend to have him drive over from Secaucus and meet her at the terminal on Staten Island.

After everyone else had gone, I stayed behind in the office for a while just listening to the radio, which by now had gone to an all-news format with constant coverage of the emergency at the WTC. Apparently, our radio station was one of the few left on the air, since the main broadcast tower atop One World Trade had been put out of commission by the explosion. We'd discover later that several television stations would also be without their signal for days.

Staff at the law firm next door were getting ready to head home early, too, so before they left, I went into their office to look out at the Twin Towers again. This time, the garage entrance was clearly visible; any smoke coming out was of the light, wispy variety. Rescue workers were still bustling about, while as far as I could see, West Street remained choked with fire trucks and other emergency vehicles.

First responders had come from all over the city even as officials still weren’t sure what they were dealing with. Was it a disaster involving Consolidated Edison and their combustible steam pipes, as my co-workers and I imagined? Was there some sort of massive structural failure within the bowels of the WTC? Or, as some reporters were beginning to suggest, was this some sort of terrorist act?

Either way, the WTC was the most-densely populated office complex on the densely-populated island of Manhattan, so a major problem there was a major responsibility for the city's entire first responder workforce.

We saw the same thing happen on 9/11 seven years later, of course, but with unprecedentedly horrific results.

Terrorism Not Yet a Part of Life

Back in 1993, terrorism on United States soil remained almost unimaginable. It hadn’t happened before, at least on that scale.

There was the LaGuardia Airport Christmas bombing in 1975, which killed 11 people - five more than we'd learn died at the WTC - but only destroyed a baggage claim area. All these years later, that bombing has yet to be solved, although some experts suspect a Puerto Rican political group that had also bombed Lower Manhattan's Fraunces Tavern earlier in 1975, killing 4.

The bombing of Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building would come two years after the WTC's first attack, in 1995, and feature a similar modus operandi involving a rental truck stuffed with explosive material. 168 people were killed in this rare atrocity in "middle America," and over 500 injured.

Nowadays, terrorism has become a part of many ordinary patterns of life. Air travel presents the most noticeable deference to terrorism concerns, but many public buildings also now have scanning machines, closed-circuit cameras now proliferate from downtowns to suburban malls, and our presidents now ride around in a bomb-proofed Cadillac with its own oxygen supply.

Yet even back in the relatively innocent year of 1993, within hours of the Trade Center explosion, New York media began reporting that over 100 claims of responsibility had been phoned in from terrorist organizations just within the city.

Good grief! Most of us had no idea so many hate groups existed in the United States, let alone the Big Apple. Since that sounded so absurd to us, it made the idea of terrorists striking the WTC that much more unlikely.

At the time, anyway.

As I closed up the office and struck out for Uptown, mapping out in my mind the subway routes that were probably open to me, I once again crossed the pedestrian bridge spanning the gaping mouth of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.

Just like it had been at lunchtime, the ramps below me were eerily empty and quiet. They should have been bumper-to-bumper with rush hour traffic. I looked to my left, and gazed at the Twin Towers soaring four blocks away, a bright blue police helicopter hovering mid-way up Tower Two.

It was weird to realize that for the first time since they were built, those two towers were likely completely empty of people.

New Era Dawning

By the end of that weekend, we would learn it wasn’t Con-Ed’s fault at all. Instead, Muslim terrorists had rented a yellow Ryder truck in New Jersey, loaded it with explosives, and detonated it in the WTC’s underground parking garage.

Apparently, their plan was to topple Tower One with their bomb, and that as it fell, Tower One would destroy Tower Two. This scenario assumed, of course, that the skyscraper wouldn’t fall into the wide boulevard to its west, the old ATT building to its north, or the open plaza to its east; or, as we all witnessed on 9/11, basically collapse in on itself.

I remember our office staff laughing out loud when we heard on the radio days later that the FBI had closed the case. Apparently, a couple of the terrorists, upon learning that their plan hadn't worked, reported the Ryder truck stolen, and went back to Ryder to claim their deposit, where the FBI was waiting for them. With idiots like that trying to blow up New York landmarks, we quickly assumed that while the city might be plagued with other major disruptions like February 26’s in the future, we had little else to fear.

In fact, after the WTC was cleaned, repaired, remodeled, and reopened, I was standing in line in the lobby of Tower Two, waiting to get a photo identification badge that would give me open access to the complex, since I often ran errands for the company there. I remember chatting with a couple of other guys in line, also waiting for their badges, and we got to joking about the foiled destruction of the very building we were in.

Like typical civilians who mock government bureaucracy, we saw the I.D. procurement process as useless red tape meant to pacify building tenants who might be leery about moving back into the towers. Just another hoop to jump through; just a veneer of security to try and show that the Port Authority is serious about protecting their trophy property.

After all, nobody would be insane enough to attempt the destruction of the Twin Towers ever again!

I so wish we were right.
_____

Prelude to 9/11, Part 3

With the tenth anniversary of 9-11 rapidly approaching, I'd like to return to 1993, and the first attack on New York's World Trade Center. I was living and working in New York City at the time, and doubt I'll ever forget that strange, confusing day.

This essay was originally posted in September, 2010:

The First World Trade Center Attack: Friday, February 26, 1993

Part One - click here
Part Two - click here

Part Three:

I was taken aback. Talking to the damsels in distress at Burger King, it hadn’t occurred to me that a massive evacuation was taking place at the World Trade Center (WTC). I guess I had just assumed that the smoke from the fire we saw back at the office had only contaminated the lower parts of the complex, like the lobbies, the mall, and the train stations. I still didn't realize that both towers had become two giant smokestacks.(FYI, police helicopters did pluck over 100 people from the tower roofs that day, including a pregnant woman who gave birth soon after being rescued.)

Evacuation can be a great equalizer. At least from skyscrapers. When you’re emptying two 110-story buildings, executives, managers, secretaries, clerks, and custodians who were interspersed across 220 floors worth of offices and one very exclusive restaurant suddenly become one human mass facing the same predicament. There isn’t one emergency stairwell for million-dollar CEOs, and another one for hourly employees. It’s sheer physical fitness, not your job title, that spells the difference between getting out with enough energy to make it home, or just getting out.

Indeed, all ages, body types, and physical conditions were represented in the grim, sooty lines of WTC tenants shuffling out of the towers. Some were walking arm-in-arm for mutual support, some were almost being carried by others.

None were talking; many were coughing.

Some women were walking barefoot, probably having taken off their high heels back on the twentieth floor landing, or maybe the 82nd. I remember seeing photos of handicapped people who were forced to leave their wheelchairs behind, relying on the graciousness of co-workers to be carried down.

Trudging down 90, 60, 30 floors in smoky dimness, with hundreds of people in front of you, and hundreds more pressing down behind you, with more being added floor by floor as you descended. Can you imagine?! The claustrophobia alone must have been oppressive, let alone the anxiety of not really knowing what was going on. What energy that must have required for everyone involved!

Whenever tragedy has stricken the Big Apple, its mayors always like to say those are times when New Yorkers shine. And sure enough, everybody had worked together to get out of the buildings alive. Nobody was complaining, nobody was bickering. Everybody was too exhausted. They also seemed to be dazed, since nothing like this had ever happened to them before.

Lines of Soot-Covered Survivors

Oddly enough, the long lines of huddled evacuees slowly marching from the towers were being herded by police officers to walk alongside the towers themselves. The cops were not allowing anybody to roam out into the broad plaza between the WTC's two signature skyscrapers. As I walked back around to the plaza's eastern side, I could see why.

Craning my neck and looking high into the snowy sky, bits of stuff were falling from the upper floors of the Twin Towers, and it wasn’t snow. It was… furniture! Later, when I got back to the office, I heard on the radio that people waiting for congestion to clear in the emergency stairwells were smashing office furniture through windows to try and let the smoke escape and allow fresh air in. So bits of furnishings and shards of glass would occasionally rain down, onto the rooftops of shorter buildings around the towers, and into the plaza below. It wasn't like leather chairs and sofas were crashing onto the plaza like bombs during the London Blitz, but enough debris was falling to make walking out from the relative shelter of the plaza’s periphery exceedingly dangerous. That’s why the police were forcing evacuees to stay in their narrow lines alongside the buildings.

Another reason also became clear: as the evacuees came towards that parking lot that was never used, more police officers were ready in a surprisingly well-organized distribution system with bottled water, blankets, and towels, handing them out to the grateful, freezing, exhausted, soot-covered office workers, one by one. For evacuees who could barely walk, more first responders draped blankets over them and helped them onto waiting stretchers. Ambulances had lined up in rows, filling the otherwise unused parking lot and turning it into a sort of triage.

I vividly remember one tall woman with what we Texans call "big hair" that was dusted with soot. She was wearing a plush, knee-length mink coat – obviously having taken the time to retrieve her valuable fur before vacating her office – and still had on her high heels. After all, even in an emergency, some New Yorkers wouldn’t dare forgo their fashion sense. She walked towards me, patting the sleeves of her thick mink, and each time she did, soot puffed out of her coat. It was obviously ruined, and by the look on her face, she knew it. Undaunted, or perhaps simply resigned to reality, she strode past me and into the throngs of people milling about the ambulances, on into the bizarre afternoon.

Sing it With Me: "We Need Dirty Laundry"

By this time, news crews were everywhere, and as evacuees from the towers came towards the parking lot triage area, some reporters would dart towards them, trying to get an interview. Some were shooed away by cops who were trying to assess the medical needs of evacuees. But not many evacuees had the interest – or the breath – to talk with the reporters anyway. They just pushed by the media folks, wanting only to go home.

Other evacuees lined themselves up at the backs of ambulances staged in the parking lot. Paramedics worked feverishly with oxygen tanks and masks, helping people wash their faces, rinse out their sooty mouths, and cleaning up after a few evacuees simply vomited what they’d inhaled back in the towers. Even as the medics were multi-tasking on multiple patients, the lines at the back doors to their ambulances continued to grow. But the evacuees were patient, for the most part; content enough to be safely out of the towers.

Patience, however, was lost on the news crews who were roving around the triage area, like vultures looking for prey. Who could get the best story? Who could find the evacuee with the most harrowing tale to tell? What better place to look for provocative exclusives than these ambulances, where weary survivors were being treated?

The only time I became disgusted at what I saw came when I watched TV news crews try to push their way into the backs of ambulances where paramedics were treating injured people on stretchers. Reporters actually pushed aside waiting patients and tried to clamor inside the ambulances, swinging light poles and microphone poles with absolutely no regard to the people or equipment that were being jabbed inside. This happened repeatedly, from ambulance to ambulance, as all of New York’s media hounds tried to scoop each other with interviews of the sick.

At first, it was disturbing, but as I witnessed it happening multiple times, it became appalling. I couldn’t believe that here we were, in the face of what was rapidly being realized as a major emergency, and sick people were being pushed aside and jostled so news reporters could try and advance their own careers. This had nothing to do with getting first-hand accounts of what went on inside the Twin Towers. Those reports could be collected after everybody was safely home and over the day’s shock. The only reason for those reporters to be as belligerent as they were in their aggressive pursuit of interviews and video of sick people in ambulances was their own lust for making a headline. I’ve never held the media in very high regard, but after that day, news reporters have ranked just above used car salesmen in my book.

Suddenly, a cop saw a particularly insensitive reporter trying to shove his way into the back of an ambulance, pushing back a cluster of evacuees waiting for help. “Hey!” she yelled, a hefty black officer, as I recall, reaching over and physically pulling the reporter by his arm out of the ambulance, his hand-held microphone dropping to the pavement. The evacuees who had been pushed aside gave the reporter looks that matched the sooty marks on their faces, otherwise too weary to express their own anger at the reporter. When the reporter started to protest, the officer simply ordered him to stay back and not get in anybody’s way.

By now, the snow had mostly stopped, and the smoke drifting from the tops of the Twin Towers was clearly visible. After soaking in a bit more of the human drama unfolding before me, and finally seeing one too many reporter push aside evacuees waiting for help at the ambulances, I decided to return to the office, having more than enough material of my own to share with my co-workers who had stayed behind.

I headed back past the Burger King, walking down Trinity Place, to the relative sanity of our busy little firm.
____

For Part 4, click here.

Prelude to 9/11, Part 2

With the tenth anniversary of 9-11 rapidly approaching, I'd like to return to 1993, and the first attack on New York's World Trade Center. I was living and working in New York City at the time, and doubt I'll ever forget that strange, confusing day.

This essay was originally posted in September, 2010:

The First World Trade Center Attack: Friday, February 26, 1993

Part One - click here

Part 2

Of all the streets in New York City famous in their own right, Trinity Place isn't one of them.

It's the humble service road for its far more stellar sibling, Broadway, one block east. Some office buildings and restaurants which feature prominent entrances on Broadway literally have their back doors on Trinity Place.

Indeed, as Trinity Place parallels the part of Broadway slicing through the world's financial capital, it provides the quiet yin to Broadway’s teeming yang. Even its traffic flows in the opposite direction: north.

Its name comes from the grand old Trinity Church, consecrated in 1846, which faces Broadway at the head of Wall Street, and whose historic graveyard – including the remains of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton and steamboat inventor Robert Fulton – looks out over the suitably quiet roadway linking Battery Park to the south with the eastern side of the World Trade Center (WTC).

On this dreary February day, I walked up Trinity Place, past the solemn stone wall buttressing Trinity Church’s cemetery, and past what was then the American Stock Exchange. Usually the only people I ever saw on this walk were traders from the exchange, outside on their smoke breaks, always in shirtsleeves, no matter the weather.

Business as Usual?

Before 9/11, the WTC complex consisted of the Twin Towers, of course, but also a collection of much shorter buildings scattered around the feet of their much taller partners. They were squat, odd things clad in black metal, surrounded by a parking lot that I only ever saw used once – during a marketing promotion for new Ford Probe sportscars.

So when I turned the corner at Liberty Street, and my gaze passed over the WTC complex there in front of me, apart from all of the emergency vehicles lining the street, I couldn't see that much that didn't look normal. In New York, it's not unusual to see what civilians might consider to be an inordinate number of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances at the scene of what turns out to be a minor emergency. You can't really complain, for example, when dozens of first responders turn out for a dumpster fire in a city with so much unpredictability.

In addition, the snowy skies mostly obscured the upper reaches of the towers, and masked smoke which had begun billowing out of their tops as if they were two cigarettes (which I had always thought they looked like anyway).

Things almost looked placid enough for me to go on into the WTC's underground mall and have lunch in its food court. If I wanted to - which I rarely did. That was still back before the Port Authority started modernizing the public spaces with national retailers and better restaurants. Unless you liked tasteless hot dogs or dining in the plastic wood ambiance of vintage 1970's diner kitsch, for all of its wonder, the Twin Towers were gastronomically disappointing back then

At the very top, both literally and figuratively, sat the multi-star Windows on the World restaurant, where my office used to hold its annual Christmas dinners. And then at the bottom, and I do mean the bottom, near the entrance to the PATH station, were the dimly-lit, decidedly non-gourmet offerings for the masses.

No, as far as cheap food was concerned, the two-story Burger King at the corner on Liberty Street suited me just fine. This same Burger King would narrowly miss being destroyed on 9/11, even after the police turned it into their temporary command post on that fateful day.

Everything seemed normal at Burger King. I got my order, and walked upstairs to the main dining area. I sat looked out a window facing Liberty Plaza Park (now called Zuccotti Park), and figured that with everything appearing so routine, our concerns about the brown-out, the smoke from the WTC’s garage, and all of the emergency vehicles still parked all over the place seemed overblown.

Not Everything is Normal

Then I started looking around the dining room at my fellow diners, and at the next table, I noticed several young women huddled over hot teas and coffees. They had no coats on this frigid day, and their blouses were dingy gray. Their hair had fine soot on it, and their faces looked like they had been hastily washed, maybe in the Burger King bathroom? They were talking in earnest about the PATH commuter trains to New Jersey not running from the Trade Center's station. How were they going to get home?

I interrupted them, and asked if they were from the WTC. Yes, as a matter of fact, they had been evacuated from one of the towers, with not even enough time to go and get their coats from a nearby closet. They had broken into a sweat while trudging down what seemed like miles of emergency stairs, they had frozen when hustling across the open plaza at the base of the towers, and they were coughing from all of the soot they’d inhaled both inside and outside the buildings. To cap it all off, they’d learned that both the commuter trains and the subways with stops in the basement of the WTC were shut down. How were they supposed to get back to their homes in New Jersey, across the Hudson River?

Well! Here were three beautiful young women with a problem I could help solve. I assumed as much of a knight-in-shining-armor pose as I could muster, and I shared with them my admittedly well-honed knowledge of the other local subway stops they could try. They’d probably be able to catch the Lexington Avenue line on Broadway or the N and R from Rector Street, and go up to 42nd Street, then hike over to the Port Authority bus terminal for any number of bus lines into the Garden State.

“Oh, I’ve heard bad things about the bus terminal,” one of the young women balked, referring to perhaps the singlemost crime-ridden building on Manhattan Island (other than City Hall, but that's another story). So I remember we had a conversation about how daytime at the bus terminal is relatively safer than nighttime, and how if they stick together, they should be fine.

And with that, these damsels in distress decided to hit the restroom one more time before striking out on what must have been a long commute home.

My work being done at Burger King, I decided that before I headed back to the office, I’d just stroll around the WTC one last time to see if anything at all exciting was taking place. I bundled myself up – wondering if maybe I should make a chivalrous gesture and offer my wool coat to the damsels, but then, plenty of stores were nearby where they could buy their own coats if they really wanted to.

Chivalry only goes so far on raw February days in New York City.

Figures in Coal, Shuffling

So I stepped out into the frigid, snowy air. Rows of fire trucks and ambulances idled silently along Liberty Street and the southern edge of the WTC complex. Huddled in my overcoat for protection from the biting wind, I walked down to the Bankers Trust tower (which had become the Deutsche Bank building by 9/11, and was so severely damaged when the towers fell, it itself has now been torn down). That black, charmless skyscraper featured an odd, elevated outdoor mezzanine looking over Liberty Street to the entrance to Tower Two.

Throngs of people had gathered on the mezzanine, looking somberly to the Trade Center, their chilled faces marked by bewilderment and pensiveness.

I turned to follow their gaze.

And there I saw them.

Long, shuffling lines of gray and black, some people wearing coats, others coatless, but all covered to varying degrees in soot. Coughing, but otherwise silent, without expression or vigor.

These were the evacuees from the Twin Towers, thousands of them. About 50,000 people worked in or visited the WTC daily. Take the entire population of Biloxi, or Ames, or Sheboygan, and funnel them out of two 110-story towers, four shorter buildings, and a shopping mall, one by one. And you have the miserable, sooty lines of evacuees that February Friday.

They moved like a line of insects in a cartoon, or more morosely, like the ill-fated lines of prisoners being herded to the gas chambers. Although not deathly, the mood was somber. And quiet.

And so utterly still.
_____

Prelude to 9/11, Part 1

Today being September 1, with the tenth anniversary of 9-11 rapidly approaching, I'd like to return to 1993, and the first attack on New York's World Trade Center. I was living and working in New York City at the time, and doubt I'll ever forget that strange, confusing day.

This essay was originally posted in September, 2010:

The First World Trade Center Attack: Friday, February 26, 1993

I can still remember the sudden shudder and muffled explosion that rocked our office on the 25th floor.

My desk faced north, and it was as if a sonic boom had rolled our building backwards, and then forwards. Just for the briefest of moments.

Lights went out, cables clanged in the elevator shafts down the hall, computers went dead.

It all happened so fast, we didn’t have time to be scared. Our desktops clicked and beeped back to life, florescent ceiling lights flickered back on, fax machines that had been in mid-transmission began squawking error messages, and alarm bells from the elevators started ringing.

And of course, a chorus of muttered expletives erupted from co-workers who, like me, did not welcome this disconcerting setback. It was lunchtime. It was also Friday, invoice day, and billables needed to go out the door. Crashed computers and jammed fax machines were even less tolerated than on a normal day.

As we rebooted our computers and somebody reset the fax machines, we wondered aloud at what had happened. Did something blow up in our building, a 30-story pre-war tower perched along the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan? Maybe there was a massive wreck at the entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, which snaked by the entrance to our building? Nah, is was probably stupid Con-Ed’s fault (New York’s power provider); one of their steam pipes probably blew.

And being New York City, a thick grid of streets and towers piled atop Consolidated Edison’s primitive pipes and substations, our concern for what caused our momentary setback subsided quickly. After all, even a trickle of melting snow could short out a third rail on subway tracks two stories underground. With New York generally, and Manhattan particularly, one worries less about what you can’t see and even less about why it might be important. As I’ve said before, New York life is lived in inches. Your power's coming back on? Then get moving again and don't look back.

So we were only marginally curious when the office manager in the next-door law firm came over and invited us to come take a look out their north-facing windows.

“All this black smoke is coming out of the Trade Center garage,” she informed us.

Where There's Smoke...

Located four blocks south of the World Trade Center (WTC), our aging office building featured a beautifully ornate lobby and a vacancy rate past 75%. The 25th floor housed just two tenants - our freight forwarding company, with stunning views of the harbor and the Hudson River; and the law firm, which looked up West Street straight towards the Twin Towers.

Sure enough, from the law firm's office with a vista along the flanks of what was then Lower Manhattan's westernmost boulevard, looking due north as the street below us curved slightly, we saw thick, sooty smoke billowing out of the entrance to the Trade Center's parking garage. Not just puffs of gray, but heavy, charcoal-colored plumes.

And true to the New Yorkness of the moment, cars continued to plow through the smoke as it blew across West Street. Pedestrians still plied the sidewalks and crosswalks, more concerned about dodging traffic than the smoke which must have been making their eyes water. We could hear sirens, though, and within moments, a couple of police cars rolled up the street.

Actually, the sound of sirens would fill the air for the next hour or so as police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, and emergency services officials converged on the World Trade Center, jamming West Street down past our building all the way to the Battery. The whap-whap clipping noise of helicopter rotors would buffet the soundwaves around Lower Manhattan until after I left for the evening.

We looked at each other and agreed this was bigger than just an exploding steam pipe. "Con-Ed has a lot of 'splaining' to do," I recall us mimicking in Ricky Ricardo spanglish.

Lunchtime

From what I can recall, the owner of our company, who lived out on Long Island, had taken that Friday off. His son, my boss, was on a business trip to California. Our sales manager was out sick, so the rest of us – about six in all – were holding down the fort.

Not that the lack of managerial supervision meant we could simply goof off. On most days, our office ran itself quite efficiently, with all of us knowing what needed to get done and how to do it. Our firm's executives knew they didn’t need to be on-site for us to be productive. Besides, as I’ve said, Fridays were when we invoiced, and the woman who was in charge of billables had done it for so long she could do it in her sleep if she had to. The one thing we couldn’t do without was computers.

Which, to our surprise, started crashing multiple times and failing to reboot. Our screens dimmed, and software programs wouldn't open. Between the staff at the law firm next door and ourselves, we realized we were having a brown-out.

Normally, we kept a radio on in the office, but today, the news announcers proved to be little help with what was going on. This being before the days of cell phones, the Internet, and texting, we were probably a bit more self-sufficient than people are today. We didn’t wait for a play-by-play on the problems at the WTC, we just kept working as much as we could.

I remember that by the time we'd deduced we were having a brown-out, some announcement came over the radio that electricity was being reduced below the Brooklyn Bridge because of the fire at the Trade Center. But here again, that was not an irregular occurrence, either. The summer before, a transformer fire had shut down half of the financial district and forced some subway riders to walk across the bridge to pick up their trains. For all that is modern in New York City, so much remains so ancient.

My aunt, then a legal secretary for a Midtown firm, called me after a co-worker of hers heard that streets were being shut down around the WTC, and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel was closed except for emergency vehicles. I told her we were fine, apart from the slow computers and constant wailing of sirens from the street below. Soon, I would be going out to lunch, and I'd let her know what was happening.

My boss also called in from California, having heard of an emergency at the Twin Towers. About all I could add was that we were having a brown-out and the computers weren’t working properly. At least the invoices we’d already printed were getting out. He simply encouraged us to get done whatever we could without our usual technology, although I'm sure he could hear his father grumbling on Monday that "we never had that problem before computers!"

Since our day's workload was rapidly being curtailed through no fault of our own, most of my co-workers decided to simply have lunch, and maybe things would be back to normal in an hour. So they ordered from the diner down the block.

Being the nosy guy I am, however, and having never developed a taste for the burnt grease that diner called food, I decided to stroll up to the Twin Towers to see what was going on. Since it was a snowy, windy, bitter day, and the diner delivered, nobody else wanted to walk up there with me.

By then, the elevators were back to normal, after some people had gotten stuck when the power came back on. So I went downstairs, and across the pedestrian bridge spanning the mouth of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. I marveled at how even though emergency equipment idled all along West Street, the wide ramps leading to the tunnels, instead of sucking in or spitting out cars and trucks like normal, were eerily quiet and empty.

And so utterly still.
_____

For Part Two, click here.