Still Fighting Tears, Looking to Tomorrow by Pete Hamill New York Daily News 10-09-01 Four weeks are gone, and on Broadway near J&R Music, the people keep coming, to peer down barricaded Vesey St. at the ruins. They have come from Queens and Japan, from Brooklyn and Germany, from the Bronx and from France. They move on a kind of pilgrimage, halting at Dey St., and Liberty St. to view the bare ruined choirs that were left us by the fanatics. They are not mere gawkers, not ghouls with cameras. Stand with them, chat, listen to the muted, astonished voice: They are mourning too. "Oh, God," says a middle-age woman in a dark blue coat. "Oh, God. Oh, God." Another woman whispers: "Pray for them all. And us, too." Four weeks are gone, and we are in another morning of clear skies, with the temperature 20 degrees colder than the 70 degrees of Sept. 11. This is October, almost a separate season in New York. For years, we've been spoiled by Octobers when ballplayers lolled in the long shadows of green fields. You hear little talk of baseball now, and when you do, it feels forced. This October, more New Yorkers wear FDNY and NYPD caps than Yankee or Mets caps. "I don't know," a Chinese man said to me. "I just can't get it up for baseball this year." Blurry Images Other New Yorkers glance into appliance stores on Fulton St. and see TV screens and the blurred images of explosions in Afghanistan. The news itself seems oddly hollow and mechanical, a televised ritual that started in Iraq in 1991 and continued through to Kosovo. Here are the same plainclothed generals, pointing at maps. Here is the jargon of war, added to by phrases like "asymmetrical threat." Downtown, with its enduring glimpses of mangled steel, giant cranes, trucks packed with rubble, nothing seems capable of erasing the horror, not even retaliation. On Broadway yesterday, there were still opaque coats of ash on windows along John St., reminders of that morning of pulverizing horror. A few "missing" posters remained, flapping in the wind. The signs draped on the fence before St. Paul's Chapel spoke of courage and gratitude, and men in hardhats moved through the doors in search of food, or coffee, or fresh socks and a kind word. They seemed more extraordinary than ever, now that so many cameras have moved to the company of the Northern Alliance. Down in New York's unhealed wound, the men in hardhats do their work, and it is almost entirely manual labor. Everywhere downtown, you saw New Yorkers going to work, from the Korean deli on Chambers and Church Sts. to the New York Stock Exchange at Broad and Wall Sts. In the deli, my friend Mr. Lee told me he had been closed for three weeks, deep in the Frozen Zone, without electric power. Last week, he came in with 25 men who worked for three days to clean all traces of ash and throw out spoiled food. His friends and relatives farther down had lost entire stores. An Indian friend who ran a Church St. luggage store called India Bazaar (a few doors from Mr. Lee) wasn't around. "He's at FEMA," his partner said, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, "filling out forms." On that morning four weeks ago, they watched the first tower fall, and the great, terrifying dust cloud that followed, and they ran north without locking the door of the shop. They returned at 5 p.m. to seal the door. "Nothing at all was stolen," the man said. "Nothing." Over on Nassau St., three young blacks were selling laminated photographs of the World Trade Center, along with NYPD and FDNY caps. "One dolla, one dolla, one dolla, one dolla," was the day's mantra. At Broad and Wall, portable metal barricades sealed off Federal Hall, with its statue of George Washington (who was inaugurated on this site), and I remembered a rowdy week about 25 years ago when all the young men of Wall Street spent their lunch hours cheering for women in tight sweaters. It was a kind of mindless, goofy signal that Vietnam was over. Yesterday, nobody cheered for anything. The thing that had happened to all of us Sept. 11 was very far from over. Four weeks have gone, and I realized again yesterday that something important had been gouged out of us by the death-sick terrorists from the cult of Osama Bin Laden. I have friends who admit that there are moments in every day — usually when they're alone — when they break suddenly into tears. Almost anything can serve as a trigger: a grandchild's voice, a tune from a show like "My Fair Lady," the sight of a boy tossing a ball with his father in a park. New Yorkers — and particularly those who came from immigrants — always believed in the day after tomorrow. That was perhaps the most important part of the New York character. When things were hard, you were taught to dig down into yourself and labor on. For things surely would get better. And they almost always did. After New York's day of lunatic carnage, such a belief now seems oddly naïve. Old Haunts Yesterday, moving around barricades, I wandered with my wife toward Rector St., walked along the south side of the barricaded Trinity Church, heading toward the building at 75 West St. that once housed the New York Post. More than 41 years ago, I walked into that newspaper's city room for the first time and truly started my life. The building was still there yesterday, but the police would not let us visit. At the corner of Rector and Greenwich Sts., once more open for business, was George's Lunch. Working nights in a year before anyone had ever heard of cholesterol, all of us ate too many egg sandwiches and drank too much coffee from George's and smoked too many cigarettes at our typewriters, writing tales of murder, lust or fire. Some of us were never happier. In those years, we still believed in the day after tomorrow. Up Greenwich St. yesterday, past the policemen and the state troopers, a giant yellow crane hovered over a ridge of smashed steel. I motioned to my wife at George's neon sign and then at the crowded counter beyond the window. "I used to eat here," I said, fighting off tears. "When I was a kid."