Christopher Thornton teaches in the Department of American Literature and Culture Studies at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Poland. He also writes on numerous travel-related topics that reflect social, cultural, and historic issues in many parts of the world. His first book, Descendants of Cyrus: A Journey Through Everyday Iran, revealed the Iran that rarely appears in media images. A few years later he published Iran in Pictures: A Photographic Insight, a collection of 350 photos with 125 pages of text. He has two books planned for the near future: Democracy at 30: A Look at Europe’s East and Nations Within: A Tour of Native America. Before settling in Poland he lived in Holland, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt, where he taught at the American University in Cairo.

Autumn in New York

By Christopher Thornton

From the bluffs on the New Jersey shore the Hudson River appears a muscular, expansive waterway—and so it is—shimmering in the afternoon sun, grey and brooding in the grey of winter but still extending the length of Manhattan until it empties into New York harbor. Above it, the New York skyline still presented a backdrop of glass and concrete columns that peaked in midtown and gently tapered toward the buildings of Lower Manhattan. But there the skyline was no longer familiar, for at the end of the island there was more open sky than New Yorkers had been accustomed to seeing, recently, clouds and wisps of haze that would have provided a delicate, finishing touch were it not for the void they filled.

This was the first week of December 2001, as good a day as any to visit the site where a few months before the twin-tower World Trade Center had stood. It was a Monday, perhaps less crowded, I thought, with preholiday visitors. But it was also unseasonably warm and sunny, eerily reminiscent of that beautiful early autumn day.

What was striking was not the bubbling stimulation that is the hallmark of Manhattan but its absence—the shouting voices that weren’t heard, the cacophony that didn’t echo from intersections, car horns that shrieked less frequently. There was a hush in the streets more audible than their customary din, and what one would have expected in the beginning of December—a chorus of approaching revelry.

If the sidewalks of midtown were noticeably sparser, below Canal Street they almost emptied. Signs in the windows of pizza shops and drug stores, delis and Chinese take-outs, announced that they were “Open for Business” to counter lingering doubt and even lure in the few passersby. But there were still darkened storefronts and unlit neon, their colorless tubes suggesting the tangles of twisted metal that lay not far away, and entire buildings with empty windows overlooking semi-deserted streets. Here the city seemed stunned, time frozen. The canyons of Lower Manhattan were truer to the metaphor than they ever intended to be.

But back then, just a few months after the attack, the clearest view of the bulldozers and cranes was two blocks away, from the corner of Fulton Street where it meets Broadway, near St. Paul’s Church. The iron fence in front of the church had become a shrine surrounding a shrine, covered with mementos and scrawled expressions of condolence from around the world, in languages from places familiar and remote. A crayon-drawn poster expressed fellowship from a sixth-grade class in Okinawa, Japan. “God Bless America” was scribbled on the middle white panel of a French flag. Candles and flowers were strewn the length of the sidewalk. Baseball caps and T-shirts bearing more messages of sympathy were draped over the iron posts. Twenty-five years later, it is worth wondering what has happened to all that goodwill.

Among the mementos tied and taped to the fence were the faintest expressions of hope: A flyer with a digital photo of Carmen Diaz pleaded with onlookers: “Worked on the 86th floor of Tower 2, last seen on 78th floor, small tattoo on left forearm. Any information, please call . . . .” The picture had faded and been stained by raindrops, but still it hung. Removing it would have meant the extinguishing of a believer’s faith. Unsurprisingly, nothing on the iron fence in front of the church had been removed. Candles still burned, but it was not clear who was keeping them lit. The caps and shirts and flags remained untouched, forming a collage of sorrow and empathy that shouted need and longing, but stripped of artistic touches.

At the end of the afternoon, in front of the police barricade at the end of the street, a small crowd had gathered. This was nothing unusual. There was often a crowd, from the break of dawn until long after dark, like the ebb and flow of an ocean tide. Now it had risen because the not so small army of crane operators and excavators were beginning the graveyard shift—a term in this part of the city far too easy to take far too literally.

At the end of Fulton Street the hush that had come over the onlookers was most resonant. The crowd watched the cranes and the spray of fire hoses as they doused an underground blaze that had been persisted for three months, the longest burning commercial fire in American history. They pointed to the solitary 20-story-tall fragment of superstructure that stretched like a spindly tree into the autumn sky, an image haunting and at the same time eloquent, like the lone tree in Waiting for Godot. Few words were spoken. Camera shutters clicked, but discreetly, their owners careful not to commit an impropriety. A man climbed on top of a trash barrel to get a better view and a nearby policeman blew his whistle, ordering him down. Without protest, the man obeyed. So conditioned to breaking the rules, New Yorkers now adhered to them.

A stream of pedestrians crossed the intersection, slipping passed the onlookers, but none turned in the directions of the cranes and groaning end loaders. Some could have been the office workers who spent eight to ten hours a day in buildings nearby, now looking down at the rubble from picture windows that formed a ghoulish amphitheater encircling the site. For them the scene was no longer a novelty but a thorn that pricks at the memory, and so they moved swiftly, their eyes fixed straight ahead, wearing the rush-hour look of New Yorkers in a rush, but now with better reason.

Then there was the smell. When the wind shifted eastward, in from the Hudson, it passed over the rubble and those at the end of Fulton Street could then perceive what their eyes could not see. It was not overpowering, but unpleasant enough to wrinkle noses and make eyes squint. A few faces turned away each time the breeze drifted up the street, not to avoid the aroma but a sensation that was unusual and forbidding and

could not be explained.

There was little need to watch the workers for any length of time. Their efforts had fallen into a monotonous rhythm without change, so after a while I continued south, past the massive bronze bull at the corner of Wall Street, where in a startling touch of normalcy a group of Japanese tourists were having their picture taken. A few blocks later I crossed Broadway into Battery Park. The leaves had long been shed from the trees, yet the air, even at the end of the day, was still unnaturally warm. A few panhandlers ambled along the walkways, but with no ready prey to approach most had given up and were lounging under the trees. It was unsettling to see—not the aimless loafing, which can be found in any city, but the lack of motion, and so close to a place that had once been the emblem of global motion—of trade and commerce and the engines that moved it. New York had always thrived, and was driven, by movement.

I bought a hot pretzel from a pushcart vendor who was closing up for the day and sat on a bench by the waterfront. When the breeze blew in from the harbor it carried the familiar scents of the sea—decaying fish and salty air and the pungent aroma of diesel fumes from passing ships—but all of this was welcoming, even refreshing, after the unusual stench of Fulton Street. Neither the Ellis Island nor Statue of Liberty ferries were running. When one of the boats pulled up to the dock a sign above its gangway read: “No Stops. Harbor Tours Only.” It unloaded a small cluster of passengers, who straggled off with looks of half confusion, half disappointment, after their circular journey to nowhere. Files of commuters crossed the park in the other direction, marching briskly toward the Staten Island Ferry—the only people in Lower Manhattan whose movement suggested a clear destination.

A burning glow had settled over the horizon, and I watched the sun set behind the Statue of Liberty, which had taken on a new layer of symbolism. Its raised arm was now thrust defiantly skyward, piercing the orange winter light. After a while the lights on the New Jersey shore began to glimmer, so I left the park and walked back up Broadway. By the time I got to Trinity Church the odd aroma had returned. At the excavation site the day workers had been replaced by the night shift; at the end of Fulton Street a fresh crowd of onlookers had replaced the old. Two blocks away, beyond the police barricades, the floodlights encircling the site were now blazing white, turning night into day in another halting of time. A lilting façade leaned over the ashen gray rubble, threatening to collapse but held in suspension, as if in mockery of the events three months ago. After the fall of darkness it was easier to see what the site had become—a colorless, timeless world filled only by the groaning of cranes and bulldozers, groping through layers of shapeless wreckage—a vast hole in a city cut off from all of its natural rhythms, watered by the methodic spray of fire hoses.

The next day I thought a change in direction might take me to an unchanged part of the city, so I walked from midtown north up Seventh Avenue and into Central Park. Normally by now a cooling trend would have swept in, bearing a prewinter chill, but by afternoon the air was even warmer than the day before. Pushcart vendors tended their stands in T-shirts, and out-of-towners in the city for the day carried their jackets under their arms. And yet, in spite of the afternoon balm, the park was oddly quiet. No office workers or store clerks were extending their lunch breaks to take a leisurely sprawl on the grass. A group of children were kicking a soccer ball on the Great Lawn, there was the clop-clopping of a carriage horse on the circular roadway, a few mothers watched over their toddlers in a playground, but the rest was stillness. Under so much sun and cloudless sky one could only wonder where the city was hiding, or what it was avoiding.

I angled westward past the lake in the direction of Strawberry Fields, which had lately become the site of another vigil. Here the weather had brought out the Beatles faithful in response to the death of George Harrison. But this crowd was also respectfully, reverentially silent. A lone guitarist sang “Something,” repeating the verses each time he got to the end, like an old 45 stuck in its groove. A few voices joined in, but quietly, as one would whisper in a church. This grief was personal, not unlike that at the lower end of Manhattan, though it had yet to progress to the healing, restorative phase of the collective, as at the lower end of Manhattan. The mourners edged slowly around the mosaic, their eyes passing over the wreaths and piles of flowers, the colored glass vigil lights, and homemade posters from which the many faces of George Harrison, young and old (or “older,” as the faithful would have preferred) beamed back at the fans one last time. On benches nearby notices had been posted stating that “the Imagine mosaic is periodically cleared throughout the day.” But the petals on many of the bouquets had dried, and some of the photographs had faded from days lying in the sun. But the word “Imagine” remained uncovered, not to be disturbed, fully exposed to the searching looks and afternoon light. But its message was lost at this time of year, for all one could imagine was another act of mayhem on another unseasonably warm December day, as when John Lennon was gunned down in front of the Dakota, just a few hundred yards away. The memory must have been contagious, for card table vendors were quickly unloading their photos of Lennon wearing his “I Love NY” T-shirt to fans seeking the solace that the song might bring.

I left Strawberry Fields and crossed the park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I always remembered being filled in early December with non–New Yorkers combining preholiday vacations with holiday shopping sprees. Along the way, visitors in from the suburbs toted their Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s bags, and once in the museum there was the overlapping murmur of foreign languages in the galleries. But there was not much of a crowd here either, except in the ever popular 19th-century European wing, where Monet’s haystacks and Gaugin’s South Sea islanders provide a constant draw. Elsewhere the rooms were still and empty, the Greek kraters and calyxes standing lonely and neglected in their glass cases, the self-portrait of Rembrandt looking a little more wizened and grimacing without its admiring audience. By closing time, in the far north wing, only a solitary guard was left to watch over the Temple of Dendur. With no last-minute patrons to clear away he wandered over to the immense glass windows to gaze out at the leafless trees and gathering dusk. I threw a penny in the reflecting pool in front of the six statues of Sekhmet, the Egyptian lion-headed goddess of war and destruction, and watched as the ripple leaped from the point of impact, expanded across the surface, began to waver, and then slowly, almost reluctantly, flattened.

By now I was longing for a crowd, an odd impulse in a city where one often spends most of their time avoiding them. There was probably no better place to find one than along Fifth Avenue at rush hour, so I left the museum and headed south, passing coatless, idle doormen pacing aimlessly in front of exclusive addresses, and cordons of dog walkers leading their teams into the park. Below 59th Street the city finally seemed to reclaim its character. The sidewalks were chock-a-block with pedestrians, bumping elbows and brushing shoulders in the way that gives only New York the true feeling of New York. At Rockefeller Center the Christmas tree was a towering cone of lights, and outside Saks the window gawkers were lined three deep, for the first time making the season almost seasonable. But if there was a sense of the city caught up in the swing of things, of being buoyed by the holiday, it was short-lived. Outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral a signboard announced a 5:30 memorial service. Near 23rd Street a postcard rack presented another grim reminder of the still too recent past: “Disaster Cards: 3 for $2.00.” The garish scenes of the afternoon hours of September 11 were trimmed with red, white, and blue in a tasteless attempt to dignify the grotesque.

About an hour after leaving the museum I arrived at Washington Square. A group of carolers had gathered around the arch, so I found a seat on the stone barrier encircling the fountain, and took in the view to the south. A few months ago the lights of the twin towers would have started to come on—a constellation of urban stars filling the sky with the glitter symbolic of a city working around the clock. But work and almost everything else was now less of a concern. A gathering instinct had taken over the city, so more attention was drawn to the chorus of voices that had started out small and gradually grown, forming an impromptu memorial at the site of yet another memorial. And the traditional holiday messages of peace and joy and goodwill toward men were no longer so gratuitous.

I listened for a while, resting from the walk and refreshed by the softness and simplicity of the sound. When the group finally dispersed I crossed the square to wander through the streets of the Village. On the way I received only one solicitation for drugs, and even the panhandlers were polite—the suspension of business-as-usual had tempered every industry. Only a few diners were sitting at the sidewalk tables outside the restaurants. Waiters everywhere complained about the lack of business, which they usually do, but this time the reason had reason. At one cafe at the corner of Bleecker and McDouggal Streets the large, sliding windows had been pushed wide open so patrons inside could catch the evening breeze, as if it were still midsummer. I kept zigzagging through the now quiet streets, looking for the feel of the familiar, for a detail to connect the present to city that I remembered. Only the tarot card readers seemed to be busy, tending to the anxieties of those who had forsaken reason in favor of the metaphysical. On Sullivan Street there was no line of theatergoers queuing for The Fantasticks. The lyrics “Deep in December . . . Try to remember, that time in September,” once so laden with nostalgia, now carried an eerie, unwanted resonance. A few weeks later the show would close after a run of forty-two years—another casualty of 9/11.

Tired of walking in circles, I finally settled in at an outside table, took off my jacket, and sat in shirtsleeves. It was 10:00 on a December night. I tried to read the daily newspaper but gave up and watched the street life. Falafel sandwiches were being served from window counters, a jogger passed wearing shorts and a tank top. Soon a question that had been lying quiet throughout the day finally surfaced: Where had autumn gone? The single word in the center of the Strawberry Fields mosaic came to mind, and I imagined the fetid aroma a mile away, the searing floodlights, and the cranes and bulldozers digging, digging, and digging in a relentless quest for an answer to a reasoning and motivation that defies being answered. Yet the question returned: Where had autumn gone? A few miles to the north, in the peace-filled darkness of Central Park, even George was silent.