Turn and Face the Strange

I was in Battery Park yesterday morning. It was a comfortably crisp, bright sunny day. While Hurricane Irma was ravaging the state of Florida, New York Harbor was the picture of serenity. People have a knack of compartmentalizing. If it’s not happening to us in real time, it’s a CNN image, Facebook post, or Yahoo news story. Anyway, as is always the case in the environs of Wall Street, tourists were omnipresent with their smartphones working overtime. With imposing backdrops such as the Statue of Liberty, the Charging Bull, and, of course, the “Freedom Tower,” lower Manhattan is a photographic haven—a selfie paradise.

In my wanderings, I was thinking about today, the sixteenth anniversary of 9/11, a dreadful snapshot in time that seems—four Spellman cycles later—almost inconceivable. How could something like that have happened where it did and with such unimaginable consequences? Sitting on a tree-shaded bench on the grounds of Battery Park City, just due west of where the Twin Towers stood and fell, it was hard to envision what that peaceful setting was like on 9/11/2001. I remember that it was a September day not unlike yesterday—a winning weather hybrid of identical amounts of summer and fall.

Battery Park City was covered in toxic debris—a couple of buildings even damaged by airplane parts—after the two towers went down. All of the structures therein were evacuated and many residents couldn’t return for lengthy periods of time. A considerable portion of the area was deemed a crime scene. Approximately fifty percent of the city in a city’s residents permanently moved from Battery Park City because—for months—the air quality in the vicinity of Ground Zero was suspect. Ponder this: It was everybody out at a moment’s notice and no returning home until God knows when. No relocation help was afforded residents by the powers-that-were, either, and hotel rooms in New York City were near impossible to come by. And to add insult to injury, some of those who returned after their extended absences found their apartments ransacked. It took lower rents and some government subsidies, too, to convince people that Battery Park City was a nice place to call home. But that was then and this is now.

Ch…ch…ch…ch…changes: Battery Park City is presently where the elite meet to eat and then some. Built on landfill from the original World Trade Center’s construction, this development on what were then obsolete, decaying piers on the Hudson River took a while. For a spell there was what looked like a big sandy beach in the shadows of the Twin Towers. Just do a Google search on “Battery Park City landfill” or some such thing and see some amazing pictures of what that part of lower Manhattan looked like not too long ago in the scheme of things. I wish I had navigated that scene in the dirty-old-New York 1970s, which most definitely had a perverse charm—one that gets more charming with each passing day in this increasingly gentrified, Starbucks universe—but I was too young to explore that far a field. While New York City was a much more interesting place back then, it also was more dangerous.

In the original planning of Battery Park City, some low-income housing was included, but fierce opposition squashed that idea. And I don’t anticipate the soon-to-be reelected Mayor DeBlasio will be locating homeless families in transitional housing in that prized locale, which is not having any problem with vacancies nowadays. The bottomless bottom lines are there to stay and need no further enticements.

(Photographs from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)