WTC
Jordan, Patrick
THE LAST WORD WTC Patrick Jordan The World Trade Center was constructed during the Vietnam War. I remember watching it rise, the bare light bulbs of the construction crews swinging...
...Whatever our response to September 11, let it be just and worthy, ethically ordered, and tempered by the knowledge of our own sins...
...others, bathed in the brilliant orange sun rising out of Brooklyn...
...My son Justin, twenty-four, works at Seventeenth Street and Broadway...
...Later, for a period, I worked as a messenger in Manhattan and would shoot up the towers in their huge pneumatic elevators, so large they seemed to carry a squadron of people at one time...
...Nevertheless, they were reportorial in nature, and even the close-ups seemed "at a distance," unable to make up for seeing with one's own eyes just how things stood...
...We at Commonweal watched the evolving horror on our computer screens...
...For the past five years, I have tunneled beneath the WTC on my way to Commonweal's new 120th Street office...
...He had always known the city of his birth as the New York of the twin towers...
...I have taken the measure of each new dawn by seeing how it stacked up against the two towers...
...We waited in fear and frustration, hoping to hear from spouses, children, and fellow staff members who might have been in the area—all accounted for finally, thank God...
...When I finally got home, my ninetythree-year-old mother asked in bewilderment and agitation why that Palestinian woman on the television had been dancing for joy...
...In this new small world, we got the news about our city from the BBC...
...D Patrick Jordan ;s Commonweal's managing editor...
...It was from there I saw with my own eyes the smoldering remains of what that morning had been the WTC, now a black hole punctured in the tip of Manhattan...
...The nation's defense shield clearly proved porous and tardy, a poor recommendation for faith in a missiledefense shield...
...Now they are gone, dust to dust...
...The mayor and the governor, who became towers before our eyes, concentrated on action, response, and inspiration—rather than explanation...
...The view from there was spectacular, the governor's energy bristling and electric, and his sense of pride, particularly in the large reproduction of Holbein's Thomas More on the wall, immense...
...At one point, I found myself walking down a long stretch of Atlantic Avenue in the Muslim quarter of Brooklyn...
...Commonweal 31 September 28, 2001...
...Some days they would be shrouded in clouds...
...I remember watching it rise, the bare light bulbs of the construction crews swinging in the breeze at night...
...A steam fitter who worked there told me he would never be caught up there once the buildings were finished: the towers swayed too much in the wind...
...In the end, may we prove worthy of our humanity, of God's gift of our very soul...
...Sometimes they ascended out of the harbor's low creeping fog, as if the fog itself were breathless at their height and unable to keep up with them...
...We and our nation must rebuild hope and meaning...
...For me, that proved a three-hour journey by subway, bus, and on foot, through some parts of the city that were to me a foreign landscape...
...His world, his mental geography, will henceforth be demarcated at 9/11/01, as will all of ours...
...He was eighty-nine at the time...
...For twenty-four years, I have begun my morning commute to Manhattan aboard the Staten Island Ferry...
...That night he said that when the second tower collapsed, his sense of hope disappeared with it...
...he asked...
...Some of the news coverage has been superb, and the photographs searing...
...For eleven years (1986-97), Commonweal's office on Dutch Street lay nestled beneath the shadow of the WTC...
...It has been an effort to begin to make sense of it all...
...What kind of people would do such a thing...
...In 1985, another Commonweal editor, Karen Sue Smith, and I interviewed Governor Mario Cuomo in his office above the eightieth floor...
...Apparently, all the antiterrorist experts are able to agree on is a need for more money...
...Then came the necessary thoughts of the morrow, of the rest of one's life, and finally, of how to get home...
...Finally, on a somber, packed bus, we inched over the Verrazano Bridge to Staten Island...
...A massive gray column of smoke rose from the area, as if from a Homeric funeral pyre, a Vesuvius on the Hudson...
...The smell of smoke from the twin towers hung in the air, and the streets were almost deserted—except for a large contingent of police, summoned by the far-sighted mayor's order to protect the Muslim residents...
...After the first attempt to destroy the WTC in 1993, our publisher, Edward Skillin, commuting through the WTC from New Jersey, had to devise a new route, swinging north and then arcing south on a subway...
...But days later, at Mass on the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, I finally remembered one of Jesus' startling warnings: Do not fear those who can kill the body but only those who can kill the soul...
...I had no convincing answer...
...We could see the two towers through the conference-room skylight, installed by editor Peter Steinfels...
Vol. 128 • September 2001 • No. 16
