So its not really that I think I have anything to add about September 11th, or even the WTC. I didn't live in New York at the time and it has been written about extensively by much smarter and much better writers. But I was reflecting on it this morning, stealing 5 minutes between the subway and entering the World Financial Center complex.
I was inhaling pages of Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, in which the main character's father died in the World Trade Center and sitting across the street from Ground Zero. Three and half years and I don't know what to make of it. My stomach turns walking around here during lunch, lots of groups of teens in matching outfits from somewhere else in the country, wearing matching windbreaker outfits. Overweight families, also from out of town, posing for photos in front of the site (is this going to be your Christmas card?) Some just quiet folks, coming down to check it out. Which I understand.
This strange memorial has been erected on the south side of the site, right before the pedestrian bridge over the West Side Highway that delivers me to World Financial Center One. It is made up of lanyard keychains that say "USA" attached to plastic covered photos. There is a mass of rainbow colored paper cranes that remind me of my own elementary school class' unit on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The original cranes were made by a young girl's, Sadako's, class. Supposedly if you make a thousand, you are granted one wish. And Sadako was dying from Leukemia from the radiation of the A-bomb. In the story she dies anyway, falling short of the thousand cranes. Thinking back its a sad story and kind of a futile origami exercise. And really not a very good lesson for young children who are supposed to be being taught about miracles and the power of positive thought. Then again, I did go to some hippie schools.
Anyway, sitting there this morning I felt awkward about reading that book there. I read of review of the book that said we may not be far enough past 9/11 to be cute about it, but if anyone can be cute about it, it's Foer. I kind of realized that I don’t know the rules when it comes to 9/11. In research for my senior essay, I read something about how there are various approaches to who gets the place of privilege in traumatic events. This is a dangerous question, though because if only those directly affected are allowed to dictate the terms and meaning of the event, it stops being applicable to the larger group. On the other hand, clearly September 11th did not affect every American to the same degree. But the rallying cries afterward would have us believe that the attack was on all of us and we were all victims. Still, when people ask me, as a middle-aged couple did yesterday, "where is the observation deck?" I, first of all, have no idea what they're talking about and second, want to scream at them,
"What the FUCK do you think this is, a fucking brewery? An operating room? Niagara Falls?"
But the fact remains that I don’t know the rules, I don't know my place in relation to the event in relation to that couple. I don’t know who decides what's inappropriately cute or when the time has come to be cute. And so, because of this uncertainty, I hid the cover of my book, finished the chapter and went inside.
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This is one of the more depressing articles I've read in awhile...
April 7, 2005
Above the Trendy, the Down and Out
By ALAN FEUER
nock at Room 18 on the fourth floor of 559 West 22nd Street and an old man in a watch cap stumbles to the door.
"What am I doing here?" he asks, answering the question with a question. "I'm dying here," he says.
His name is George Ullrich and, according to his own account, he has been dying here for almost 30 years. He lives in a small room, 10 feet deep by 10 feet wide, and in rooms all down the hallway, a piece of the city's history is slowly dying with him, one old man at a time.
There is Bob Zillard, on the third floor, whose chosen company these days is a six pack of beer. There is Dennis Bolger, around the corner, who, because of hernia problems, can rarely get off the couch.
There is Mr. Ullrich himself, who spends his days reading books on hieroglyphics and ancient Greek. And then there is Kevin - none of his neighbors know his last name - who roams the streets in a baseball cap and white beard half as long as his arm.
These men are the last remaining tenants in No. 559, a building that, like the neighborhood itself, has been swept by major change. West 22nd Street, from 11th Avenue to the West Side Highway, has been transformed from warehouse space to art galleries, from auto body shops to coffee bars. Where once there were stevedores, there are now Italian tourists. Well-heeled women walk expensive-looking dogs.
In the way of these things, the first floor of No. 559 will soon become a glass-and-brushed-steel bar and lounge called Opus 22 where fancy liquor will be served to the cocktail set. The second floor is an art gallery named the Proposition where the current exhibition is titled "Systems Appearances Dogma Taboo."
"Art's not my thing," said Mr. Ullrich, who is 71 years old. "Places change, but people don't. People just get old."
Mr. Ullrich and his fellow tenants recall a different sort of neighborhood, a place of corner bars and broken windows, a place where the rents were so cheap that sailors could pay for six months upfront and then head off to sea.
There are more important matters in the world than the four old men living out their lives in a building that has changed around them. Their story does not concern the war or the economy, but here it is nonetheless.
Their building went up in 1889 as a rooming house for longshoremen who once plied the docks a short block to the west. It overlooks Pier 63 and sits around the corner from the old headquarters of the International Longshoremen's Association, whose onetime president, Joseph P. Ryan, was a model for the labor boss of "On the Waterfront."
There is not much interaction between the old men and the art on the second floor. It would seem that a chair made out of tape measures or a video installation of a young woman doing push-ups in a miniskirt are not much to their taste.
Ronald Sosinski, the gallery's director, said he saw the old men in "a coming-and-going sort of way" on the stairs and found them harmless, often full of humor. He opened the gallery in 2000 at a time, he said, that "everybody had to come to Chelsea; it was just not a question anymore."
Still, he seems to recognize the uniqueness of a building where the art he sells can cost 10 times what the tenants pay in rent.
"It's probably the only building like this around anymore," Mr. Sosinski said. "And it may be in its last moments, too."
The landlord is Alan Frank, who says he is content to have the men around. Mr. Frank presents himself as a lover of the old ways and charges his tenants the generous rate of $300 a month.
As landlords go, he is the sensitive sort.
"The cruel twist is that these guys were left here living among the yuppies and the galleries," he said. "All their haunts have disappeared. The coffee shop. The old Mexican restaurant. The little drugstore. I have a certain amount of sympathy for them living in an area that's not familiar to them anymore."
"In two or three more years, with attrition, they'll probably be gone," he says, adding that he has no plans to toss them out. "If I have nothing to do with it, I'll be happy."
As for the old ways, he, too, remembers the old bar on the first floor, a place named Catch 22 or Slavo's or Joey's, depending on whom you ask. Its nickname was "the Bucket of Blood," said Mr. Frank, suggesting that the stevedores and sailors who used to gather there often got out of hand.
The first time he set foot in the place, a sign on the bar reminded the patrons: "Management is not responsible for women left overnight." From the former owners, Mr. Frank said, there were tales of Thanksgiving dinners served to the salts upstairs at little or no cost.
It should be said that Mr. Ullrich, Mr. Zillard, Mr. Bolger, 62, and the elusive Kevin never worked on the docks. They are, respectively, two retired Teamsters, a firefighter and a military veteran, all lucky enough to have found cheap lodgings in rooms they secure with padlocks whenever they go out.
The rooms themselves are much as one might imagine, or worse. The furniture is spartan. The paint peels off the wall in continent-shaped flakes. An odor of cat urine hovers in the hall.
Each of the men arrived in his own way. Mr. Bolger's former home burned down. Mr. Zillard was a bachelor. Mr. Ullrich was drawn by the cheap rent. As for Kevin, his neighbors say he could not survive anywhere else.
Loneliness is often an old man's native state, and the halls here are filled with artificial voices: from the radio, the turntable, the television set. A decade ago, there were 20 tenants. Some moved out, some were asked to leave. Death has claimed the rest.
Mr. Zillard, 74, attributes his own longevity to drinking beer, never whiskey. He has outlived two generations of bartenders at his favorite haunt, Peter McManus Cafe, at 19th Street and Seventh Avenue.
As for the family life, he says he missed the boat. Thirty years ago he met a girl on the subway. Her name was Kathleen Clark. He got her name but not her address. He has been looking for her ever since.
"I got an icebox there I put my six packs in," he said. "That keeps me company enough."
"I'll probably die here," he went on, "waiting for them to paint."
Also, if I thought this place was weird during the week... saturday is a nightmare.
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