As we passed City Hall, I whiffed the smell. It had to be the smell referred to every day since September 11. I turned to Sue and simply said “Smell that? That must be it.” She and Lee and Mattie knew I was alluding to the overwhelming smell that journalists, rescue workers, residents, visitors had said was the ever present, ever constant reminder.
We reached Barclay Street, the first place, which looked like a route to the site. I never called it Ground Zero. Didn’t before during or since that day we visited the site. I call it the World Trade Center or simply the site. Calling it Ground Zero seems somehow to lessen the place for me, using an over used cliché for a one-in-the-world place.
We walked down Barclay Street to Church Street and saw our initial glimpse of the faces of the buildings surrounding the site. They were torn and ripped, like a curtain too long the scratch place for the cat, bits and pieces ripped away, tattered windows and ragged facades. The site itself was not visible because of a ten-foot chain link fence covered with tarpaulin, which blocked the street and any dead-on look of the site.
For the first time that day, I looked up, where the towers were. I would do this repeatedly throughout the day, look up and into the brilliant cool blue December sky. I looked where those towers had been and where all those people last were.
[an essay in 13 parts from Pablo Notes, 2001]