9/11/09

Last year I worked next door to Ground Zero. Each morning I biked down muddy, wet, gravelly Liberty Street from Broadway, past the orange clad construction workers, the new Fire House, and through the mass of spectators who were gathered there at all hours, every day.

I would chain my bike to the scaffolding of the temporary walkways that ran alongside the site and over the West Side Highway, and watch the diggers & cranes through the wire fencing as they carved out the foundations of new buildings where the towers had stood.

Late, late at night when I worked alone in the half dark office, I would look down into the void of the floodlit construction site, and try to imagine what had been there. And fail. Such a geographically precise square cut from Manhattan’s grid system. Such a small space for so many lives.