The events of September 11, 2001 are well-documented. My family and I have our stories just like everyone else who was in New York that day. Less documented is the aftermath of the tragedy and what it was like for people who lived below Canal St., in the “hot zone.” I find it amazing how ignorant most people are regarding many of the details of the attack; no one knows what it was like to live next to Ground Zero for the rest of 2001 and 2002. Unless you were there. I’ve never written at length and in detail what the aftermath was like because early on I learned that no one wanted to hear about it. It was impossible to explain to anyone outside of the city, and, to some extent, those who lived uptown, above the hot zone. The city was paralyzed for weeks after September 11, but by the beginning of October, life did go on for Americans and New Yorkers outside of Lower Manhattan. For those of us below Canal, the tragedy was an ongoing event, one which lasted for at least a year.
After watching the Towers fall on the roof of our apartment building (25 Hudson St.), my parents were told by the military that they had five minutes to get out. “Get a toothbrush.” They changed clothes—my father was knee-deep in dust and debris—and walked five hours uptown. My brother and I were taken out of school by two of our uncles, and after our parents reached the Upper East Side, we all stayed with my uncles for two weeks.
School was cancelled on September 12. We tried to go back home, but were stopped on the West Side Highway by a phalanx of NYPD and military personnel. There were endless aisles of people, all wailing and stricken with a sorrow and disbelief I’ve never seen before or since. I couldn’t forget if I wanted to. As we approached the line, half a dozen people tried to break through and were carried away by the cops, crying and screaming. I saw women pounding the chests of cops begging to go back to their homes, and I saw the cops calm them down and communicate that, though their behavior is perfectly understandable under the circumstances, they weren’t going home that night. Or the next.
As First Responders continued to clear the rubble (seven stories high), residents of Lower Manhattan returned to their bombed-out neighborhoods, namely Tribeca, Chinatown, Battery Park, and the Financial District. Papers and ID were required to pass both Canal and checkpoints closer to Ground Zero; because our apartment at 25 Hudson was just two blocks away from the rubble line, we had to present papers on every corner. There were curfews too, but no one wanted to walk around Lower Manhattan in the fall of 2001: the smoke and the smell lingered, and you knew what you were breathing in. Twenty-five years later, The New York Times confirms what we all knew: the government let us return home before the air was safe. Since September 11, 9700+ people have died of illnesses related to the tragedy. Not just First Responders: survivors, workers, civilians. My neighbors.
I was eight years old on September 11. I have clear memories going back to the mid-1990s, and when I look at the theatrical release schedule for 1999 or 2000 or 2001, I can tell you where and when I saw a movie, which specific theater in the multiplex, and what I thought of it. Josie and the Pussycats: United Artists Union Square 14, April 10, 2001. Rat Race: Regal Battery Park 16, August 18, 2001. The 2001 MTV Video Music Awards: Britney Spears singing “I’m a Slave 4 U” half-naked with a snake wrapped around her, endless awards for Fatboy Slim and Limp Bizkit (who I still thought was a rapper because of the cover of Significant Other), and inescapable songs like “Hash Pipe,” “Get Ur Freak On,” “Izzo (H.O.V.A.),” “Clint Eastwood,” “Whenever, Wherever,” all just two days before September 11.
After September 12, my memory goes dark. I know we went back to school on September 13, but I have no idea what we did or what any of my teachers said. By then, they knew my brother and I weren’t orphans, but like everyone else, we were terrified of the inevitable next attack. No one ever talks about the fact that another attack was taken for granted: September 11 was the opening salvo in a grand war, and that reasonable fear was nourished by the Anthrax attacks later that fall and several foiled plots that were barely reported at the time, if at all. My father’s New York Press offices on 7th Ave. received Anthrax letters, and every other day he’d talk to cops who’d mention a plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge or the Holland Tunnel. Meanwhile, the Bush administration began bombing Afghanistan, but Osama Bin Laden was nowhere to be found. No one could’ve predicted this on September 12, and indeed, we lived in a perpetual state of panic so extreme that I have practically no memory of the rest of September.
But again, movies come to the rescue. I know the first movie I saw after the tragedy: Zoolander, a movie I was looking forward to and one that holds up remarkably today. I don’t know that there’s a better sociopolitical pop culture satire with as many perfect, inexhaustible jokes, but then again, it was more or less ripped off from Bret Easton Ellis’ 1998 novel Glamorama. It doesn’t matter: Zoolander was so good that it gave me one of the few memories I have of late-September 2001, when we were still staying uptown with my uncles, unsure when we’d get to go back home.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter (@NARCFILM) and Instagram (@NARCFILM2000)