Out Of The Ruins

By Romesh Ratnesar and Joel Stein

In Manhattan, vacuums are opportunities. And even one as sad and sacred as the place where the World Trade Center stood can't remain inviolate for long. For weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, ground zero played host to all varieties of uncredentialed and unsupervised volunteers from all over the U.S.--the lobstermen from Maine, the barbecue guys from Dallas, the Gumbo Krewe from New Orleans. But in America, even tragedy becomes professionalized, and ground zero is now as distinct--and as commercial--a New York region as the theater district or the garment district. It's a throbbing 16-acre region populated by construction workers, itinerant volunteers, movie stars, religious proselytizers, uniformed officers, National Guard members, souvenir hawkers and more tourists than anywhere else in the city. Heroism has been replaced by capitalism New York-style.

At first, the mayor's office tried to prevent the Ground Zero District from growing into a spectacle. The chain link fence surrounding the site was covered with a thick green tarp that blocked the view, and police threatened to snatch cameras. "For the first several weeks, I didn't want anyone down there. It was a very personal feeling," says Richard Sheirer, director of the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management, which oversees the site. But after realizing the overwhelming demand to get a glimpse of the hole, the office reversed its policy. The tarp came down, the fences were moved a few blocks closer, and police and the National Guard were told to guide tourists to the best vantage points. The OEM is building three 40-ft.-wide raised wooden viewing stations around the site that can accommodate 400 tourists at a time. "This is the 21st century Gettysburg," Sheirer says. "There is a need for people to see it."

Ground zero has become both a tourist-thronged landmark and an exclusive downtown club. The site itself is nearly level, with most of the recovery work now taking place underground. In some areas, the engineering crews from three different companies have cleared through two of the seven stories buried beneath the street; the cleanup task could finish by next spring. At any given time, 1,000 people work inside the "red zone"--the area of devastation still off limits to the public. Workers there have put up a Christmas tree and an iron cross found in the wreckage; the New York Board of Rabbis erected a Star of David. A wooden platform used as a viewing station for families of the victims is covered with messages they have written with felt pens.

The population in the pit is dwarfed by the number of people who make pilgrimages each day to the area around it. It's now a regular stop on New York City tours, just like Chinatown or Times Square. Along the perimeter of the site, people call friends on their cell phones to record their visits. Every 10 ft. on Park Street, on the edge of the red zone, another immigrant vendor peddles N.Y.P.D. and F.D.N.Y. hats, T shirts and scarves. Credentials to the red zone have supplanted tickets to The Producers as the hottest status symbol in New York. Assistants have scrambled to procure the official, laminated OEM passes for the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Prince Andrew, Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey. Ray Charles asked Quincy Jones to get him in.

On a recent afternoon, National Guard officer Hector Maisonet, who mans an entrance to the site on Church Street, showed visitors his emergency vest, signed by Tyra Banks and Jamie Lee Curtis. "People ask us if we get tired standing here all day," says Guardsman Miguel Latorre, 42. "I say, 'Yo, it's my job.'" With the last ruins of the Twin Towers removed for possible display in a future memorial, the dozens of camouflaged Guard members and police officers stationed there now serve as the attraction itself, like the guards at Buckingham Palace. Tourists take pictures with them, chat them up and say patriotic thank yous before hitting the souvenir tables.

Where Wall Street expense accounts once dictated the local economy, businesses are now reinventing themselves for the new downtown ruling class--the cops and the National Guard, the construction workers and the tourists. Like several other retailers, the family owners of Laotian restaurant Mangez Avec Moi supplement their diminished income by selling F.D.N.Y. T shirts and hats on weekends. Moran's, an Irish steak house on the opposite end of the district, replaced its upscale menu with mozzarella sticks, potato skins and chicken fingers. "We couldn't offer a stuffed sole for $35 or a porterhouse," says Abby Lydon, the restaurant's co-owner. "That business lunch is no longer here."

Lydon's daughter spray-painted directions to the restaurant on numerous construction planks that have sprouted in the cleanup zone, which other stores also use as free billboards. Apocalyptic signage was also erected by Andrew Menschel, 58, the owner of the Dakota Roadhouse, a bar just north of the Trade Center site. Back when the green police tarp shrouded the site, Menschel scrawled advertisements for his bar all over it: OSAMA MISSED US, WHY SHOULD YOU? Some locals have scolded Menschel for trying to "make profit out of death," but business is so slow he will try anything. On a wall in the bar he pasted a map of ground zero that shows the areas assigned to each construction company. "The cleanup is the only thing we've got," he says. "A lot of people come by and say, 'We don't want a drink, but we really liked your signs.'"

It's hard to persuade workers to buy your burgers or your shoes when they can get all they want for free. No one who works at ground zero--from cops to construction foremen making $90 an hour overtime--has to pay for anything there. Nonprofits never had much of a presence in Gordon Gecko Land, but with millions pouring in to anyone with "9/11" in his organization's name, they are now the dominant economic force in the Ground Zero District. And even when it comes to charity, the cold rules of New York City bureaucracy and capitalism apply, as the 30-member Gumbo Krewe from Louisiana found out.

For weeks, the Krewe had been serving thousands of free bowls of steaming hot gumbo and spicy jambalaya to rescuers and cleanup workers. Then, on Dec. 7, even though the Krewe had secured corporate sponsorship, nonprofit status and fire-fighter support, the city shut down their free-food enterprise. Though OEM officials say the Krewe lacked the proper permits, the Cajuns believe they were sent home because they competed with the new, official provider of free food at ground zero, the Salvation Army.

Every day, the Army dispenses meals to 6,000 people from a centrally heated, 31,000-sq.-ft., $3 million installation that resembles the Superdome. Dubbed the Waterfront Cafe and built by the Environmental Protection Agency as a decontamination center, the 48-ft.-high tent can withstand winds up to 150 m.p.h. and costs $650,000 a month to operate. It features 30 showers and a warren of gym lockers, and the walls are blanketed with elementary-school artwork. Uniformed U.S. Army officers monitor the entrance. In the cavernous dining area, Salvation Army volunteers working 8-hr. shifts serve free hot meals around the clock to cops, fire fighters, OSHA inspectors, Coast Guard officials, private construction crews. To the dismay of local restaurateurs like Menschel and free-lancers like the Gumbo Krewe, the Salvation Army gave the catering contract to its longtime partner, Long Island-based Whitsons Food Service, which, according to a sign, is "pioneering to rebuild New York one meal at a time."

But workers do have other choices. Those unhappy with the bland cuisine at the Waterfront Cafe drive their golf carts, ATVs and Gators 30 blocks north to Nino's. Until Sept. 11, Nino's was a pasta shop on Canal Street. After the attacks, it became a nonprofit enterprise that feeds anyone in a uniform for free, securing more than $1.5 million in donations so far. Overnight, it went from serving 150 meals a day to 7,000, almost all to cops. Nino's has hired a public relations firm, replaced its head chef with the owner of a successful catering company, set up a fund-raising office uptown, lined the block with corporate-sponsor banners, hired a museum curator and is considering building a TV studio for celebrity-chef drop-bys, such as Emeril Lagasse. Like any other successful mogul, Antonio (Nino) Vendome, 49, has an eye for potential partners: he pays $20,000 a month to the 60 Minutes- and Good Morning America-featured ex-addicts of the Rhema Ranch Ministry in Dallas to barbecue ribs for him on the Canal Street sidewalk across from his restaurant.

Even though Nino's uses 115 volunteers a day, the waiting list to serve is three weeks long. Neighbors' gripes that the restaurant's tents and trailers are clogging Canal Street do not concern Nino's. "We don't have permits," says Paula Paige, Nino's director of operations, who until Sept. 11 was an unemployed dotcommer. "But we're feeding the cops. What are they going to say?" Yet at most times of the day, the cops are outnumbered by television crews and volunteers, whose ranks have included Dan Quayle, Susan Sarandon, Danny Glover, Leonardo DiCaprio, Billy Baldwin and Miss Teen U.S.A.

Boosted by the publicity, Vendome has ambitions beyond the Trade Center cleanup. An intensely manicured real estate developer in a three-piece suit who speaks in Bushisms like "make no mistake" and "evildoers," Vendome says he will never reopen the restaurant to the public. Instead, he has a committee working to transfer onto acid-free paper the 30,000 messages he has received from rescue workers and schoolkids from as far away as Japan. "This will be a memorial," he says. "This will be dismantled and disassembled by experts. It's important to show 1,000 years from now what the nation stood for and how we reacted."

For the various groups and individuals who have joined in and benefited from the relief effort, the focus is on parlaying their new identities into something permanent. St. Paul's Chapel, next to one of the clearest views of ground zero, is no longer open to its parishioners. Since the 11th, it has provided workers from the site with food, beds, work boots, massages, chiropractic services, Red Bulls and cigarettes. Cots once reserved for the homeless are now used by ironworkers looking for a mid-shift nap. The chapel is the oldest religious building in New York City, but it was down to 30 regulars and tried to reinvent itself for Generation Y with services that experimented with jazz, rock music and PowerPoint presentations. In the three months since the attacks, the church has been flooded with donations. Now the Rev. Samuel Johnson Howard is trying to figure out how to turn the church into a memorial: "If a shrine is somewhere people travel to intentionally to remember holy things, then I think St. Paul's will always be a shrine."

The church is already carefully storing the thousands of signs, poems and stuffed animals left by the throngs, often six or seven rows deep, who have transformed the gates of the church into a wall of grief. St. Paul's now generates its own artifacts by hanging fresh canvases outside on which visitors can write messages. Demand to volunteer at the church is so high that it can assign two people each day simply to hand out pens for the duration of their 12-hr. shifts. Al Farrar, 55, took three days off from work to travel by bus from Pinckney, Mich., with other members of his church for a day of pen duty. "My dad was at Pearl Harbor the day it was bombed. I didn't see it. My parents lived through the Depression. I didn't see it. I wanted to see this," he says.

Most visitors come to ground zero looking for some kind of catharsis. At first they made makeshift memorials: a huge pile of stuffed animals left by co-workers of dead flight attendants, a diorama of Barbie and Ken in fire-fighter uniforms, an abandoned bicycle labeled as a messenger tribute. But now organized religion has rushed into the emotional void. Early this month 12 teenagers from Canada, chaperoned by six adults, came for the week to man three prayer stations along the perimeter for an organization called Youth with a Mission. "We pray for anybody about anything," says Terry Halcrow, 45. "We're not here to be kooks." Other spiritual entrepreneurs also circulate around ground zero, including Scientologists, Rabbi Schneerson's Mitzvah Tank and Billy Graham's New York Prayer Center.

Amid all the professionalization, the few remaining amateurs stand two miles up the West Side Highway. At Point Thank You on the "Hero Highway," people still wait in the cold, cheering the passing traffic with signs such as SANITATION ROCKS. John Dennie, 60, has commuted every day from Staten Island to Point Thank You for more than two months. "I came for the Columbus Day parade and was hooked after five minutes," he says. A volunteer standing next to him, who asks not to be named to avoid taking credit, says, "There's not much the average New Yorker can do to help anymore. Everything seems to be taken." The man scans the highway, looking in vain for more emergency vehicles. "Things are getting back to normal in New York," he says. "The other day a driver yelled, 'Get a life,' and gave me the finger."