David Adler
September 2001

New York @ Night
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By David R. Adler

"Behold, O Lord, my affliction,
for the enemy hath magnified himself." – Lamentations 1:9

I have lived and worked on the island of Manhattan for nearly fourteen years, and a part of me collapsed that morning.

I had been running late for my part-time office job downtown. By the time I emerged from the subway it had already happened. I was oblivious, as were many of those around me. It was only when I turned and started walking south on Lafayette Street that I could see the massive plume of smoke. Big fire, I thought, nothing terribly unusual. I stopped outside my building, saw people massed around the entrance, and decided to continue south to see around the next corner. Was it the World Trade Center? I never even realized I could see it from here. On my way to the elevators, someone told me exactly what it was.

Once upstairs, I ducked into the first office with a TV. By then the Pentagon had been hit. And it became clear that some version of Doomsday had descended on us.

With a few others, I went up to the roof, where dozens of employees were gathered. We were about half a mile away. The towers were in full view — one of them, I should say. The south tower had collapsed seconds earlier. The north tower continued to burn, as smoke and ash poured forth from the south tower’s ruins and spread well to the east. My first instinct was to call my girlfriend (in Ithaca), but my cell phone was useless. Feeling completely numb, I went back inside to try my desk phone and couldn’t get through, not even to my answering machine uptown. I went back to the TV in time to see the north tower collapse.

Twenty or so blocks away, thousands had just died. But still I didn’t quite get it. Surely they must have succeeded in evacuating the buildings, I thought, like a frightened child hoping in vain for the best.

My office was closing. The subways were entirely shut down, probably as a precaution against a chemical attack. I had little choice but to begin the 90-block journey home, and I joined a huge and eerie exodus heading north back up Lafayette Street. Large groups of people gathered around vans and cars with their radios blaring the latest updates. I overheard a teenage girl ask her friends, "Wait — why are the Israelis bombing us?" Emergency blood banks had opened and long lines were forming. (In a staggering coincidence, I had just donated blood on Sunday, two days before, for the first time in my life.) Around 17th Street and 8th Avenue I bumped into Rez Abbasi, the wonderful guitarist. We manically discussed what was unfolding around us and tried to reassure one another. Later I walked past the massive construction project at Columbus Circle — what will be the new home of Jazz at Lincoln Center. How strangely disturbing it was to see this skeletal building on its way up, after watching the city’s largest buildings come crashing down.

I learned in the days that followed that my second cousin Janet’s husband, Charlie, who worked on a high floor in one of the towers, is missing and presumed dead. When Charlie and Janet were married some years ago, it was my father who walked Janet down the aisle.

"The elders have ceased from the gate,
The young men from their music.
The joy of our heart is ceased;
Our dance is turned into mourning." — Lamentations 5:14-15

Just one of the many affected structures: the 1/9 subway line, which I take to go to the Village Vanguard, Cornelia Street Café, the Jazz Gallery, and the Knitting Factory (all at most a 25-minute trip from my place on 98th Street). Inspectors searching for damage ran into a wall of debris, a complete blockage, in the tunnel north of the Cortlandt Street station. The station itself, almost directly underneath the towers, is completely demolished. It is feared that parts of the tunnel itself collapsed, beginning less than two stops from where I often get off. My regular route downtown now leads straight to a disaster area.

Few could conceive of performing music, or going to hear it, for the rest of the week. But that wasn’t even the point. The nerve center of New York’s creative music scene had been sealed off by the NYPD and the National Guard. Staying out of there was not a judgment call, it was an emergency decree. As the New York Times reported on September 13, "Strewn across Lower Manhattan… there is enough concrete to build a five-foot-wide sidewalk from New York City to Washington, D.C., enough steel to erect more than 20 Eiffel Towers, and the remnants of nearly 14 acres of glass." And the people. The people. The devastation is of biblical proportions. Not only did our lives flash before our eyes. So did all of human history.

One day in the mid 90s, New York came under a partial solar eclipse. It was a beautiful afternoon. As I walked in my old neighborhood in the East Village, the sun was strangely dimmed, and the shadows cast by the leaves, and the awnings, and the human body, looked dappled and unnatural. Just one small shift in the cosmos, and our perception of the world was briefly but unmistakably changed. The World Trade Center attack was practically a celestial event in that sense: a moment when one’s unstable place on the planet comes brutally into focus.

The cover headline of the September 17 issue of The Economist read, "The Day the World Changed." Changing the world was supposed to be a good thing, the outcome of a long, uphill battle toward justice and peace. Now it’s all too clear that changing the world isn’t only the goal of well-intentioned idealists, and can be done in just an hour.

My political reaction is still taking shape, but I’ll venture the following. The near-universal revulsion provoked by the attacks is a positive sign, and yet one fears that the American-led anti-terrorist effort, if mishandled, could turn all the world into a burning building from which there’s no escape. Here’s a scenario: the U.S. invades Afghanistan and fights a ground and air war against the battle-hardened and deeply fanatical Taliban, whose fighters know every possible detail of the rugged landscape. Enraged pro-Taliban forces in Pakistan stage a successful coup and join the war against us. India, all too eager to give Pakistan a black eye, enters the war on our side. The conflict goes nuclear.

Scary? Consider that one of our religious leaders has already called for nuclear strikes. Following the televised prayer service at the National Cathedral on September 14, Reverend Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, urged the government not to refrain from using any and all weapons in the coming fight, including weapons of mass destruction. This was very important, he argued, as it would prevent deaths on our side. It seems that, according to this man of God and faith, American soldiers must not die, but diseased and crippled Afghanis may have to. Judy Woodruff, the CNN commentator engaging Reverend Graham, let the statement stand without comment.

If the U.S. begins bombing the hyper-oppressed people of Afghanistan and furthering the devastation of this highly unstable part of the world, bin Laden will have won. Nothing would suit his purposes more than an American display of indiscriminate violence toward the Islamic world. This is the trap he has laid for us. It’s plausible to say that he carried out this attack precisely to provoke the U.S. into military action, hopefully against Islam itself. He reasons (yes, reasons) that Muslims now unreceptive to his message, after witnessing "the full wrath of the United States" in Vice President Cheney’s words, will rally to his side in large numbers.

The U.S. most certainly needs to root out the murderous conspirators within our borders and throughout the world. I don’t have an answer as to how, nor do I categorically oppose a military response. But we had better stop frothing at the mouth and let reason prevail, lest we fall right into bin Laden’s trap — a mistake that could conceivably doom us all.

The opinions and ideas expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of All About Jazz.