A CELEBRATION OF THE PEOPLE OF

NEW YORK
NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

t is like a nation itself more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York. John Steinbeck

KEVIN VAN PAASSEN / NATIONAL POST

The Statue of Liberty, early morning, Sept. 10, 2002.

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NEW YORK

NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

Once the roar of the falling towers had ended ... it became clear that what made this city a single thing what gave it its metaphorical unity wasnt the asphalt and the steel and the rock beneath it all, it was the people The New York Times

GUS POWELL / COURTESY OF ARIEL MEYEROWITZ GALLERY, NEW YORK

They schooled us well. They taught us the history of this city as if it were the history of ourselves

Worlds greatest home town

Former National Post columnist Allen Abel grew up in New York City. In the mid-1990s, after two decades in Toronto, he returned to his native Brooklyn to write a book, called Flatbush Odyssey: A Journey Through the Heart of Brooklyn, recently rereleased. Abel was in New York visiting his mother last September 11, and in this essay, written especially for the National Post, he talks about his family's response to the terrorist attacks and their abiding love for their city. dont know what I am, if not New York. Not myself, not my sister, not my mother, or my father. Polish, Jewish, White Russian, Ashkenazi, Orthodox, immigrant, emigrant, alien those were my grandparents robes. But I never knew my grandparents; not even all their names. I dont know what I am, if not New York. Twenty-ve years in Toronto weathered that core of me not at all. I thought it might; there were times when I hoped it would. But I am still the boy at Coney Island, and last September only made it worth the more. Our New York was not the New York you foreigners dream of, the New York of taxis and Tavern on the Green and the Met and the Oak Room at the Plaza. Our New York was the subway and the bus and the sidewalk; the Polo Grounds and the old Madison Square Garden; stickball and Johnny-on-the-Pony and Rockaway Beach, egg creams and hot pastrami and Italian kids chanting Christ killers! Christ killers! as our parents force-marched us to Hebrew school. Think of my sister on the blighted LL train at midnight, and my father and his brothers, seven days a week in their little Brooklyn candy store, and my mother in her fourth-oor kitchen, 53 years now in the same apartment. And that is our New York. What is it about, this being a New Yorker? It is working summers as a mailman out of FDR Station on 3rd Avenue, and parking the truck on Fifth to cheer the astronauts just home from the moon. It is being in the house for AliFrazier, the rst time. And it is the millennium turning in Times Square, and the confetti falling at midnight, and kissing my sister full on the lips, and saying, this is our city. They schooled us well, we grandchildren of immigrants, to cast aside the relics of the Old World and grasp this new New York as ours. They taught us about the Roosevelts and Rockefellers, about Tammany Hall and peg-legged Peter Stuyvesant, as if it were the history of ourselves.
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GUS POWELL / COURTESY OF ARIEL MEYEROWITZ GALLERY, NEW YORK

VINCENT LAFORET / THE NEW YORK TIMES

From the top: People view Ground Zero from the observation deck of the Empire State Building on Sept. 15, 2001, the first time it was reopened after the twin towers collapsed; two visitors to Central Park caught in a sudden rainfall make one umbrella do double duty; a young couple in the city.

NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

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It is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real esh and I myself am not a dream. Helen Keller

GUS POWELL / COURTESY ARIEL MEYEROWITZ GALLERY, NEW YORK

GUS POWELL / COURTESY ARIEL MEYEROWITZ GALLERY, NEW YORK

Clockwise from top: At the steps of St. Patricks Cathedral on Easter Sunday; Smoke break at 500 Fifth Avenue; Nuns from a convent in Connecticut try for a view of Ground Zero; Shopping on Madison Avenue.

PHILIP GREENBERG

MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES

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NEW YORK

NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

Dont you see? The rest of the country looks upon New York like were left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. I think of us that way sometimes, and I live here. Alvy Singer, Annie Hall

STAN HONDA

PHILIP GREENBERG

Clockwise from top: Life-size cow sculptures, painted by New York artists, are displayed on Ffith Avenue as part of Cow Parade; seven Marilyn Monroe look-alikes and three Andy Warhols participate in a contest to commemorating the 40th anniversary of Monroe's death and Warhols 74th birthday; a sidewalk sculptor working in Times Square.

VINCENT LAFORET / THE NEW YORK TIMES

We remember the highlights

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I just wish you could have been there in 63, when Sandy Koufax struck out 15 Yankees. I phoned my sister in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and asked her what it means to be a New Yorker, and Debbie said, I dont know, because Ive never not been one. And then her voice softened, and she said, But I know what it means to be in Manhattan, and the World Trade Center isnt there. Its an attitude, a belief, a resiliency that you dont really need if you dont live here, Debbie said, and she has lived there and nowhere else for 47 years. She teaches kindergarten at an all-

(We werent very literary, the Abel clan. We knew not from E. B. White and A. J. Liebling and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Why didnt those people use their real names?) And we heard them say that, once you leave New York, everything else is just Hackensack. But I have seen a lot of this planets Hackensacks, from Canton to Caracas to Cape Town, and some of them are pretty darn grand. No, I dont think it is arrogance that sings in me. (I keep hearing Whitman: I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine. I too walked the streets of Manhattan island ...

Caribbean school, and not long ago she was named New York Citys AIDS Volunteer of the Year. (She knows New York from the street, and not from the skyscrapers.) When the towers fell, she huddled with her pupils, and kept them close until their parents came home. And thank God, all of them did. What has kept you in New York? I wondered. (As if anything could drag her away. She has tickets for tonights solemn Yankees game.) It certainly wasnt that my mother was just a half an hour away, she said with evil glee. And I dont look at New York as the land of opportunity, the way the rest of the world seems to.
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Thats another reason I love New York. Just like that, it can go from bad to cute Carrie, in Sex and the City Im staying! You hear that, New York? THE FROG IS STAYING! Kermit the Frog

MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES

SUSAN B. MARKISZ

STAN HONDA

MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES

Clockwise from top: Dancers from Trinidad wait to perform in the West Indian American Day Carnival Parade; Carol Harvey, Noelle Hanrahan and Ilene Richards enjoy a few pints at An Beal Bocht Cafe, an Irish pub at 445 West 238th Street in the Bronx; New York police officer Patrick M. Ward stands with members of the Aboriginal Arnhem tribe from Australia; Riding the subway home after the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island; Dykes on Bikes head down Fifth Avenue during the gay pride parade.

MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES

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NEW YORK

NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough Fran Lebowitz Manhattan is a narrow island off the coast of New Jersey devoted to the pursuit of lunch The Wall Street Journal

JEFF ZELEVANSKY

JEFF ZELEVANSKY

STAN HONDA

Clockwise from top: A New York city deli during a busy lunch hour; a man sits outside a bakery in Little Italy; lobster-seller on a Bronx street corner as a protest march passes by; pedestrians looking at bowls in a shop window in Chinatown.

STAN HONDA

Its an attitude ... a resiliency

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So it must be insanity. I asked her about the worst of her times. Had it been those nights alone on the train, rumbling under and over the corpse of Brooklyn, heading home to her basement apartment after a Rangers hockey game? (Because when you think of New York, think also of the burrowing of ordinary New Yorkers like us, not the shining luxury of the penthouse few.) Do you mean the Canarsie line at 3 in the morning, when I saw the blacks pummelling the shit out of the old Chinese guy? Didnt that make you hate the city? I wondered.

No, Debbie replied. Ive seen too much niceness and decency to be affected by that. Are you afraid now? I asked. The fear now is not about walking around Harlem at midnight, she said. Its when they announce that theyre not letting any trains go north of 23rd Street because they found a briefcase on the sidewalk somewhere uptown and theyre afraid its another bomb to blow up New York. Then she announced, Heres a quotable quote for you, and said: We always thought of New York as a battleground for the drug dealers. But we never thought of it as a battleground like Israel,

or Northern Ireland. She had just come home from an art fair in Greenwich Village. (I envisioned her hauling home at least six shopping bags of wonderfully useless stuff.) I asked what her best times had been. Maybe the day they retired Mickey Mantles number, she said. Maybe the time I got to take all the kids to our fathers store for ice cream, and I was queen for a day. What about the Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art? I asked her. That had been a great highlight of my life, not to mention dinner at the Russian Tea Room, back in the heyday of Woody and Mia.
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NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

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When reporters asked the Pope what he liked best about New York, he replied, Tutti buoni everything is good. Thats my philosophy exactly Andy Warhol

SUSAN B. MARKISZ

Michele Greco, owner of Mike's Deli, is a legend on Arthur Avenue in the Belmont section of the Bronx.

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NEW YORK

NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

Its true that what you nd in New York is something other than America. Only small towns and small countries are self-satised; and real capital goes beyond its borders Simone de Beauvoir

GUS POWELL / COURTESY ARIEL MEYEROWITZ GALLERY, NEW YORK

MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES

Top: South side of Grand Central Station; above: Commuters walk through Grand Central Station at the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend.

We are not cold or indifferent

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Nah, my sister said. Not Picasso. By sheer coincidence, I was at home last September 11, updating a book I wrote a few years back about Brooklyn, and its history, and its people, and my mother. That morning, we sat together in the room where she had cradled me as a baby, half a century before, and watched our city fall to ashes. (The Twin Towers were about four miles away.) Then, the next day, she went down to McDonalds as usual to meet her Haitian neighbours and I got on a train and rode out.

I called my mother and asked if the year had changed her. I have been scared before by events beyond my control, Hennie Lucci said. Pearl Harbor scared me. During the war, they talked about poison gas being dropped on New York, and that scared me. The Cuban Missile Crisis scared me. But this was the worst this was total devastation. It was very difcult not to be crippled by fear. She, too, was a New Yorker to the core. If you ever see a photograph of Times Square in August, 1945, and people holding up headlines that say JAPS QUIT, and the beautiful young girls kissing all the soldiers, that is my mother. She was 22 then, a bookkeeper at a hardware store on Vesey Street in Lower Man-

hattan, one short block from where the Twin Towers would rise, and fall. Being a Brooklynite has always been my creed, my mother said. Our manners, coldness, indifference thats all erroneous. We are not cold. We are not indifferent. We dont have bad manners. Its just the pressure under which we live. A few weeks after the Japanese surrendered, my mother composed a poem about her daily ordeal as a subway straphanger. She used to read it to me when I was a kid. Now, she read it to me again:
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NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

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I was in love with New York. I do not mean love in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city the way you love the rst person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again. Joan Didion

STAN HONDA

Top: Volunteer Santa Clauses walk across Fifth Avenue to kick off the Christmas season. Left: Rockefeller Center Below: The day after U.S. Thanksgiving, 2001, holiday shoppers crowd into Macys department store, while Mayor Rudy Giuliani browses in Barneys flagship store.

SUSAN B. MARKISZ

LIBRADO ROMERO / THE NEW YORK TIMES

DON HOGAN CHARLES / THE NEW YORK TIMES

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NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 11, 2002

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NEW YORK

GUS POWELL, COURTESY OF ARIEL MEYEROWITZ GALLERY, NEW YORK

Pilgrims, a gathering of New Yorkers near Ground Zero, Sunday Sept. 23, 2001.

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NEW YORK

NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

New York is the only city in the world where you can get deliberately run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian. Russell Baker It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story. Agatha Christie

PHOTO BY GUS POWELL / ARIEL MEYEROWITZ GALLERY

VINCENT LAFORET / THE NEW YORK TIMES

Clockwise from top: Houston Street, summer, 1999; A woman puddle-jumps as a flash thunderstorm breaks a hot, muggy June afternoon; Homeless woman Joan Kimball, 37, walks beneath the Manhattan bridge where she lives in Brooklyn. (According to the Coalition for the Homeless there are nearly 30,000 homeless people in New York City shelters.)

MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES

Theres no reason to be afraid

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As I board the Express, A seat is my goal. Need I confess All I get is the pole? . . . I stand and stare At a hundred faces. And hungrily long For the wide open spaces . . . She couldnt have longed that hungrily, I thought she never left. I asked her if she was frightened now.

Scared? Yeah, Im scared, but I dont do anything about it. I go to the Kings Plaza Mall they say not to go to malls and Im scared. All my peers are scared. I know one man who says hes not going on a plane again, ever. And here I am, ying all over the place. Then she thought of the people jumping from the windows, and she said, They were just bookkeepers, and they took the subway to work that day, and they died. I tried to steer her into another reverie of New York, in another time. Walking down to Wall Street, looking up at the buildings like an out-of-towner, she said. Coming out of a Broadway show on

48th Street, and walking all the way down to 14th to get the subway. Everything was grand then. Everything was so grand. But then, I wasnt scared then. People still walk from 48th Street to 14th Street, I told her. Theres no reason to be afraid. I know, my mother said. But I dont think I could walk that far anyhow. Last November, when he suffered the terrible stroke that, a few weeks later, would end his long, long life, my father had been resident in Florida for 22 years.
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NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

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New York New York big city of dreams/ And everything in New York aint always what it seems/ You might get fooled if you come from out of town/ But Im down by law and I know my way around Grandmaster Flash

OZIER MUHAMMAD / THE NEW YORK TIMES

TYLER HICKS / THE NEW YORK TIMES

TYLER HICKS / THE NEW YORK TIMES

Clockwise from top: Antwan Smith, 18, does pull-ups on a scaffolding at 118th Street and Manhattan Ave. in upper Manhattan. Opera singer Anne Tormela holds forth in the subway under West 34th Street. People watch skaters ride a ramp on top of a midtown nightclub this summer. Public school students cheer as rap musicians take the stage near city hall at a June rally against proposed budget cuts to education.

MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES

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NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

New York has never learnt the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself from hour to hour in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. Michel Certeau

PHILIP GREENBERG

GUS POWELL / ARIEL MEYEROWITZ GALLERY

Clockwise from top: Mowing the lawn on Rockefeller Center; a construction worker, tethered to his safety harness, works high above a construction site at Eighth Avenue and 43rd Street; men work amid the distractions of Fifth Avenue.
SUSAN B. MARKISZ

Old Country bad! America good!

Continued from Page 12

He, too, had been a New Yorker, born in Manhattan on East Tenth Street at Avenue B in the age of the drayman and the pushcart, the outhouse and the Yiddish-speaking streets. They call the district Alphabet City now, one of those fey nicknames that the new arrivals conjure, to sassy up a sad old slice of town. Eighty years ago and more, my father would ask his own father, Pop, tell us about the Old Country, and Ike Abelowitz, a grocer from Bialystok, would slam his st on the counter and snarl, Old Country bad! America good! And he would say nothing more. My fathers time stretched far so back that he could remember

standing on Broadway in his knickerbockers after the war the First World War watching the doughboys marching home from Over There. And when we went to a Spring Training game last March in Fort Lauderdale our last game together and I asked him for his earliest baseball memory, he recalled a boyhood hero named Jesse Barnes pitching a no-hitter for the New York Giants, and I looked it up and that was 1922. He was as thoroughly New York as it was possible to be, the New York of Al Jolson and Mayor Jimmy Walker, of Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth. He never owned or even drove a car. He never dwelled in another place, unless you count a trench on the march to the Rhine. He held season tickets for 40 years, but

never saw the Rangers win the Stanley Cup. And then, in the late seventies, when it became an act of suicide for a small, old man to ride the subways, he bought a little at in Boca Raton and headed south. But his leave-taking of New York was not a happy one. The night before he was to depart, thieves broke open the moving truck that held his possessions. They didnt get much a collection of old yodeling records, a few pairs of Hush Puppies, and the dozens of rolls of paper towels and toilet tissue he had cached while working at a newsstand in the Lincoln Building on 42nd Street, across from Grand Central Station.
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Autumn in New York / Why does it seem so inviting / Autumn in New York / It spells the thrill of rst-nighting/ Glittering crowds and shimmering clouds/ In canyons of steel / Theyre making me feel Im home Vernon Duke

SUSAN B. MARKISZ

SUSAN B. MARKISZ

PHILIP GREENBERG

Clockwise from top: Luz Rivera prepares for her graduation performance at the Bronx Dance Academy middle school graduation. Bass player John Robinson, of Bronx jazz group The Valerie Capers Quartet, plays at the first jazz concert at the Russian residence in Riverdale, N.Y. Opera diva Denyce Graves, playing the part of the gypsy Carmen in the Metropolitan Opera production of Bizets Carmen, sings an aria in a free outdoor performance in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. Designer John Galliano enters an upscale party on the Upper East Side.

SUSAN B. MARKISZ

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NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

In a New York Minute/Everything can change/ In a New York Minute /Things can get a little strange / In a New York Minute /Everything can change Don Henley

MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES)

These are my inheritances

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RUBY WASHINGTON / THE NEW YORK TIMES

And heaven knows why they stole our home movies. Litttle Allen at the Empire State Building, in 1954, and on the Circle Line cruise around Manhattan Island. All of us at the Steeplechase amusement park in Coney Island. Little Debbie and her skinny big brother at the squalid little zoo in Prospect Park. So these are my inheritances shadows and memories, scraps and souvenirs, of the greatest home town in all the world. Strange: when the warriors of Allah attacked my fathers native city, I know that it wounded him, but the old soldier would not speak his fear. His world was closing. Yet in October, he stayed up past midnight two weeks before his stroke to watch the Yankees in his 90th World Series. He had planned, through most of his time in Florida, to be buried there when the time came. Then, about a year ago, he suddenly and adamantly changed his mind. What lay behind his reversal, we will never know the ghosts of his parents, the tenement on Tenth Street, the echoes of his horse-drawn streets. He died in February. So we ew his tired body north by low-cost freight, and we buried him in New York.
National Post

From top: Gabriel DeckerLee, 8, Willa Decker-Lee, 5, and Lee Saunders, 5, play on a Queens pier on the East River in front of the Manhattan skyline; a child watches the Central Park Zoos polar bear keep cool; young partygoers outside the Pussycat Lounge in the East Village.
KELLY GUENTHER / THE NEW YORK TIMES

NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

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All of this the shared apartment in the Village, the illicit relationship, the Friday-night train to a country house was what he had imagined life in New York to be, and he was intensely happy John Cheever

MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

Clockwise from top: Beachgoers cram the Coney Island beach on the Fourth of July holiday, disregarding government warnings of potential terrorist attacks; onlookers view the Bryant Park Carousel, which opened for the first time on June 11 with a ride costing US$1.50; Travis Sasser, 10, jumps over a wave as Corey Gamble, 13, stands by on Coney Island; newlywed Tina Moeing braves a drizzle as she poses for a videographer in Central Park on May 13.

MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

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NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

New York, New York, a helluva of a town / The Bronx is up, but the Batterys down / The people ride in a hole in the groun / New York, New York, its a helluva town! Betty Comden and Adolph Green, On the Town

JEFF ZELEVANSKY

Clockwise from top: Police officers stand around a cardboard cutout of New York Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer outside a pep rally in Bryant Square Park to celebrate the Subway Series between the New York Mets and the Yankees in October, 2000; a fan in the bleachers at a Mets game tries to catch a ball; New York City firefighters carry U.S. flags, each representing one of the 343 firefighters who were killed last September 11, in this years St. Patrick's Day parade; the Naked Cowboy performs in the middle of Broadway.

BRUCE COTLER

NICOLE BENGIVENO / THE NEW YORK TIMES

JEFF ZELEVANSKY

NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

NEW YORK

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Living in New York is like being in some terrible late night party. Youre tired, youve had a headache since youve arrived, but you cant leave because then youd miss the party. Simon Hoggart

MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES

RICHARD PERRY / THE NEW YORK TIMES

Clockwise from top: Onlookers wave as the worlds largest pipe and drum parade marches up Sixth Avenue in April; an environmental protester dressed as a recyclable glass bottle hands out a flyer outside city hall; two employees of the transportation-forhire industry; pigs are delivered to a butcher shop in Chinatown in preparation for Chinese New Year celebrations; Donna McKenzie carries a 50-pound bag of ice to a co-workers birthday party during late Julys heat wave.
MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES

JOYCE DOPKEEN / THE NEW YORK TIMES JEFF ZELEVANSKY

NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

NEW YORK

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New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up! E.B. White

ROBERT MECEA / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Cyclists ride into Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge as the autumn sun comes up through its arches to burn away the morning fog.