[Nettime-bold] Michael McDonough, New York architect

[Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.com>]

Subject: report from NYC...
Date: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 5:36 PM
From: Michael McDonough <here@michaelmcdonough.com>
To: Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.com>

It started at 8:45 AM with the missile-like scream of something flying too
low and fast across the city's heart, followed by a thump that shook the
ground. Something is wrong.

Minutes later, a second thump. The city empties into the streets. TVs come
alive with live video feeds of the planes striking the south sides of the
towers. I photograph the fires from my SoHo roof, capturing the north sides
on film. The fire has penetrated the towers and is licking up the facades,
bright orange tongues through inky black smoke.

But the towers are not the towers, they are one tower and one smoky billow
the size of an atomic cloud. People are jumping from the upper stories of
the remaining tower. A short time later, now on the streets, my wife and I
are talking to strangers, exchanging information got from blaring car
radios.

Mid-sentence, the second tower implodes before our eyes, only a few blocks
away, glass shards blowing out from the smoky, collapsing core.  Like
nightmarish snow, they glisten and sparkle, then disappear. On a normal day,
over 100,000 persons pass through the WTC. We have just seen a large number
of them vaporized. 

Debris, chunks of the buildings the size of city buses and automobiles rain
down onto the streets of Lower Manhattan. The collapses at first take the
tops of the towers.  In a matter of seconds, the remaining, lower reaches
are infernos. The facades of the towers have fallen onto the surrounding
streets. A woman in the hotel next to the towers reports seeing legions of
firefighters, police, and medical personnel disappeared beneath the rubble
in an instant. Now the explosions have killed not only those in the towers,
but those trying to save them on the ground.

Elsewhere in the city, as the day grinds on, businesses and shops are
closed, locked tight with security gates in place. All civilian vehicular
transportation in and out of the city stops. The tunnels are sealed off and
empty. The bridges are available for those who want to hike out of the city.

At early evening I walk the police cordons around lower Manhattan. On the
local streets, urgent laser printed pleas for blood donations are taped to
mailboxes and street lamps. Black SUVs with darkened windows scream through
intersections in long lines, with sirens and flashing lights. Ambulances
from New Jersey and Long Island, and Upstate New York--townships 60 miles
and more outside of New York City--course the streets; 20, 30 at a time,
they move, heading north to hospitals and triage centers.

 Military planes dart overhead, then disappear. The city is an uneasy
silence broken on occasion by piecing, crackling sounds, warnings and urgent
communications. Thousands of people stare blank-eyed and quiet as they watch
the buildings all over downtown burn. Dozens of construction workers loaded
on trucks--welding kits, steel barriers, men and material--head south, to
ground zero. Fire engines line the west side arterial roads, empty, their
occupants fighting the out-of-control fires on foot.

Military vehicles start to appear. The trucks and cars near the center are
shattered, crushed, lost in a hail of ash and metal and concrete. New fires
start. Smoke billows easterly, against white smoke against the blue sky of
our mid-September day. More buildings are burning. Another flaming, 40 story
pile falls. 

We are helpless; we watch. Cars are burning. Mercury from a million
fluorescent lights, PCBs from miles of electrical components, dioxin from
football fields of synthetic carpets and miles of PVC piping placed
throughout the complex, a toxic, now gray soup belching from the flaming,
collapsing hulks. It is as if the city has lost its arms, and is staring
blankly at where they used to be, finding flaming, smoking voids in their
stead.
 
Michael McDonough
New York City
9/11



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