[Nettime-bold] The View From Chamnbers Street

[Andrew Ross <andrew.ross@nyu.edu>]

Nettimers,

Since I have neighborhood ID, the authorities let me go downtown, at 
noon, as far as Chambers Street, which is where the troops hold a tight 
line, only three or four blocks north of ground zero. After the first 
barrier on Houston St., Soho is totally closed for business, and 
deserted. Too bad for Dolce and Gabbano!  I take some perverse pleasure 
in walking down the center of West Broadway in broad daylight, something 
I'm unlikely to be able to do ever again. A stray cop actually does 
mutter something about jaywalking.  And I actually do say ,"You gotta be 
kidding." He smiles, a little reluctantly.  So do I. 
						
Past the checkpoint on Canal St there are some bizarre sights, like the 
crushed cars piled on top of one another that have been dumped outside 
one of Tribeca's fanciest restaurants. The local bourgeoisie is nowhere 
to be seen, and the folks on the streets are artsy, indie types–the kind 
of folks who used to live here. I run into some people I haven't seen in 
ten years.  Everyone else on the streets is wearing some kind of uniform 
or official ID.  The thick white dust thickens as you get near to 
Chambers Street, which is where it begins to look like an urban 
battleground.  I've been struck in moving around downtown over the last 
24 hours how many weird paramilitary vehicles are on the streets–very 
strange-looking vehicles (with unfamiliar acronyms on the side, if they 
are at all identified) of the sort we don't see on civilian streets but 
which are clearly the property of civil authorities.  Down at Chambers 
Street, all of the marks of authority--city, county, state, and 
federal--begin to merge, alongside fringe, paramilitary organizations 
like the Salvation Army and the Guardian Angels (New York City's version 
of vigilanteism, circa 1980).  

It's an intensely active scene, with crews of relief workers and firemen 
marching back and forth, and trucks of all shapes and sizes weaving in 
and out of the convoys of official vehicles parked on  Hudson and 
Greenwich St.  To the south, when the smoke and fumes momentarily 
clears, I can see the mangled wreck of the towers, and every so often, 
the sunlight catches what looks like a flame.  South of Hudson Street, 
the pile is about fifty or sixty feet high, much less to the south of 
Greenwich where the tower leaned when it fell.  Even so, it's a 
surprisingly well-contained area of damage.  Hoses are trained 
everywhere. I manage to get access to the bridge over the highway that 
links BMCC to the Stuyvesant school.  For as far as you can see north, 
the West Side Highway is crammed full of heavy trucks of all shapes and 
sizes, waiting to cart off the shrapnel.  The yachts off the piers are 
bobbing merrily. The trees in Washington Market Park and snow-white with 
dust. Someone has traced out graffiti in the dust on the bridge: "Fuck 
Woodstock! Time to Fight!"  A sentiment to which the decent New Yorker 
can only say,  Oy! 					

The wind starts to shift the fumes towards us, and since I don't have a 
mask, this sorry dude beats a retreat.  Why did I go down there?  I 
wanted to test out my right to the streets in my own neighborhood. What 
does it feel like to be a member of the public under such circumstances? 
What does the "official city" look like, under such circumstances?  What 
I found, other than the carnage,  was a loosely coordinated overlap of 
authorities, and a veritable army of working class folks in one uniform 
or another (the city's public workers for the most part) putting their 
guts into a horribly grim job.  Sound familiar?  This loose coalition, 
with its lumpen workforce, was making the most of a bad scene, and their 
labor is a study in contrast to the unhinged sabre-rattling of the 
nation's policy establishment.  (At the other end of yesterday's chain 
of events were the workers paid a measly minimum wage by the airline 
companies to guarantee our safety at airports). Yet I have to shiver 
when I think of how this same coalition, under different circumstances, 
might conceivably be, and sometimes is, turned against the citizenry.  
On the subway this morning, the vibe was dead mute–-a mood I could only 
compare to another NYC subway ride I took the morning after the Rodney 
King-inspired insurgency.  As for the air billowing out from DC, that's 
a nasty whiff.  If you find that smell disagreeable, you're likely to 
find the city streets even less hospitable in the months to come.

I'd once spent a long time researching the Twin Towers for a book 
chapter, "Bombing the Big Apple," that I wrote several years ago.  As it 
happens, I'd recently done a word search through all of those digital 
files. I was looking for any mention of Osama bin Laden. from media 
reporting of the 1993 bombing and the immediate aftermath. For what it's 
worth, the search came up negative.   

 

Andrew Ross
Professor and Director
Graduate Program in American Studies
New York University
285 Mercer St. 8th Floor
NY, NY 10003
tel 212-998-8538
fax 212-995-4803



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