A photo I feared the world might never see: Burmese dissident and human rights hero Aung San Suu Kyi with an American Secretary of State. She and Hillary Clinton met the press yesterday in Washington, D.C. Credit for this photo: Mandel Ngan, AFP/Getty Images.
In May 2001, Avalon Publishing Group–the Berkeley, California company I worked for as an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf Publishers–moved all its New York employees to new offices on 161 William Street in lower Manhattan, near City Hall Park, behind Park Row and the J&R Music World stores, 2-3 blocks east of the World Trade Center. I had enjoyed our original space on W. 21st Street, and didn’t appreciate the longer commute from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but soon got used to the new neighborhood, new restaurants, new sights and sounds.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I rode the train downtown and emerged from the Fulton Street subway station, at the corner of William and Fulton, with a customary single earbud stuck in one ear, tuned in to local public radio station WNYC, alert to what might be going on at street level. I detected uncharacteristic alarm from the on-air voices of host Brian Lehrer and correspondent Beth Fertig. Before I could comprehend the source of their concern, my gaze turned west and up in to the air toward the World Trace Center towers, startled to see flames, smoke, and debris pouring from the structures, against a backdrop of a California-type deep blue sky. The air around me was palpably hot, a weird sensation I couldn’t account for, even after seeing the flames above me in the sky.
What in the world?
Turning the corner and hurrying toward my office building, I focused again on the radio voices, hearing something about an airplane having crashed into one of the towers, and then, that a second such crash had occurred only moments before I came out of the subway. Lehrer’s and Fertig’s alarm was in real time. Any idea I had momentarily entertained, associating this incident with the incident in the 1940s when the Empire State Building was struck by a light plane, was dashed. I ran in to 161 William, took the elevator to our upper floor and found a handful of Avalon colleagues who’d arrived before me. I hustled over to the western side of the floor, joining them as we all took in a clear view of the twin towers, with a valley of lower buildings below and between us and the conflagration. The volume of flame, smoke, and debris were all much greater than when I’d first seen them downstairs. The debris included a fluttering cascade of myriad loose sheets of white paper. Midway between our building and the two towers, I noticed a lone man on a rooftop across the way and below our floor. The figure seemed to be in a prayerful pose, kneeling on a rug, wearing a white skullcap. I never learned what he was doing there, and have in the years since pondered it with colleagues such as Keith Wallman who also saw the man that morning.
In those days, neither my wife nor I owned a cell phone. I rushed into my office, on the east side of the building, and used my phone there to call Kyle. The lines worked the first time I tried our home line. She’d just gotten in from taking our son Ewan to kindergarten; on her way home she’d heard about the events downtown. I told her what I’d seen and she said she had TV on and warned me to leave the office building right away. I said, yes, but I don’t know what’s going on at street level. What if the buildings fall, and topple in the eastern direction? What if people are panicked or trampling each other? Maybe I’d be safer upstairs. These were some of my thoughts. Kyle said she was going to go out and get cash and drinking water for our apartment, then go back to school and bring Ewan home. We talked a few minutes more and I told her I was going to go back to the other side of the floor to see the latest developments. I stayed a few minutes and finally decided, yes, it’s time to leave. I tried my home line again but now couldn’t get a call through. I would’ve left a message, telling Kyle I was leaving and that I would try to call her again later, but couldn’t get through at all. A colleague and I decided to descend in the elevator together, and then make a run for it when we got out on William Street. My companion was my fellow editor Tina Pohlman. As we were rushing from the western windows in to the open elevator car–I know now it was at 9:59 AM–we heard one of the weirdest sounds I’ve ever experienced, made by the collapse of the first tower. First, came a deeply guttural bass sound, created probably by the tremendous downdraft of air from the vertical collapse–something almost felt more than heard. The next instant, I registered a high, trebly, tinkling noise made up, I think, of breaking glass and splintering metal.
Tina and I descended without incident and saw out the lobby’s revolving door hundreds of people running past our building front, engulfed in a dusty, smoky cloud. Without hesitating more than a few seconds, we pushed out the door and joined the massing throng pushing north and east, toward the Brooklyn Bridge. Tina hoped to head over to the lower East Side, where she lived, if permitted by police. My direction was uptown, all the way to West 102nd Street, my home. We were immediately surrounded by the cloud, a murk that wasn’t pure gray or black, examples that TV footage would later show; this cloud actually had some shafts of sunlight in it. It was more ochre than gray. Still, it was pretty opaque and a specific fear registered that if debris were flying in it, we might not even see it heading at us. We made a right turn on Beekman Street, past New York Downtown Hospital, and turned left on Pearl Street, running together for several blocks until we ran under the Brooklyn Bridge.
Though still surrounded by the blanket of dust, and impelled to keep running till I was clear of it, I was beginning to fear that I couldn’t keep up the pace. I wasn’t so much out of breath–the problem was the shoes I had worn that morning: a pair of newish ankle-high boots. With the beautiful fall weather that morning, I had considered them appropriately autumnal and so decided to don them. But I hadn’t broken them in yet, and they proved terrible to try to run in, or even to try walking fast. I would regret my choice of footwear for many months that followed.
I tried to ignore the nascent pain and resumed my nervous, awkward jog, continually hitching and hauling up the knapsack slung over my shoulder. Surrounded by earnest and fearful strangers, all of us still shrouded by the murk, my route passed through unfamiliar parts of Chinatown. Approaching Canal Street the cloud began to thin a little. Finally, we crossed Canal Street and burst into patches of clear air. Tina and I said goodbye and wished each other well as we headed off in our separate directions. I was relieved to be in clearer air and thought, Now I just have to get home. Problem was, I still had a long way to go. Any city buses that passed were insanely overcrowded, and moving at a crawl anyway. Yellow cabs and livery taxis were also full and barely moving through the dense surface traffic. Continuing to listen to the radio, I learned that the second tower had fallen, at 10:28. With both towers now down, I was now confirmed in my horror that thousands of people had died this day. Meantime, the subways had been halted, and it was unknown when they would resume operation. I had no choice but to walk all the way home, about 8 miles.
I pushed up Broadway, through Soho, past Union Square, the Flatiron Building, Madison Square, Times Square, the Theater District, Central Park, Columbus Circle, and Lincoln Center. Every now and then on this odyssey I’d stop and try Kyle on a pay phone. The lines were all dead. She didn’t know when or even for sure if I had left my office. At last, I hit 72nd Street and was on the Upper West Side. It felt good to be back uptown, but I still had thirty blocks to go. I kept pushing, increasingly hobbled, eventually ringing our bell and announcing I was home. It was around 3PM, about five hours since I’d left William Street. Kyle and Ewan were waiting for me and I collapsed into their open arms. I sat down and removed my shoes and socks. Both feet were raw and blistered, from ankles to toes. I tuned in to TV for the first time all day and saw with my eyes the enormity of the loss that everyone else had been viewing all day via the visual medium. Not wanting to disturb Ewan any more than he might be already, we shut off the set until he went to bed.
Avalon’s offices would remain closed for about a week and a half. I tried to stay off my feet and let them heal, but the need to be ambulatory prevailed and I resumed walking around. Unfortunately, my gait was much altered by what I’d endured, which led to a series of foot, ankle, calf, hamstring, and leg injuries over the next couple years. Damage to the #1, 2, and 3 subway lines in lower Manhattan was so serious that my longer commute was lengthened further; a trip that used to take 30-40 minutes often ran to 90 minutes or longer. It was a horrible burden every day to come to work in the same neighborhood with the toxic brew a few blocks west that was already making recovery workers on the pile ill. For some reason, cold air seemed to magnify the odor that drifted eastward in the neighborhood. On winter evenings, I would leave the office and rush down in to the subway station, covering my mouth with a handkerchief to cut the horrible, vile crippling smell that I knew contained a mix of plastics, circuit boards, burnt upholstery, carpets and human remains.
A new normal kind of took over, but nothing really seemed normal anymore. I read about and followed the 9/11 Commission and was appalled at what had been the Bush administration’s failure to heed urgent warnings from counter-terrorism officials, as we were reminded again this morning with Kurt Eichenwald’s NY Times Op-Ed, The Deafness Before the Storm. I was deeply and personally offended when Bush held his 2004 convention in NYC, using the still-healing city as a backdrop for his bogus triumphalism. He and Dick Cheney claimed to have kept us safe–except I always hastened to add–when they had failed, big time. I was enormously relieved when Avalon moved offices again, back into Chelsea, a welcome removal from the still-stricken neighborhood downtown.
Each year on 9/11 our UWS neighborhood welcomes mourners, firefighters, police, and families to the Fireman’s Memorial on Riverside Drive at 100th Street. Last year, on the tenth anniversary, the day’s observances drew firefighter crews from all over the U.S., anglophone and francophone Canada, Scotland, France, and Australia. I’ll conclude this personal remembrance of September 11, 2001, and its aftermath by sharing nine of the photographs Kyle and I took at the special day last year. I will close by saying I hope your 9/11 anniversary this year, 2012, has been a soothing day. Shalom.
Please click through to read entire post and see all photos . . . //more//
Terrific essay by fellow blogger Lance Mannion at his self-named site. It’s called Shake Every Hand, Kiss Every Baby, and it’s a very readable analysis with much humor of the one-on-one people skills that successful politicians employ in connecting with voters.
His post reminded me of when Kyle and I met Bill Clinton in April ’92, prior to the NY primary, weeks before he had wrapped up the Democratic nomination. This was in lower Manhattan, near Wall Street. First Hillary, then Bill spoke standing on the open bed of a pickup truck, and when they were done, climbed down into the crowd. They met and conversed with everyone there, shook every hand, and campaigned like he was trailing in the polls, not leading. Bill’s hands were soft and big–it felt like shaking hands with a pillow. He looked me in the eye and asked for my vote in the upcoming primary. I then volunteered for his fall campaign against President Bush, joining an ad hoc group in Manhattan called Street Corner Speakers for Clinton. That was a great campaign year.
In considering what makes a successful politician, Lance’s references run the gamut from Dickens’ Hard Times to George McGovern’s early days as a hopeful South Dakota pol. I was glad to see that Andrew Sullivan linked to it this morning at The Dish on the Daily Beast in a share of Lance’s post Andrew called The Handshake Factor.
I recommend you read the whole piece. Here’s a taste of it, the same excerpt as on The Dish.
* In borrowing this post’s title from Richard Ben Cramer’s great book of the same name, I say thanks to Mr. Cramer.
Interesting comment by Eric Wilson in the Times on the dress Michelle Obama wore at the DNC last night.
Like the fool he is, Romney surrogate John Sununu is in the media trying to stir up some issue about the cost of the dress, which I’ve tweeted about below. FWIW, Eric Wilson reports that the retail cost of Michelle’s dress is approximately 1/4 of the garment Ann Romney wore the night she spoke at the RNC. Sununu’s accusing the Obama camp of ‘lying,’ when it’s news orgs reporting the cost.
Bye, bye August, it was nice knowing ya.
The George Washington Bridge, aka The Great Gray Bridge, taken during a bike ride along the Hudson in upper Manhattan, August 30, 2012.
I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, where our family’s dentist was Dr. Danny Butler, a gentle man whom I never minded having take care of my teeth. He was a pleasant-looking fellow, who in retrospect I remember looking a little bit like Jack Paar. When I moved to New York in 1985, Diane Butler, one of Danny’s daughters, was living in the city, studying dance. I met up with her in Gotham, and traded old Cleveland stories. Remembering that my family had run Undercover Books, Diane told me her about her smart sister who was starting to make waves in academia, and as an author. Her sister was Judith Butler–who went on to become well known as a philosopher, UC Berkeley professor, and author.
Soon after I got settled in New York I began working in publishing, and began hearing about Judith’s written work in the fields of women’s studies, gender, philosophy, and related topics. One of her latest books is Parting Ways: A Jewish Critique of Zionism (Columbia University Press, 2012), in which she grapples with the ideas of earlier thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Edward Said, and Mahmoud Darwish, to arrive at her own critique of Zionism. She is a serious thinker, and not a hater.
I was intrigued this week to see that she’d written a personal essay for the website Mondoweiss, in which she responds to critics who object to her stated beliefs and opinions about the Middle East conflict. Right-wing elements in the Jewish community have objected to her for some time, but it seems the objections have become more vocal recently with the news that she would be the recipient of the Theodore Adorno Prize, awarded every three years by the city of Frankfurt, Germany.
I was struck by Judith’s cogent and temperate response to what I take to be inaccurate attacks by her critics. Below is the first paragraph of her rebuttal. If you find it reasonable and well-reasoned, I urge you to read her entire statement.
The Jerusalem Post recently published an article reporting that some organizations are opposed to my receiving the Adorno Prize, an award given every three years to someone who works in the tradition of critical theory broadly construed. The accusations against me are that I support Hamas and Hezbollah (which is not true) that I support BDS (partially true), and that I am anti-Semitic (patently false). Perhaps I should not be as surprised as I am that those who oppose my receiving the Adorno Prize would seek recourse to such scurrilous and unfounded charges to make their point. I am a scholar who gained an introduction to philosophy through Jewish thought, and I understand myself as defending and continuing a Jewish ethical tradition that includes figures such as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. I received a Jewish education in Cleveland, Ohio at The Temple under the tutelage of Rabbi Daniel Silver where I developed strong ethical views on the basis of Jewish philosophical thought. I learned, and came to accept, that we are called upon by others, and by ourselves, to respond to suffering and to call for its alleviation. But to do this, we have to hear the call, find the resources by which to respond, and sometimes suffer the consequences for speaking out as we do. I was taught at every step in my Jewish education that it is not acceptable to stay silent in the face of injustice. Such an injunction is a difficult one, since it does not tell us exactly when and how to speak, or how to speak in a way that does not produce a new injustice, or how to speak in a way that will be heard and registered in the right way. My actual position is not heard by these detractors, and perhaps that should not surprise me, since their tactic is to destroy the conditions of audibility.
For my own part, I believe in co-existence and a two-state solution. In 2008, I lamented the return of Netanyahu to power in Israel, as I feared that his settlements policy would marginalize reasonable voices on all sides, and make a peaceful solution an ever-diminishing prospect. I condemn intolerance, hateful rhetoric, and violence. I do not endorse all of Judith Butler’s positions, but I emphatically support her right of self-expression and applaud the decision of Frankfurt to award her the Adorno Prize.
When I worked for Carroll & Graf Publishers from 2000-2007 I used to travel 2-3 times a year to the Bay Area for sales conference with our parent company Avalon Publishing Group. Though Avalon was based in Berkeley, I learned from my senior colleague Herman Graf that it was far more interesting to stay in San Francisco, and drive over the Bay Bridge to the East Bay in the morning for our meetings. Years earlier Herman–who I recently helped fete to mark his 51 years in publishing–had years before I joined the company staked out a motel that suited his needs perfectly, and mine too once I became semi-frequent on the Jet Blue flights from JFK to SFO.
This establishment was the Royal Pacific Motor Inn, and I see from the Web that it’s still thriving. The Royal Pacific had everything we wanted–perfectly adequate and clean motel rooms; free guest parking, which Herman appreciated since he was the one of us who rented a car (never mind that driving with him was often a hilarious if not nerve-wracking adventure); and great restaurants and nightlife all around us in the Chinatown/North Beach neighborhood. The motels current reviews on yelp.com make clear that, depending on your personal preferences, it can be an ideal and reasonably priced place to stay when you’re in the Bay Area.
The nearby streets offered innumerable Italian and Chinese restaurants (I still recall and savor the fresh whole Dungeness crab cooked Szechuan-style I ate one night at a Chinese place less than a 100 steps from the motel); coffee bars; City Lights Bookstore and Black Oak Books; and Tosca Cafe, an after-hours bar and hang-out that was a pleasant cave-like retreat from the busy sidewalks outside. Its soft lighting showed red booths, eye-catching murals on dark walls, and a long bar to stand at or park a stool in front of. Back in the day, Enrico Caruso frequented Tosca, so the excellent jukebox sported not only rock n’ roll, but opera. Whatever the musical genre, it was never up too loud. There was also a back room with a pool table, where I once shot a game or two with astronomer and author Timothy Ferris. Over the years Tosca’s clientele has been reported to include Sam Shepard, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Francis Ford Coppola, who with Tosca’s owner Jeannette Etheredge, started an initiative for homeless denizens of North Beach, according to C.W. Nevius of the San Francisco Chronicle. Like such legendary watering holes as Greenwich Village’s White Horse Tavern, remembered fondly in Pete Hamill’s memoir, A Drinking Life, and Elaine’s Restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Tosca always seemed like a place that didn’t try to do too much for its customers, but what it did do, it did very well.
These recollections of the Royal Pacific, North Beach, and Tosca are prompted by a column by reporter Nevius in last Saturday’s Chronicle. He reports that Toscas’s landlord, a strip club owner named Roger Forbes, is seeking a substantial rent increase that Etheredge says she she simply cannot afford to pay. If the two are unable to reach a settlement, Tosca may be evicted. Etheredge laments the situation, telling Nevius, “Look at the place. It’s out of an Edward Hopper painting.” Like the late Elaine Kaufman of Elaine’s, who was known to sometimes treat customers with disdain, Etheredge is also no shrinking violet. Nevius writes,
Well, maybe not Roger Forbes. For his part, Nevius adds,
Urban homogenization is increasing everywhere these days, whether banks and chain drugstores taking over the commercial blocks on the upper west side of Manhattan, or North Beach submitting to the siren song of tourist-friendly peep shows. As a New Yorker who’s seen favorite businesses lose their lease or disappear overnight (farewell Calcutta Cafe on Broadway at 104th St.), I hope Tosca can hang on. After reading about Tosca’s troubles, I called Herman Graf to let him know and share some old North Beach memories. He reminded me that during sales conference week, other Avalon Publishing Group clients, such as Morgan Entrekin of Grove Atlantic, would end up at Tosca in the wee hours, one of the very best times to hang out there. To get a sense of the bar’s splendid interior and rich history, I urge you to view the rest of photographer Carlos Avila Gonzalez’s excellent slideshow and read Nevius’s entire column via this link.
When I look at the dashboard for this website I feel as I’ve lifted the hood of a car and am peering in at all the belts and fans and cables. The difference is that just two months shy of a year since I started The Great Gray Bridge, I pretty much know what’s going on under its hood, whereas with an automobile I never will. One thing the dashboard shows at a glance is how many posts I’ve published, counting from the very first one I put up October 30th last year. As you can see from the screenshot pasted in below, a handy counter shows that the next post I put up–this post, in fact–will be my 300th since the blog’s inception. 
While I concede that the recognition of benchmarks like this one is only as important as we make them, I want to pause a few moments over this milestone. In ten months as a (near) daily blogger, what have I learned?
1) I now know for sure that by last fall–nearly three years after I had stopped working as an editorial director for a major publishing house–I missed having a list of new books to acquire, edit, package, and assemble for each new publishing season. I wanted something to curate, a garden of words and enthusiasms to plant, tend, and share. This blog has allowed my curatorial instinct to bloom again.
2) I know for sure that I am fortunate to have a loyal cadre of readers who, over the past several months on average, number between 850-1100 unique visitors to the site every day. I also know that my readers–you–average three pages viewed on the site during each visit. I am very grateful for this attention to what I write and post and pledge to keep writing and posting with the frequency and variety that I have done for the past ten months, hopeful that the time spent here you regard as well-rewarded.
3) I see from the second screenshot shown here that the categories forming the super-structure of the site, with each new post being assigned one or more categories under such rubrics as Art, Film, Photography, Design; Books & Writing; Canada; Media; Music, Bands & Radio; Publishing & Bookselling; and Urban Life, New York City & Bicycling, to name only a handful of the fifteen total–form a telling cross-section of my interests and what I’m covering. The bookish buckets, Books & Writing and Publishing & Bookselling, combine to comprise two of the most heavily populated categories, with 138 and 55 posts respectively, while News, Politics & History clocks in at 101 (sure to keep growing as the fall political campaign heats up). Meantime, my musical mission is highlighted by the 68 posts falling under Music, Bands & Radio, with many of those overlapping with the 50 I’ve assigned under the category, “Canada,” whose indie music scene
I follow closely, as fan and blogger.
I’ve recently added a couple new categories–Sports and Food & Spirits, and tacked Bicycling on to the Urban Life, NYC category, as I had earlier omitted it. Considering that I bike approximately 40 miles per week in the city, during which I get some of my best blogging ideas and have adventures I later write about, I’m going to be blogging about biking from time to time, especially as biking becomes a civic and political issue in Gotham, with the BikeShare program due to start in 2013.
Another recent addition is the page at the top of the site called PT–Personal, a biographical sketch that is a counterpart to PT–Professional. In the former I chronicle my personal history from teenage years in Cleveland to the point at which I became a bookseller and editor, covered in the latter page. I will also soon be creating a page called PT–Photographs, where I’ll be posting pictures relevant to my personal history and pursuits.
Whether this is your first time on my site, or if you’re a frequent visitor, thanks for dropping by and spending time here. Please feel free to comment and share, or just to poke around and read. You needn’t leave any footprint at all, as I know that many readers prefer not to.
I want to close this 300th post by saying that in the build-up to what will be the one-year anniversary of the site in October, I will also be marking the 80th anniversary of the opening of the George Washington Bridge, aka The Great Gray Bridge, which I’ve previewed in this post. I invite you to check back again soon.