Targeted again? Sept. 11 neighborhood shaken by attack
NEW YORK — On his way to work each morning, Antonio Collac stops to light a candle at St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, a stone-columned sanctuary two blocks from lower Manhattan’s ground zero.
There, beneath a vaulted roof that was pierced by the landing gear from one of the jets that felled the World Trade Center, and before the altar where firefighters laid the broken body of Mychal Judge — the chaplain often counted as Sept. 11’s first victim — the tragedy of that morning 16 autumns ago is anything but abstract. Collac, a designer who has worked in the neighborhood for many years, says he, too, is a vessel for memories of that day.
But on Wednesday morning, Collac came to offer a new prayer — this one for the eight people killed and 12 seriously injured when terror again targeted lower Manhattan the day before, again just a few blocks away. The attack served as a reminder, he said, for a neighborhood that has been transformed by construction and washed over by a tide of tourism in the years since 9/11. For all the area’s success in pushing to remake itself, people here acknowledge that the memories of its past still help shape their state of mind.
“You know, this area is Target A. We know. Everybody knows,” Collac said, pausing at the bot- tom of the church steps. “But there is nothing we can do, my friend. We have to continue and the only thing we can do is pray.”
It is not clear whether Sayfullo Saipov, a 29-year-old immigrant from Uzbekistan who mowed down bikers and pedestrians Tuesday with a rented pickup truck, knew just how close he was to the site of the 2001 terror attack. When his truck struck a school bus and came to a halt, just five short blocks separated him the crowds that flock to the 9/11 Memorial. On Wednesday morning, the chop from the police helicopters deployed to keep watch over the new terror site overwhelmed the sound of the waterfalls that continuously fill the memorial’s reflection pools.
But for many of the thousands who live, work and study in this neighborhood, the notion that it might again find itself in the crosshairs of a terrorist attack was hardly surprising.
Most days, caught up in their rush from the subways to the area’s new condominiums and office towers, they said it is easy to forget what seem like existential worries. Then, they walk around the corner and gaze up at the new Freedom Tower and remember that for all the neighborhood’s new wealth and cosmopolitan energy, for much of the rest of the world it remains defined by what came before. This week’s attack, if anything, is just a fresh, albeit horrifying, confirmation.
Postal worker Lorraine Bell took a cigarette break at the base of the glassy new 7 World Trade Center tower, in a triangular pocket park dedicated to those who survived 9/11. In September 2001, Bell said, she was working at a union office about 2 miles away when a TV began showing images of the smoke billowing from the Trade Center. She rushed out to a supermarket and headed downtown, handing out bottles of water to those stumbling out of the complex, covered head to toe in white soot.
Now, with a new job in this neighborhood, she marvels at what it has become.
“They did almost a 360 degree turn,” she said.
But that has not stopped Bell from worrying that some of the grime that gathers on the ground here is not from construction, but residue of ash from the 2001 attack, even around the newest buildings. Her discomfort with the neighborhood is not unique, she said.
“People go along every day like its normal,” she said. “But do you know there are lots of people who don’t want to work down here?”
Samantha Aponte, 19, is too young to remember 9/11, but she, too, knows that feeling. Long before this week’s attack, she said, she had spent years in school watching documentaries about the 2001 attack and hearing about it from those who went through it. When she was admitted last year to the Borough of Manhattan Community College, a commuter school with more than 27,000 students that sits between the memorial site and the location of this week’s attack, she told her mother she felt uncomfortable with the idea.
On Wednesday, when just seven of the 21 students enrolled in her math class showed up for the lecture, it occurred to her that she may not be alone in her doubts.
“I feel as though this is a targeted place,” Aponte said.