The city we were, the city we are
Twenty years is a very long time. There are now 3,716 NYPD officers remaining who were on the job on 9/11, or just more than 10% of the department, down from just under 50% in 2012. There are about 2,100 firefighters remaining who were on the job on 9/11, or just less than 20%.
The drop-off may be even steeper for the city as a whole. Eight years ago, the Department of Planning told me that nearly half of New Yorkers then hadn’t been here on 9/11. About 2 million people had arrived here from other places and a million more had been born here, while 650,000 New Yorkers had died.
Today, the number isn’t knowable, says Dr. Arun Peter Lobo, the city’s chief demographer. Over 20 years, 5.4 million people arrived here, 2.3 million kids were born here, and 1.1 million New Yorkers died. That would tally up to 8.8 million people, or the entire population of New York City, but of course lots of the new arrivals and births didn’t stay here, and some of those who left eventually moved back.
“These aren’t discrete values you can add and subtract from the overall 2001 population,” Lobo stresses, though “it gives you a sense of the population churn. Over five or maybe 10 years you can do that sort of math, but over a two-decade period it becomes problematic ... What you can say is that the city is in a very different place in terms of its population.”
That’s true every 20 years, as the inflow of newcomers rejuvenates and renews New York even as that means the city is endlessly struggling to solve the same problems and relearn the same lessons.
Last year, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner certified 65,712 deaths, up from just over 30,000 in each of the previous two years. At its peak last April, the coronavirus killed 5,319 New Yorkers in a single week and hospitalized nearly 10,000 more, many of whom later died. To date, it’s killed 33,968 people here — more people than have been murdered since Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor, including the 2,753 people murdered on 9/11.
As it happens, there was an opinion column in the Friday print edition of the Daily News by the brother of a man who succumbed to lung cancer in June, nearly 20 years after he’d volunteered to go to the pile at Ground Zero as a National Guardsman and was ordered not to wear a mask to avoid frightening the public. That was in the days just after the towers fell, when we were still hoping to find survivors and Mayor Giuliani was assuring New Yorkers that “the air is safe as far as we can tell.”
Facing that column was one attacking Mayor de Blasio for standing by his plan to require city workers who’d worked remotely until now to return to their offices on Monday, when the school year begins (and with no remote option this year) despite the spread of the delta variant since those plans were announced and even as private employers have pushed back their own office return dates. Yet the city, wrote the head of New York’s largest municipal union, is bringing workers back into offices that haven’t been checked to ensure safe working conditions and without abiding by the Centers for Disease
Control’s social-distancing guidelines.
There are huge differences between the two decisions. Giuliani has never apologized for his assurances that were initially offered in the great uncertainty of the days and weeks after an act of war but that later proved to be terribly, fatally wrong. De Blasio in my view is taking a sensible, measured risk in bringing office workers back after a year-and-ahalf, as we know much more about the coronavirus now and as Manhattan’s offices remain ominously hollowed out, threatening the city’s economic recovery.
But squint, and you can see how two very different mayors in very different moments both proved willing to roll the dice with what city workers are breathing to send a broader message that New York would be returning to business as usual after (or today perhaps amid) a catastrophe.
The mantra after 9/11 was “never forget,” but that admonition is itself a concession to the fact that people do forget and to the fact that places change as much as the people who make them up over the course of 20 years, which is a very long time.