The United Artists Battery Park Theaters -- with 16 screens, it is, I think, the newest multiplex in Manhattan -- hosted much of the festival, certainly most of the public screenings. A few floors up from the also-new Embassy Suites Hotel, the lobbies (the screens are spread across several floors) overlook Ground Zero, as you can see in my report from last year's festival.
The decontamination center you see in one of last year's photos is now a public parking lot, and a much needed one in that particularly car-unfriendly part of Manhattan (lots that were under the World Trade Center are, of course, gone). The temporary police station that was across the street from the decon tent is now a baseball field with an invitingly green outfield and a well-maintained diamond. Spaces that were once outposts of disaster have been reclaimed by the residents for their own use.
The Pit, the WTC site itself -- the immediate area where the towers stood -- now looks like an unremarkable, if very large, construction site, one extending several stories under the street level. And the neighborhood is positively overrun with men in heavy, steel-toe boots and orange or yellow hardhats -- they're in the delis in the morning getting coffee, in the delis in the afternoon buying sandwiches, and I suppose at points in between working on the construction cranes or dump trucks that seem to be everywhere.
But there is still an amazing amount of damage to remind one of what happened. On the north side of the WTC site, one building still has gaping holes in it. They're squared off, not quite as ragged as they surely once were, but here's an enormous office building that's been exposed to the elements for two years. Will it ever be habitable again?
And that building has nothing on the Deutsche Bank Tower at 130 Liberty Street, on the south side of the WTC site. This 40-story building -- which would be a skyscraper in most other cities, and is just another office building in New York -- has been shrouded like this since just after 9/11. Where do you even find a shroud that big? (The New York Post calls it "downtown's unintended mourning cape.") The building has been invaded by a disgusting fungus that no one's ever even seen before, and now there's a huge argument going on over whether the building can be saved or whether it should just be demolished. It's an insurance nightmare, and it's making the controversy over who controls the rebuilding of Ground Zero all the more bitter. Before 9/11, the Deutsche Bank Tower was blocked from view from the north by the towers -- now, with the towers gone, you can see this shroud all the way up Fifth Avenue up into the 30s, miles away. It's a constant literal black spot on the city.
It's not only big corporations that have been driven out of their homes. All the little support businesses that tens of thousands of office workers used -- dry cleaners, shoe shine shops, newsstands, delis, restaurants -- are gone, too. This cafe was turned into some sort of field medical center in the days after 9/11, it seems. The paramedics are gone, and so is everyone else still. There are entire square blocks (the Deutsche Bank Tower occupies an entire block itself) that are still boarded up, still empty, with no indication of when they might ever return. They'll probably get bulldozed eventually, too.
Ground Zero is probably now one of New York City's prime tourist attractions. Hawkers sell t-shirts and "day of terror" souvenirs. People stand before the temporary memorials, up high on the fences that surround the WTC site, that list the names of the dead. They leave flowers, and they're still leaving notes of thanks and prayers and well wishes.
But mostly, charter buses come and pour tourists out onto sidewalk, and they grip the chain-link fence and stare into the Pit and speculate amongst themselves -- in the Midwest or Southern accents that tell you they weren't here that day, that they've probably never even been to New York before, that after this they're gonna go see The Lion King and then maybe the Empire State Building, that this is just one stop on their sightseeing schedule -- about where the towers were and where the planes hit and wow they must have been big buildings. And you want to grab them and shake them and tell them they have no idea, they can't imagine the smell or the smoke or the dust or how huge that pile of twisted steel was or what it was like to see policemen crying. But you don't. And then they turn around and put the Pit behind them and smile while someone else takes their picture.
