Today, half of Bryce’s block is cordoned off by a plywood wall, and two giant lamps illuminate the site of the crash throughout the night, as if it was a football game. As November ran into December, Bryce and most of the other Rockaway citizens who live adjacent to the plywood perimeter decided they would leave their yards dark this year. “It’s their way of showing respect,” he says. Flags are the only decorations they left up. And besides, this winter “we don’t have that same good feeling that we had in other years.”
After the accidents, anthrax, and calculated murder that dominated New York City from Sepetmber through December, it was inevitable that Christmas here would be different. On the streets, the American flag, memorials to the dead and symbols of Christmas have all become intertwined. The motifs from the year’s disasters are still visible: melted metal beams in buildings, fire trucks parked on street corners, the plywood used for blocking off crash sites and creating memorial signs. But now some of the defiant flags have turned into Christmas lights patterned to imitate the Old Glory. The tree at Rockefeller Center is red white and blue. The candles of mourning are indistinguishable from the candles of Christmas. From one end of the city to the other, this is a holiday season borne out of four months of assault.
Take Rockaway, which had already lost some 40 citizens to the September 11 attacks before the November crash. Away from the site, it’s a red, white and blue Christmas. Yard signs feature three wise men on one side, and the American flag on the other. Santa stands on a rooftop, American flag in hand, and next door a flag as big as the red sports car in the driveway hangs over the house. Rockaway doesn’t look like a town enamored with a vague idea of peace on earth; it looks like a town in mourning but still defiant.
Flight 587 was bound for the Dominican Republic, and, a borough away, the Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights in Manhattan is still mourning the plane’s passengers. Washington Heights is a dramatically different community ethnically and economically from Rockaway, and it is dominated by apartment buildings rather than suburban houses. But Christmas decorations are strikingly similar on these opposite sides of New York. In Washington Heights, patriotic lights twinkle on fire escapes, and American flags dangle below them. A flag made from painted carnations stands at the local Dominican community center. Flowers of mourning lay on the sidewalks outside the community center and the plywood perimeter in Rockaway, though evergreen branches have beeen mixed in with flowers in Washington Heights.
Downtown, the memorial areas surrounding the World Trade Center, filled with pictures, mass cards, and other mementos, now share space with Christmas trees. Workers have attached Christmas lights to some parts of Ground Zero’s plywood perimeter walls. But these things are still dwarfed by the visible devastation at 6 World Trade Center, the only stricken trade center building still partly standing. WTC 6 is a burnt out husk, nauseating to look at. And the Christmas bulbs can’t compare to the gigantic overhead lights, which illuminate the dust kicked up in the salvaging so that it is visible for miles.
But in this saddest and most un-Christmaslike zone, some people salvage a sort of optimism about the holiday. Charles Womack, a sanitation worker, and sanitation police officer Jack Jefferson, both 57, work the night shift at Ground Zero. The two pray together every evening before coming to the site, and will stop again at any time during the night to pray with a passerby or a fellow worker. Jefferson talks about the brotherly and sisterly love that exists between everybody working at the site, and most everyone who visits. “I’ve never seen this kind of unity in New York,” he says. “You’re aware of the sadness. It makes you more thankful to be alive.”
“We see God because people are crying to God,” says Womack.
A few miles north, New York’s Christmas almost got another crushing blow on Tuesday, when a fire started in the gift shop of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the nation’s largest gothic cathedral. The flames quickly rose into a 40-foot blaze which, until firemen (who pulled up in engines with wreaths on the grill and flags on the back) got it under control, threatened to light the cathedral’s ceiling and spread throughout the building.
Neighbors wept as they watched flames lick at the cathedral walls, probably in part because the building has been an integral part of the city’s mourning since September 11. Jere Farrah, a St. John’s official, remembers hundreds of people arriving on September 11 to visit the cathedral’s Memorial Bay. Memorial Bay features a metal cross constructed from salvaged material taken from a burnt-out building. It was dedicated to fallen firemen in 1966. “Throughout the immediate aftermath of 9-11, we were regularly visited by firemen in uniform either on their way to or back from work, who would stop to pray or reflect at Memorial Bay,” says Farrah. New Yorkers left flowers, candles and children’s drawings on the memorial. Beginning on the night of the 11th, St. John’s held a series of sunset candle-light vigils that sometimes drew thousands. As the months wore on, St. John’s was home to memorial services for firemen and decimated World Trade Center companies, as well as dozens of victims’ funerals. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Sen. Hillary Clinton all came to St. John’s to mourn.
At St. John’s, all efforts now are focused on trying to make the cathedral available for Christmas Eve Eucharist. Employees are furiously washing and vacuuming away the soot that the expected 5,000 attendees might otherwise kick up. The giant organ will not be used for fear that the pipes will blow more ash into the air. Still, the smell of soot will hang over the event, soaking into churchgoers’ hair and clothes. And everyone will be looking at the black marks around the enormous windows that have now been boarded up with plywood.
Mark Sisk, New York’s Episcopal Bishop, who is in the midst of writing the central sermon for Christmas Eve. “It is inevitable,” says Sisk, “that people will, as I will, contrast the sweet and beautiful smell of the incense with the smell of the smoke.” If a whiff of soot unnerves the audience, then that’s okay by Sisk. “To see the great edifices destroyed like the Twin Towers, or seriously threatened, as our own cathedral has been, is very painful,” he says. “On the other hand, it is a fundamental truth of life. Our lives are fragile.” No one knows that more than December’s New Yorkers.
