posted 09-04-2002 02:09 PM         

NEW YORK - I would not be at ground zero if my boss hadn't sent me.

And I'm finding it hard to keep my mouth shut as day-trippers pose for snapshots in front of the 70-foot pit like Bermuda-shorted vacationers at the Grand Canyon: "Gotta get your head and the hole in the same shot, honey," one says.

What's next, souvenirs that read "My folks went to the site of the single worst tragedy in U.S. history and all I got was this lousy T-shirt"?

A few of the people here tell me they came because tennis at the U.S. Open was rained out. Might as well not make the day a total loss, right? I mean, it's wet, the Williams sisters aren't showing off their daring outfits over in Queens, so why not get in a little tomb-gazing, then maybe hunt down one of those nice wrap sandwiches?

I am probably being unreasonable about this. But if I could, I'd say, No talking, no pictures, no smiling, no lunch. Just be here and let it eat you. This is an abyss, not a scenic overlook. Be haunted and cry.

It's unfair of me, because a lot of people who are here crowding the concrete barrier and looking down came only to witness, maybe after having forced themselves to show up, as I did.

I thought 50 weeks would be enough time. But my reaction is too emotional, too complicated. I spent my wedding night here, at the Vista Hotel, which was damaged in the 1993 attack, then rebuilt as the Marriott Hotel, which is now air.

I had been in the World Trade Center dozens of times, having been born and raised in this city. My brother's apartment is four blocks away. And my friend Billy died here, along with nearly 3,000 others.

"Where do you winter?" a snobby undergraduate once asked Billy in college.

"Same place I summer: Brooklyn," he snapped back, typically quick and smart-alecky. I'd heard he had been considering leaving Cantor Fitzgerald. What an awful thing to know.

The site is ringed with stadium lights, switched on even during the day for the construction workers who are scurrying around the muddy bottom in yellow raincoats.

A concert of piercing monotones rises from the depths as trucks back up. It sounds like an orchestra that can play only one note. Because rainwater has made the place into a lake, the trucks move like slow ships, leaving wakes as they go.

"It looks sort of sanitized now," visitor Martin Harrell, a Philadelphia lawyer for the Environmental Protection Agency, says as he peers down. "I think people expect it to look like it did a year ago on the news." With the debris gone, workers are already rebuilding part of the site as a PATH train right-of-way to New Jersey, a bitter project for some victims' relatives.

Developers want the place to become a train hub with offices and apartment buildings. Relatives see the site as a quiet memorial - as do many other people. In a poll, around 4,000 New Yorkers rejected six proposed plans that included the construction of big office buildings on the spot. They wanted more cemetery, less commerce.

They may well lose on this one. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the 16-acre site, has decreed that it needs to recoup the 11 million square feet of office space it possessed at the close of business on Sept. 10, 2001.

What I find amazing is that the Port Authority was headquartered in the World Trade Center. Its employees died here. And yet it's vigorously bottom-lining this thing. Just business, nothing personal.

Many of the people who were lost in the attack might have actually agreed. Along with cops and firefighters, quite a few were money types, after all. But their relatives have other ideas.

Victims' families are afraid to lose the footprints of the buildings - not just the twin towers' but those of the Marriott and other buildings as well.

The footprints are like the chalk outlines of homicide victims, all that's left of what burned and buckled. The land within the lines is, for many Americans, sacred ground.

They're not dismantling the Alamo for condos, or reengineering the Pearl Harbor Memorial to throw in a Sea World. Disney isn't doing an Auschwitz theme park.

So why are they thinking of messing with this? I'm telling you, if we can't get this right - if we can't stop thinking about the bucks for a minute and just get this one thing right - then who, really, are we?

Around the site, a few surviving buildings are covered with dark netting to prevent unstable pieces from hitting anyone. The buildings look like tall mourners draped in black crepe. One of them has developed a mysterious mold growing inside, born of the ashes and toxins spewed on the 11th.

As though sickened by events, the tower now sits empty and ailing. If buildings can have footprints, can they have souls as well?

The rain falls harder. "These people today are only tourists," says Eddie Lang, visiting from Vancouver. "There's no emotional feel here, really." He is wrong.

I open my umbrella and find myself walking away, not even thinking about it. Just moving out, with no last glance and no turning around.

Maybe another reporter would have stayed longer. The newspaper should have sent him or her.

posted 09-04-2002 02:57 PM         

I feel that America needs to move on. Never forget, but move on. JMO