LIVING HISTORY AT GROUND ZERO

Suzanne Fields 


New York -- New York, New York, a
wonderful town. (The Bronx is up, and the
Battery's down.)
Sometimes derided in what New Yorkers call
"flyover country," Gotham is nevertheless a
microcosm of America with its many
immigrant and ethnic cultures, the work of
immigrants who first clung together in self-
made ghettos with shops, stores and
restaurants to recall the places left behind.
When these immigrants make enough money,
they usually move out to more inclusive
neighborhoods.
New York was built by legal immigrants. At
Ellis Island, where more than 12 million
immigrants made their first stop in America
between 1892 and 1954, a tour guide tells the
story -- perhaps apocryphal, but it could be
true -- about an arriving immigrant who wore
a signboard because he spoke no English,
saying he wanted to go to Houston, meaning
the street on the Lower East Side, then a
Jewish neighborhood. He was by mistake put
on a train to Houston, Texas -- where he
settled and struck oil.
These were the days and years of happier
immigration. There was no chaos on the
border, few questions about who was legal
and who was not. It was difficult for those
immigrants to get here and difficult to go back.
Everyone came to stay, climb into the melting
pot and become an American. New York is a
city in constant change, swinging between the
pride of e pluribus unum -- "out of many, one"
-- and the discomfort that accompanies
multicultural and economic differences. The
roiling debate over illegal immigration
sometimes leads us to forget that we are all
immigrants. Ronald Reagan once remarked that
America is the only country in the world
where a new citizen is as American as a
citizen descended from a forebear who arrived
two or three centuries ago.
But New York is also different from the rest of
America, with its sophisticated culture in
avant-garde art galleries, museums, expensive
couturiers, gourmet restaurants and an
abundance of upscale organic, vegan and
gluten-free markets to suit the precious and
the trendy. On the upper reaches of income,
the 1-percenters are status-conscious,
acquisitive consumers who can afford almost
any luxury the city offers.
New York is the melting pot that never quite
melts, with some of the poorest driven by
hope of "moving on up," to achieve and
become rich in the way of the millions who
did it before, and with a shrinking middle class
of young people moving away when they want
to start families because they can't afford
Manhattan rents.
What draws New Yorkers together today is the
memory of Sept. 11, 2001, and the rebuilt
ground zero. The new National September 11
Memorial Museum has opened next to the
Freedom Tower, rising from the ashes like the
mythical Phoenix, testifying to the defiance of
an obscene Islamist attempt to humble and
humiliate.
The sacred and the secular are mixed at the
museum at ground zero, documenting both
what was lost and the spirit of what survives.
The lost get personalities in portraits with
touching detail that rises above grim statistics.
Cherished artifacts, a pair of shoes, a pair of
eyeglasses, a fireman's helmet, a medal, bring
life to democracy's Valley of the Kings. Grief
remains palpable in the descent into dark
reflection, a pilgrimage warmed by hope of
never again. A dramatic abstract sculpture
created by the force of impact when one of the
airplanes crashed into the North Tower
between floors 93 and 99, agitates the
imagination with pity and fear, steel twisted in
agony and loss.
The slurry wall, 64 feet of poured concrete
that kept out the Hudson River, survives, a
monolith preserved as though an
archaeological remnant of an ancient
civilization. It's a triumph of engineering, an
emblem of the human spirit, cracked but
unbowed. A surveillance video showing the
hijackers going through airport security on the
fateful morning unsettles but demands
attention. Some critics have railed against the
use of the word "jihad" in the museum's
narrative about 9/11, but the word is both
reminder and touchstone for diligence in the
continuing pursuit of evil men who are
determined to kill us.
This week, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder
warned that Islamist fighters from Europe and
the United States who went to fight in Syria
have learned new technology from bomb-
makers in Yemen, and some have been sent
home with an assignment to do harm.
The Memorial Museum reminds New Yorkers
and the rest of us to love thy neighbor, but
beware of thy enemies. Two granite basins of
rippling water fill the footprints of the
destroyed twin towers, tears of grief and
mourning -- and of renewal and the will to
fight back.