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Making Light
Language, fraud, folly, history, truth, and knitting.

Thursday, September 20, 2001 ..

National Mental Health Association reports identity theft Someone was bound to try to take advantage of the situation here. Turns out it's the Scientologists, who've managed to send in 759! "volunteer ministers" under the guise of providing mental health counseling to stressed-out New Yorkers. This would be more believable if Scientology didn't have a long history of being explicitly at war with standard psychiatric practice. Short but accurate cartoon version: Their idea of help and therapy consists of becoming a Scientologist, learning about clams and volcanos, and giving them all your money forever.

Their good faith would also be more believable if they hadn't set themselves up as the NMHA, National Mental Health Assistance, which bears rather too much resemblance to the respectable old NMHA, National Mental Health Association.

According to the Sacramento Bee http://www.sacbee.com/news/calreport/data/N2001-09-17-2015-0.html , this scam was spotted after the ever-vigilant Fox News aired the fake NMHA's toll-free phone number for about two hours last week, listing it as a number to call for people seeking mental health counseling.

The real NMHA is naturally upset about this, and worried about people who fall into the Scientologists' hands during a period of temporary vulnerability.

http://www.nmha.org/newsroom/system/news.vw.cfm?do=vw&rid=341 Wednesday, September 19, 2001 Fragility There's so much to grieve for that your heart doesn't know where to start. All over the city you see flyers put up by the friends and relatives of the missing, with snapshots and descriptions and a number to call if you have any information. Poor souls. If they're still hoping, it's only because they can't bear to stop. Nobody's come alive out of the rubble since Wednesday last. Yesterday the hospitals announced that all the patients in their care have been identified and accounted for. The people who haven't come home yet aren't coming home ever, and there are five or six thousand of them.

Where the flyers are especially thick, at places like Bellevue Hospital and Union Square, people have been leaving votive candles burning, acknowledging that the flyers have become memorials. The faces of the dead are everywhere you look.

If you can stand to look at it, here's an amazingly detailed image of the bottom end of Manhattan Island as seen from space.

I keep having these moments of grief for the little things. A week ago the gardens of Battery Park City were green and elegant, spilling over with late flowers and foliage plants. All that will be gone now -- buried under rubble or a dense mulch of paper and pulverized concrete, or trodden into bare ground again by the rescue workers and their machinery. It's such a little thing, only plants after all; but they were beautiful. I also wonder about all the public art along the BPC esplanade -- charming, witty stuff, a happy addition to the city.

Nobody's reporting on its condition -- and why should they, with so many other important stories to report? -- but I hate to think of it being lost.

The World Trade Center was not especially lovable on a day-to-day basis.

It was grand, no denying that; but so abstract. I was always much fonder of the World Financial Center and Battery Park City. I have yet to find a picture of my favorite view of Ground Zero Before, looking south as you drove down the West Side Highway late in the day. The massed WTC/WFC/BPC buildings were a complex shimmering mass, looking for all the world like an updated Frank R. Paul illustration of The City of the Future. http://www.frankwu.com/Paul-1.5A.html Another thing I can't find a picture of is the WFC's indoor signage.

Some of it will still be there in the buildings that are still standing, but many pieces will have been lost when the gerbil tubes collapsed.

These were the identification signs for the different parts of the complex, and they weren't small. They were made of multicolored true enamel on brushed brass. The enamelling consisted of elaborate abstract square designs like quilt blocks on acid. I think there was a different design for every building in the complex. The signs were like big hunks of jewelry, and I coveted them.

You may already have seen pictures of the wreckage of the Winter Garden, but if you don't know what it was, you don't know what was lost. I've put together some pictures: one page of the way it was before [300K]
[100K] and one page of pictures from the last week [356K]
[132K ] The Winter Garden was one of my favorite, favorite places. It was a marvellous piece of public space, a rounded glassed-in atrium with the best set of stairs in the New World. They were made out of some kind of highly polished red stone, and curved in a half-circle to match the curved front and back of the building. They made a long shallow descent to a circular polished stone area, as though they were the seats in an amphitheatre. The rest of the Winter Garden was a high-ceilinged atrium, all paned glass like a fancy Victorian conservatory, and the west wall overlooking the Hudson was windows from top to bottom. In the central area were two rows of tall palm trees in square planters.

I'm not conveying what a pleasant, friendly space it was. I first wandered into it some years ago when we were giving an out-of-town friend a tour of the south end of the island. We hadn't really gotten a good look at Battery Park City (then only about half-built) and the new WFC, so the Winter Garden came as a complete surprise: quiet, pleasant, with places to sit down, and decent public restrooms. There was a Brian Eno sound installation running, and a free concert that night.

That's one of the things about New York City. Sometimes it's impossible, intractable, insanely frustrating, running counter to the grain of anything you try to do. Other times it's full of light and grace, magical coincidences happen, and marvels pop up unexpectedly all over the place. The Winter Garden was the city wearing one of its happiest faces.

From the photos I've seen, it looks like the east end of it was smashed by falling debris. I saw once and couldn't find again a photo of firemen bringing water up from the river in hoses that ran between the palm trees. I can't tell from the satellite photo what's happened to the rest of it. For a while I thought it had been bulldozed. I don't know.

It hurts to look at pictures of rubble and remember coming into it from the gerbil tube around sunset, with the light coming through the glass-paned wall along the river and the sky visible through the arched glass ceiling. For a long time they had an elaborate full-size model of da Vinci's flying machine hanging where it was a bit above eye level as you came in, and rose higher and higher above you as you passed under it on your way down the stairs. It was beautiful. It was why we have civilization.

Park Slope on the day. And an artifact.

As the crow flies, we're not terribly far from lower Manhattan. All that long Tuesday, people were standing out on the sidewalks, talking to each other and staring at the plume of smoke. Nobody wanted to be alone. I asked some of the geezers on our block if this was what it was like when Pearl Harbor got bombed. They said no, this was worse.

The light was flat and strange, filtered through the plume of smoke. All day you could hear emergency vehicles coming and going in all directions, and overhead the swooshing of fighter jets on patrol. Other than that it was oddly quiet.

(The first fighter jet I saw terrified me. When I saw it make a tight turn and circle round toward the south end of Manhattan I was sure it was another kamikaze, and my knees buckled. Then it came circling back out of the smoke plume with a tremendous whoosh and I knew it was one of ours. A little while later I realized I was listening to them for reassurance: guardian angels. At night they're lit up like Christmas trees: Hi! Nothing stealthy about us!) As the day ran down people started turning up at my apartment, so around sunset I went out to pick up refreshments. Overhead the smoke plume was turning pinkish-gold. You could see papers fluttering down through it as they rained out of the cooling smoke. All those collapsed buildings were full of office files. The disaster area is covered with a thick slush of documents. (I note in passing the loss of those files. Huge amounts of information lost.)

When I reached the corner of my block I looked down. Lying on the sidewalk was a single page from a paperback book, burned black around its edges. I picked it up. The running head said A SEASON IN HELL.

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