Brooklyn After the Crash

In the second week after the collapse of the World Trade Center, downtown Brooklyn?on the surface at least?looked like it was getting back to normal. Lawyers lugged huge black briefcases up courthouse steps. Young men followed them, taking one last look up at the sky before going in to cop a plea. Cops jawed with other civil servants about various horrors. People lined up at coffee trucks run by young Arabs.

Then you stop and look closer at all of the faces. Not many smiles, few laughs. Some have a haunted look about them, like they see what's coming and none of it's good?a world full of all those nasty 70s-type terms like bear market, layoffs and recession. New York was knocked on its ass this time, and no matter what the civic cheerleaders say, it hasn't gotten back up. When the wind is from the west you can still get a whiff of the ruins over the Brooklyn Bridge?but now it smells like a bad barbecue.

Rumors were swirling around the courthouses about Arabs still celebrating down on Atlantic Ave.?once home to a group of bin Laden supporters. The angry scuttlebutt was that some smiling teenage Arabs were posing for photos against a backdrop of the new New York skyline. Then there were tales of drive-by shootings and other forms of retribution on the Arabs.

I took a walk down Atlantic Ave., and it seems rumors were all they were. A police officer from the 84th Precinct leaned against a wrought-iron fence and smiled when I told him of some of the hearsay. He claimed he had been walking the Atlantic Ave. beat for the last 10 days and added, "I haven't seen anyone celebrating. If anything they look scared. I guess I would be too, but there have been no attacks on any Arabs in this command. It's quiet down here. The only problems we're having is all the fake bomb threats."

Some of the Arab stores and restaurants have American flags waving out front like talismans to ward off revenge. Groups of men stood outside and stared out in defiance to the street from where they thought an attack might come. I talked with one man who said, "Business is off. No one wants to come down here. People walk by us and curse us. We did nothing to anyone. We all have American flags out. We are Americans, too."

Later I walked down a quiet Hicks St. and stopped in front of Fire Co. 205 Hook and Ladder 118?a firehouse that had the bad luck of being a five-minute ride into Lower Manhattan. Because of this they lost six men. Off to the side of the house a group of young women sat on folding chairs whispering their grief. They were newly minted widows and seemed to be trying to find some solace in one another. Neighborhood people dropped off notes and flowers in a too-familiar ritual. Three firemen stood around in the street not knowing what to do. The emergency is long gone.

I walked up to Capt. Fenton, a middle-aged man with steel gray hair and the face of a parish priest, and asked him if he was at the collapse of the buildings. He wasn't, but directed me to one of his men who was.

Richie Murray is a short man wearing huge black sunglasses. He shook his head when asked about his experience.

"I was caught in the second collapse. We went to search a Burger King because we had heard that there were some people trapped there. I heard a loud roar and looked up and saw I-beams the size of football fields falling from the sky. Searing hot smoke filled my lungs and eyes. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't see. It felt like it went on for an hour, but it was probably only five minutes. After it had all settled down I got up and went and manned the rigs that had no men on them."

Murray paused and said, "I can't see out of one eye and I may never see out of it again. I lost eight friends there. Some of them had over 20 years in and could have retired."

Dan Leary, 38 and a senior court clerk in Brooklyn Supreme Court, talked about how his neighborhood of Breezy Point, Queens, was holding up. Seventy people from around the peninsula lost their lives. Breezy Point, recently described in the Times as being the whitest of New York neighborhoods, now is home to scores of fallen heroes.

"They've been holding prayer vigils at St. Thomas More Church and St. Frances de Sales Church for all of Breezy Point," Leary told me. "There are 20 brokerage-house people and 35 to 40 cops and firemen from the neighborhood missing. My next-door neighbor?a cop?came back from the sight and he couldn't talk about any of it. He was stunned. But the community still has hope. One of the most positive women has a fireman husband who is missing. No one is giving up.

"The whole city has been changed by this," he went on. "Last night to relax I went for a run down the beach. All I could smell was the smoke from the fire and out on the ocean was an aircraft carrier and overhead were fighter jets. It wasn't relaxing."