9/11/01: A Set of Impressions

On a typical day, New York City streets register more than 70 decibels, enough to cause progressive hearing loss. The quiet that enveloped the city after the Towers fell was overwhelming. Manhattan-bound traffic was closed off to nonemergency vehicles for two days, and all commercial flights coming in and out of JFK, La Guardia, and Newark were canceled. Subways ran off and on because of power problems caused by the destruction at Chambers Street. Major League Baseball games were postponed until the seventeenth; the Stock Exchange reopened the same day. That wasn’t the half of it. Whole parts of the city seemed mute — most strikingly, its typically loquacious residents, who walked the streets speechless.

Three years ago, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, New York magazine released a tribute issue, and it’s still so, so good (full disclosure, I worked on the issue as an intern, and it makes me cry every time I read it). Titled The Encyclopedia of 9/11, the project is breathtaking in its scope and raw in its intimacy. The above entry is under “Q”, for quiet.

Other entries include “blue,” as the crystal-clear sky soon became the first thing we talked about when we talked about that day; “missing persons posters” as a new, harrowing form of street art that populated the city for weeks; and “paper,” the floating sea of documents, contracts, and agreements that covered Manhattan after the crash. Give it a read.