The Lost Generation of Old New York
Picture it, Manhattan, Lincoln Center, September, 2001. A young man with alabaster skin, perky lips, dark brown eyes the color of damp chestnuts, and blond hair courtesy of a muscle queen stylist in Chelsea, is awakened. He is asleep on a dorm room sofa. His friend wakes him up. Screaming, and laughing out of panic, “AWOL,” the young man’s college nickname, “AWOL, there’s a plane in the World Trade Center!”
“What, that’s a movie! Are those my glasses?” Putting them on, “Oh…that’s not a movie!
“No, look, it’s the news.”
“Oh, shit!”
Then what seemed like a brief eternity later, the young man shouted back at his friend, “But look! There’s another plane to help…them.”
That boy was me, and that roommate was Pablo Picasso.*
(*extensive Golden Girls reference)
Me, and my college bestie Matt. I was not still a student, technically, as I graduated in May. But, I had to retake Italian “due” and the class was so early it was better for me to crash at the Fordham Lincoln Center dorms on West 60th Street than to get there on time from my apartment at 160th Street. The night before, we were all just sitting around, being college-age kids. Photos are preserved somewhere.
The next morning, well, the world was literally destined to never be the same. Cell phones were useless to make calls upon because, well, everyone was trying to do the same thing. We saw fighter planes flying around the city, unsure at first if they were ours or this new enemy.
A note: New York should have always had a military defense around it.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda.
We all banded together. We watched the smoke float up from downtown. We went to each other’s dorm rooms, ordering wine from the local shop, being sold for half price with delivery. Hey, if you were watching the world fall to shit as a small business owner on the Upper West Side, I’m sure you’d do the same.
“The World Trade Center is down, I gotta move inventory! Everybody is gonna be drinking today.”
A dear friend visiting her father and of course me, from her native Switzerland, was with us the night before. We managed to get in touch that day. She was supposed to fly back to Zürich. But, as all commercial flights were cancelled, she would have to wait until – no kidding – until her Mercedes-Benz executive father was able to get her on a private plane owned by Daimler-Chrysler escorting executives to Berlin.
(Maybe someday I’ll tell you how she, the Swiss Miss Princess, held up the plane for two hours after she accused the TSA agent of suggesting she had a bomb on her Swiss person. Maybe not…)
And, in the following years, to hear people say, “Everyone was New York that day!” The hell you were not! I have written about the things surrounding those before days in what I recall as Old New York, like novelist Edith Wharton did about New York in The Gilded Age when writing about the era in the 1920s. But, for a different reason. Twenty-five years ago the greatest city in our country, one of the greatest in the world, was changed in an unfathomable moment.
My college was immediately in mourning. Several people had studied post-graduate finance or law at Fordham, and subsequently worked in one of the towers. People wore black in New York all the time, of course–très chic. But, I saw people not dressed in black because of its sartorial status in the city at the time. Now, on subways and on sidewalks, people were dressed in black for funerals and memorials. Firehouses, police stations, hospitals, offices, and houses of worship were draped in black bunting.
The buses and subway cars had National Guard officers stationed on them. Something my late mother remembered from her girlhood in WWII Philadelphia. The most glorious city, one without limit one day, was patrolled the next.
Now, that twenty-five years separates us from that day, I also remember feeling sad for what the freshman in that and other dorms all over New York were seeing…and feeling. In town for maybe two weeks, and you get invaded. Talk about bad timing. I thought starting my Freshman year the day after Princess Diana died was bad. With those incoming students, my sad memory pales in comparison, and consequence. This, as much as I adore the late princess.
I feel we are, we were, like those 1920s Americans who went to France in the aftermath of WW. Names you have heard: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway, Josephine Baker, Gertrude Stein, Gerald and Sarah Murphy, Cole and Linda Porter, all members of the Lost Generation of artists. They were untethered by what once mattered. As were those of us there that fateful Tuesday.
The June before, toasting to our successes as graduates on a beach on Nag’s Head on the Outer Banks, North Carolina, three months later drinking half-cost wine and wondering if we were going to be nuked.
Osama bin…who?
I feel a lot of the people I graduated with were ultimately denied the future they wanted to carve out for themselves. Fearful parents called young adult children home. Apartment prices fell near the former World Trade Center, Ground Zero. But, nobody from Old New York wanted them. Onslaughts of young married Christian couples from Nebraska moved into them “wanting to help.”
Help? The only thing they did was clutter SoHo on Sundays with strollers, trying to find a brunch spot that would accommodate Little Tyler’s need of a nut-free menu and his incessant screaming. And, the East Village and Alphabet City? They soldiered on for a little while longer as one of the last truly cool spots for LGBTQ+ people in Manhattan. Until more strollers forced the residents and everything cool out.
As I write this, it has occurred to me I am perhaps no longer bitter about that morning. Sad, of course. Angry, still. But perhaps I should be grateful. After all, I was there when Old New York was buried under the sacred ashes of what I knew. In retrospect, I am glad to have been there to say goodbye, and amen.
