Exactly fifteen years ago today I was settled into my seat on a British Airways flight 178, scheduled to head from JFK to London in a few minutes. It was not to be. My cell phone rang: It was my wife, Cita, telling me that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, and that the day was too clear for that to be an accident. Within minutes, she was proved right. We returned from the tarmac to the airport, and a world in which air travel would never be the same. Large black clouds were visible from Manhattan. Cita, who was in my firm’s Washington office a few blocks from the Pentagon, rang again to say she was headed home. For some reason and unlike most others, my two phones were operating as if the World Trade Center complex that housed such equipment was not in ruins, so I passed them around to other passengers desperate to call relatives and, in one case, to find out the fate of her husband aboard a Boston-bound flight.
A few days later the New York cops invited Cita and me down to view the horror—I was writing for the New York Post at the time—the only rule being to turn our backs whenever a body part was being extracted from the wreckage—out of respect, not to spare our feelings. My reaction to the smoldering debris and the stench of smoke and burning flesh was multiplied by the fact that I had only recently moved my firm’s offices out of the World Trade Center complex. And that New York City, now wounded, perhaps permanently, was THE place where a Jewish kid born of an immigrant father could make his way, the place where, sooner than most, hard work would trump discrimination.
Which brings me to the World Trade Center. Everyone joked that it was then-governor Nelson Rockefeller’s last erection or, to the more prudish, a white elephant. And so it seemed. Remember, this was a day when a Wall Street address was essential unless you were in one of the lower levels of the financial services industry, like selling insurance, in which case Maiden Lane would do. No one would go as far west as the twin towers except to play squash in the near-by—and no Jews-allowed—athletic club.
No one, that is, except relatively new firms who couldn’t find any space on Wall Street and sensed that the twin towers just might be a prestige address some day soon. Besides, it was cheap. So my partners and I took a gamble and signed a lease, feeling just as much the pioneers by moving west of Broadway towards the Hudson River as earlier entrepreneurs must have felt by moving west of the Mississippi River.
It seemed then that America would never recover from this blow, and if it did, New York City certainly would not. That was to underestimate the resilience of our people and our economy. Mayor Rudi Giuliani urged New Yorkers on September 12, 2001, “Go about a normal day. Take the day as an opportunity to go shopping, be with your children. Do things. Get out. Don’t feel locked in.” And most of us did, taking time to offer such help to first responders as was in our power. Despite the devastation of so much lower Manhattan infrastructure, despite the loss of skilled staff and facilities suffered by many Wall Street firms, the New York Stock Exchange lost only four trading days before reopening and recovering to pre-attack levels within a month. Competitors of the hard-hit firms—and competition in that sector is red in tooth-and-claw—offered office space, communications facilities and whatever their rivals needed to get back in business, and not only because of the high degree of interdependence of firms that trade with each other on a regular basis. Other New Yorkers did what they could. The owner of a store selling sneakers gave free shoes to women whose flight from the afflicted area was impeded by their high heels; people handed out water to those trudging home across the Brooklyn bridge; the steel workers who built the World Trade Center and the sons who succeeded them in the steelworkers’ union insisted on participating in the dangerous job of sorting through the rubble; the New York police and firemen were brave well beyond the call of duty. Mayor Rudy Giuliani was everywhere, comforting relatives, directing rescue efforts, calming the panicked, and warning any New Yorkers who would try to attack the city’s Muslims or gouge consumers that they had better think twice. The mayor’s biggest problem: More volunteers than can be put to work, and so many blood donors that the hospitals couldn’t handle the load, in part because the death rate was so high that hospitals took in few wounded.
It is now 15 years since that terrible day. In the month before the towers came down the U.S. auto industry was producing cars at an annual rate of 5.6 million vehicles. Today, a boom, a bust, a slow recovery, the industry is turning out vehicles at an annual rate of 17 million. In August of 2001, some 132 million Americans were at work, 15 years later 145 million Americans trek to their jobs every day, 320,000 of them to private-sector jobs in the World Trade Center area. The nation’s output of goods and services did not plummet as a result of the attack, but continued to rise until the Great Recession and since then has recovered to stand about 25 percent above where it was when Osama bin Laden tried to bring down the American system by destroying its iconic financial sector. Innovation did not stall: In 2001 neither Uber nor Facebook had yet emerged from the fertile brains of their founders to join the ranks of the world’s largest companies.
Not all the economic news in the past 15 years has been pleasant, but since the attack the flexible, innovative American market-economy has mimicked the Broadway star of yesteryear who sings in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, “Good times and bum times,
I’ve seen them all, and my dear I’m still here,
Plush velvet sometimes, Sometimes just pretzels and beer, but I’m here.”
Even the political system survived without missing a beat. George W. Bush had just been elected president with fewer popular votes than Al Gore, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling that Florida’s electoral votes belonged in the Republican column. No tanks on the streets, not violent protests, no refusal to support his retaliatory strikes in Afghanistan. In 2008 the conservative Bush was replaced by the progressive Democrat Barack Obama, and a virulent form of partisan warfare broke out. But despite a high degree of voter dissatisfaction, the political system survives what a combination of Muslim Jihadi fervor and Saudi money threw at it. We grumble, wish for better choices of candidates. So unpopular are the candidates that backers of the winner will be more relieved than jubilant, and backers of the losers less depressed than if they had had an opportunity to back someone they really thought would make a great president. Post-election warfare will be confined to the halls of Congress and the White House, where it belongs, and to the courts. Give or take a protest rally or two. And the economy will either limp along at something like a 1 percent-to-2 percent growth rate, or the new president and congress will come together and cut a deal on tax reform, infrastructure development, structural reforms, and a plan to step up growth. In either case, democratic capitalism, reformed perhaps, remains most Americans’ system of choice, with the exception of privileged college students who seem to prefer the system that has done so well by Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, and periodically has intellectuals such as themselves assigned to picking potatoes in the rural areas of China.
The World Trade Center now provides offices for 320,000 private-sector workers. The neighborhood, once deserted after dark, now includes buildings housing 60,000 residents, and is vibrant of an evening. But not all change is progress. In the place of the twin towers is a rather striking building, allegedly made attack-proof at a cost of $3.9 billion since it is regarded as a prime target, and a shopping mall, the products of the same capitalism I so much admire in other connections. This writer had hoped that the powers-that-be would follow the instructions given by Winston Churchill when faced with the rebuilding of the bombed-out House of Commons. “The chamber must be rebuilt—just as it was.” That would have been a permanent memorial to the some 3,000 who were killed on this day 15 years ago, and a way to let our enemies that we fear them not. Instead, we are having a more, er, modest tribute. The shops in the new mall remained closed until the commemorative ceremonies concluded at 12:30pm today. Among those is an Italian restaurant led by a famous chef, Riccardo Orfino. Being from the Veneto, he likely learned in school that the Italian firms charged with rebuilding the bell tower in Venice’s San Marco Square after it collapsed in 1902 were told: “Come’era e dove’era”—”Where it was, as it was.” Like Churchill’s, this, advice went unheeded.
