9/11 archives: Christie Blatchford inside the World Trade Center on Thursday, Sept. 13, 2001

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Writer Christie Blatchford had two powerful arrows in her quiver: empathy and outrage. There were good guys and bad guys, and God help you if you were picking on the good guys and Blatch knew about it.

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There was no better example of the immense firepower she wielded with these sometimes-contradictory qualities than 9/11.

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Blatch, a Governor-General’s-Literary-Award-winning author who worked for every major Toronto daily during her 45-year career, died in February 2020 after falling ill while covering the 2019 election.

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On Sept. 11, 2001, she was a Toronto-based columnist for the National Post, and she raced to Manhattan when the twin towers fell. You couldn’t have stopped her. She was inside Ground Zero not long after midnight.

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In the days that followed, she fused a good-and-evil worldview with an open heart for the victims of 9/11 and their bereft families, and for the heroes who confronted the aftermath of Islamist terror.

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Today, the day after the 25th anniversary of the tragedy, we reprint the column she wrote the day after 9/11 itself. They remind us of what was lost on 9/11, and what we lost when Blatch passed.

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“There is no there here,” she wrote a day or two after she got to Manhattan. “The greatest rescue effort in American history is for naught. There was almost no one left to save, few whole bodies to take to the empty waiting morgues, only bone and tissue embedded in the thousands upon thousands of documents that even in an internet age were produced in the economic heart of this country and that flew out of the skyscraper when they exploded and collapsed and literally buried their thousands in paperwork.”

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Twenty-five years later, her writing reminds us how we felt in those first few days. Empathy. Outrage. And a confidence that the good guys were up to the challenge.

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— Rob Roberts, editor-in-chief

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————

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NEW YORK – Here lies the new Book of the Dead.

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As thousands of years before Christ the ancient Egyptians prepared the earliest of their mortuary texts, so are Americans now writing theirs.

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The first entries made in this colossal tomb were scrawled by fingers in the filth of the windows of the Brooks Brothers skyscraper, directly across the plaza from the soaring Twin Towers that once defined the New York City skyline and which, like the people in them, simply are no more.

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In sooty grime on the plaza-fronting windows it is written “God Bless the Dead” and “God Speed” and, on the Liberty Street side, the line borrowed from the stirring unofficial anthem that Irving Berlin created and Kate Smith rendered a battle cry, “The Land That We Loved.”

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There is no there here. The greatest rescue effort in American history is for naught. There was almost no one left to save, few whole bodies to take to the empty waiting morgues, only bone and tissue imbedded in the thousands upon thousands of documents that even in an internet age were produced in the economic heart of this country and that flew out of the skyscrapers when they exploded and collapsed and literally buried their thousands in paperwork.

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Years ago, when the musical Little Orphan Annie opened on Broadway Avenue, the child star bravely warbled a song called The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow.

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But it did not, not yesterday.

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I wanted to watch the dawn break over Manhattan, as I had when I was a young woman and the sight from the back seat of a New York City cab could make me tremble with happiness for the joy of being alive in this magical place.

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But at ground zero, as they are calling the apocalyptic landscape that is all that remains of the World Trade Center and environs, there was no visible sunrise and there was virtually no life and joy was a foreign and dimly remembered thing.

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Behind enormous clouds of smoke and steam, occasional glimpses of black skies revealed merely an odd lightening to inky blue.

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Rescuers would find a hand in the rubble and, pulses quickening and shouts swelling, burrow further into the ground to discover there was no corresponding arm, no body, no person; firemen moved morosely, weeping behind goggles, to lie upon their massive hoses coiled everywhere on these sodden streets like giant sleeping water snakes.

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Many of these firefighters hailed from the suburbs, from as near as the Bronx and as far as Sleepy Hollow and Atlantic City and all the stations in between.

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“We lost the tough guys,” Fire Chief Eugene Garvin, who worked for a decade on the southern tip of the island, said flatly early yesterday. He could name many of them, his boss, his fellow chiefs and deputies, the members of one entire rescue company.

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They were among the first responders, when the first hijacked jet hit the first tower. They ran headlong into the maelstrom that thousands were fleeing, which is why the world so loves its firemen. When the second jet followed 18 minutes later, and the twin towers separately crumbled to dust, the men were gone, driven deep into the ground, the only trace they had ever been here the beloved trucks and pumpers, now empty and smashed, they once would have shone daily, like the perpetual boys — fearless and full of grit and tenderness — such men always are.

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How is it then that in the almost complete absence of living things, humanity could be so magnificently in evidence?

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National Post photographer Chris Bolin and I drove here on ghost highways through the dark over the land that they love, past sleeping towns and the glow of hundreds and hundreds of television sets. For company, we had the radio stations, hip-hop and all-news alike (one of which carried the impromptu rendition late that first night on the steps of the White House of God Bless America) and, via cellphone to a car an hour ahead, two Canadian colleagues from The Toronto Star, writer Rosie DiManno and photographer Bernard Weil.

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We entered the northern tip of the island of Manhattan off the Tappan Zee Bridge near Tarrytown, N.Y., ran into a roadblock, and made our way to midtown by dint of our Star friends, amiable New York Police Department officers who addressed me as “Honey” and “Sweetheart,” and with the help of a New Jersey man who took us as deep into the city as he was allowed.

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There, another roadblock, where the NYPD officer at the barricades, in an accent made in the Bronx, said, “What is with you Canadians? You’re like the 20th Cavalry!” before waving us through.

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By midnight the four of us were walking down the Great White Way, as the theatre district of Broadway was named for all its bright lights, right smack in the middle of the road. At one theatre, a play called Unforgiven was playing; at Broadway and East 12th, we passed a little restaurant called Forbidden Planet, which is just where it felt like we were. The street was empty but for a few stragglers, some covered in dust, wearing paper masks over their faces and heading away from us, and a few knots of street people struck into stillness here and there.

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We walked by the posh Ann Taylor department store, two or three of the 24-hour delis for which New York is known and which were still open, the famous Pearl art supply store where once with my artist former husband I had spent hours poring over paints, past Houston Street and south and into Soho.

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At Canal Street we came up against the outer perimeter of the crime scene, talked our way past the NYPD; now, we could see the billowing smoke. We walked deeper into the restricted zone, were directed to Chambers Street and the inner perimeter, and after several tries, Rosie and I convinced the police to let us through: We were in.

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Before 1 a.m. yesterday, we were sloshing through ankle-deep rivers of water thick with paper; I picked up legal documents from one Michele Lemoal-Gray, diagrams of a “Triangular B Reorganization” of a company, mortgage files and New York Telecom cash revenue sheets: These were the only signs of lives lived.

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To a gruesome background of a hundred burning fires in the city of spires and masts, as the poet Walt Whitman once delightedly wrote of the place he called his, bathed in generator-powered floodlights that provided the only working light in the financial canyon, rescuers were combing the debris, firemen marched in solemn files with grappling hooks and pickaxes, medics strode purposefully in their surgical greens. It was still quiet.

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We ended up at the corner of Barclay and West Streets, not far from the Hudson River. Before us was what was left of Building No. 7 of the World Trade Center, the third to fall in on itself in the immediate aftermath of the one-two punch to the Twin Towers. There were but a handful of floors left, red brick and steel twisted into an immense pile; hoses from four separate pumper trucks were pouring water upon the melted remains.

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Tower Pumper No. 146 was 10 feet away, the fires roared inside Building No. 7 not 75 feet from where we stood.

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The pumper’s massive ladder was lowered, a bulky young mustachioed firefighter in the little eagle’s nest got out, threw his arms in the air and fell flat on his back atop his truck; a few minutes later, another fireman in rubber coat and hard hat took his place, and the first man rose wearily and fell to his knees in prayer. We imagined he was finished; a half-hour later, the two men exchanged places again: We were watching a ritual.

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“Go up there and turn right,” a fire captain told us, “and you’ll see something you’ve never seen before.”

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East up Barclay we went, turned right, past the men and women of the Salvation Army, offering Pep mints and drinks and hot dogs, past the federal post office, past burned out trucks and wholly crushed ambulances and dozens of civilian vehicles, and there it was, the plaza of the World Trade Center and a scene so ghastly it was almost cartoonish and certainly surreal and for which there must be a special language in which I am barely functional.

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Before us were two former skyscrapers, neatly sheared off at their sixth floors; these were once the sentinels for the south of the Twin Towers. Books in my hotel room tell me they were grey or light-coloured but all we saw were blackened shells, blown out windows, twisted girders. The South Tower itself had collapsed like a fallen wedding cake; we could see what we believe was the top few floors, the immense girders that had formed the building’s facade driven into the Earth like an abstract sculpture, but there was no evidence of the other hundred-plus floors of the tower — nothing but a monstrous crater in the middle.

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Fires burned everywhere in the windows of buildings near and far; smoke poured from a hundred places; Chief Garvin explained that because none of the structures was sound, the firemen were fighting the blazes from the outside only, not inside as they would usually do, so they were stubborn and hard to douse. Somewhere, below us, were torn gas mains; levels of shopping and parking; the subway. We could hear alarms going off, wearing themselves out to a tinny ring.

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Those buildings that stood, still, were clearly ruined; the Millennium Hilton across the plaza was badly damaged and listing. In One Liberty Place, where once Brooks Brothers gave America the classic buttondown shirt, there was now a morgue and triage centre, both virtually devoid of customers. About 4 a.m. yesterday, a Canadian named Chris Hawke who had been making lettuce and cheese sandwiches for hours in the debris, said in all that time, he had seen only one person brought to the morgue, one hand, and a torso.

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“At first,” said Mr. Hawke’s helpmate, 29-year-old Jessica Garcia, a pretty editor with a publishing company, “the rescuers were sort of happy, they thought they were going to be able to save people. They were sort of flirtatious,” she said fondly, meaning the way brave men with a terrible job are smile-y with young women. That was long gone, she said. After hours and hours of effort, they had so little to show for it; they were dejected, overwhelmed.

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“We haven’t found any full bodies,” Bob Crystal, a retired NYPD officer who drove 90 minutes from Barnegat, N.J., to offer help, whispered quietly, his voice hoarse from the smoke.

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Just hours after Rosie and I had been directed to a public toilet on the darkened second floor of this building, accepted a coffee with Ms. Garcia, the building was suddenly evacuated, and partially collapsed: Where did they go, our new friends? Did they get out in time? This was almost 24 hours after the first jet had slammed into the first tower.

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At the Burger King just feet from the rubble of the South Tower, Suffolk County Police Detective Donovan Martin waved us into his temporary headquarters. Arrows on the staircase to the second level of the restaurant pointed up, read “Evidence.” He handed us blue Con Edison hard hats, sat us down, his beautiful face streaked with grime.

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Though he works (and had come here after completing his regular shift) 50 miles away on Long Island, for the suburban force, he lives within three miles of the World Trade Center. After work, he was in his car, heading home to his wife and two children, preparing to watch the drama unfold on television, when he realized he could not.

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The first person he ran into was Nicholas Casale, another police detective, whom he found wandering around the ruins, looking for his colleagues. Det. Casale had joined an early rescue crew — he was on the site within 15 minutes of the first jet hitting — and they had set up a little command post on the ground floor of the South Tower. He had saved five or six people from the rubble of the North Tower, he told Det. Martin, but now he was looking for his fellow responders. “He kept saying ‘I’m looking for my office. Where’s my office?’ ” He didn’t realize the South Tower had gone down too, and with it, his friends.

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“That was the first thing I saw,” Det. Martin said.

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He is a drug squad officer, normally. “This is a world away,” he said.

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He was very calm, extraordinarily courteous, gentle as a lamb and strong as a bull. “I hope,” he said, “we won’t become afraid. The whole purpose of this was to make us afraid. The best way we can answer is not just retaliation, but to continue on with our lives.”

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Not a harsh word did we hear; nothing but grace wherever we looked and not a single sign of life, not one. The new Book of the Dead is being written by the living, by the most resourceful people in the world. They have won. Victory is theirs.

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That first little Orphan Annie, she knew: The sun will come out tomorrow, you can bet your bottom dollar.

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