That Infamous Day 20 Years Later

I’m hardly able to write about that day as its memory is still raw.  Also now with hindsight there is the realization it hastened what had already been underway:  economic and political forces tearing away our society from within.  Today we are left with things spiraling out of control and now we are even unable to come together to fight a virus that has claimed the lives of three hundred times the number of people who died on 9/11, almost as many American lives who died in all wars since the American Revolution.   We have a vaccine and the ability to impose mask mandates, yet corrosive politics and culture wars have weakened American resolve and unity, an attribute that was in full bloom during WW II and briefly, oh so briefly, after that fateful day of 9/11.

As I am so disheartened by the reality of what is and what might have been, not to mention, where we are going as a nation, I prefer to borrow and edit some of my prior writings about this day and its consequences, including a small portion of my book Waiting for Someone to Explain It: The Rise of Contempt and Decline of Sense.

World Trade Center Bicentennial 1976

Although it seems like yesterday, we all (of a certain age) remember where we were at that moment.  The only comparable instant in my life is remembering where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated.

On Sept. 11, 2001 Ann and I were on our boat in Norwalk, Ct., a clear somewhat breezy day with a deep blue sky.  We had the TV on and, in complete disbelief, the tragedy unfolded before our eyes.

Although we were fifty miles away, we could see the smoke drifting south from the Twin Towers.  To this day I still feel that sense of incredulity.  Did this really happen here?  My son, Jonathan, had been interviewed only a couple of weeks before by Cantor Fitzgerald, and offered a job to work on the 102nd floor of One WTC.  They lost 685 employees on that fateful day.  Jonathan decided to take another job.  Is it merely coincidence and accident that governs life’s outcomes?  Or is it simply Shakespeare’s more cynical line from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”

My older son is the poet of our family and this is what he wrote on that very day.  One line in particular resonates: “If Hell opened up, and swallowed my life, it could not compete with what witnessed, I.”  May we never forget:

“9/11/2001

By Chris Hagelstein

Terrorist troops and bodies strewn

in Twin Tower screams, destruction loomed.

News stations on a journalistic mission

under our Flag's lost transmission:

America's Death.

 

Judgement of Religious Decree

driving Boeing bombs with air fuel

circulating vultures from above the sea,

smashing their prey

on this plain sun-filled day.

 

Television digital debris rained on video,

Looping the same sequence of carnage.

The surgery of media controlled the flow

but the State of Blood remained unknown.

 

Prayers beneath each citizen’s eyes

were blessed wells now, for those who died.

No ceremony or speech could render a conclusion:

Those wired images played seemed like an illusion.

 

An Eye of some god was seeing us All

for each one's Blindness, was another’s Call,

and in the skies above Manhattan, masked in smoke

exhumed old gods of hatred and hope.

 

If Hell opened up, and swallowed my life,

It could not compete with what witnessed, I:

Buildings falling and heroes crushed:

As day burned to night

and life --- to dust.

 

Still, yet, in my hearts dismay,

Born here, I stand, no less bleeding

than those who survived this day:

For America is my body and my sea

executed on the stage of history.”

His poem is a first-hand emotional account of the horror and the hope.  This is how we all felt and I remember our country briefly coming together.  Unfortunately, Trump “remembers” it divisively, saying,” Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering….It was on television. I saw it.”

I give President Bush credit for going to the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. less than a week after the tragedy to deliver a speech "Islam is Peace" to the American people and to reassure Muslim Americans.  It is the easy path to foment racial hatred after such an event as Trump did and still does, but Bush had a different message: “America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.“

By the time President Obama was elected the economy was already deteriorating and political divisiveness, such as the rise of the Tea Party, was beginning to build to a crescendo and that’s about the time I innocently started my writing, more for personal reasons, but it quickly morphed into a mission to present the observations and views from the grassroots.  I’ve written it for 14 years now, albeit with decreasing frequency.

Since 9/11 I’ve deliberately avoided films, documentaries, non-fiction and fictional works about that day.  It and its consequences are just too terrible to relive.  But nonetheless, it was unavoidable that my reading would lead me to that day, this happenstance out of the blue.  And it was from an unexpected source, my favorite writer, John Updike.  What I didn’t know, but found out later, that he was visiting family in Brooklyn Heights, and watched the event unfold from there.  Typical Updike, his real life experience became conflated with his fiction in his last short story collection, My Father’s Tears.  

So it was with some trepidation when I realized that his story “Varieties of Religious Experience” is about that very day; beginning with “THERE IS NO GOD: the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall.”  The protagonist was from out of town, visiting his daughter and grandchild at their apartment in Brooklyn Heights.  To get through this story, written from various perspectives (including a woman on the ill fated flight that crashed in PA), I had to continually take deep, slow breaths, just to control my anxiety.  Not that Updike capitalized on gruesome details, but there is the constant unreal undercurrent of the lunacy of that day.  One knows where it is all going, and if this is what God is all about, anyone’s God, religion seems to be a source of justifying anything. One brief paragraph from the story encapsulates its essence:

Dan could not quite believe the tower had vanished. How could something so vast and intricate, an elaborately engineered upright hive teeming with people, mostly young, be dissolved by its own weight so quickly, so casually? The laws of matter had functioned, was the answer. The event was small beneath the calm dome of sky. No hand of God had intervened because there was none. God had no hands, no eyes, no heart, no anything. Thus was Dan, a sixty-four-year-old Episcopalian and probate lawyer, brought late to the realization that comes to children with the death of a pet, to women with the loss of a child, to millions caught in the implacable course of war and plague. His revelation of cosmic indifference thrilled him, though his own extinction was held within this new truth like one of the white rectangles weightlessly rising and spinning within the boiling column of smoke. He joined at last the run of mankind in its stoic atheism. He had fought this wisdom all his life, with prayer and evasion, with recourse to the piety of his Ohio ancestors and to ingenious and jaunty old books – Kierkegaard, Chesterton – read for comfort in adolescence and early manhood. But had he been one of the hundreds in that building – its smoothly telescoping collapse in itself a sight of some beauty, like the color-enhanced stellar blooms of photographed supernovae, only unfolding not in aeons but in seconds – would all that metal and concrete have weighed an ounce less or hesitated a microsecond in its crushing, mincing, vaporizing descent?

As Friedrich Shiller’s Ode to Joy concludes -- the basis for Beethoven’s massive choral addition to the symphonic form -- “Do you sense the Creator, world?/Seek Him beyond the starry canopy!/Beyond the stars must He dwell.”  And no doubt the hijackers on that fated day believed they were performing a sacred duty for their “Creator.”  How does one reconcile the destructive events of 9/11 with the creative force of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony both coming into being in the name of God?

 

Hagelstein Brothers Updated

It’s an interesting phenomenon writing a blog about all sorts of subjects, from personal to more universal subjects.  The personal entries have a tendency to give rise to the so called six degrees of separation and ultimately lead to contact with people who share that personal connection.  In particular, the historical information I’ve posted on my father’s photography business, Hagelstein Brothers, which was established by my great grandfather in 1866. has given rise to such correspondence, as well as Daguerreotypes from their studio when they were at 142 Bowery, New York City.

Naively, I had thought the business was one of the few originals in New York City.  I should have known, by then there were plenty, but few of those businesses lasted 118 years such as Hagelstein Brothers, Photographers.

Most recently I was contacted by Adam Woodward, a resident of the Bowery and an inveterate collector of all things Bowery, including some of the work of my forefathers, which he kindly forwarded to me and has allowed me to publish them here.  We speculate that the man with chemistry apparatus is my great grandfather himself, in his photography attire.

An interesting article of Adam’s search for salvaged material from old buildings on the Bowery appeared in the New York Times

Adam in turn put me onto Jeremy Rowe who has been “researching photographic studios and operations in New York City from the birth of photography to ca 1880.”  Jeremy sent me a fascinating article on the NYC Daguerreian era which can be found at this link, following the prompts to Page 16.

 

Switching subjects, my blog has been relatively quiet, avoiding all things political, as I’ve been working on a book based on a selection of my blog articles and weaving a narrative around them in an attempt to understand the insanity we call today's politics, fiscal policy and cultural mores.  Appropriately, the book is entitled: Waiting for Someone to Explain It; The Rise of Contempt and the Decline of Sense.  More on that later but if posting in this space is less frequent than in the past that is a partial explanation.

Upper West Side Visit Continued

It was now our turn for some time together in New York City, choosing to stay at a hotel in the heart of the neighborhood where we both once lived.  The Lucerne Hotel is a venerable place, long standing at the corner of 79^th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.  Old fashioned but comfortable, we had an unbelievably quiet corner room.  However, shortly after we checked in, one of its two elevators stopped altogether so one had to queue up sometimes, but this posed no serious delays.  Ann thought the complimentary wine offerings every afternoon mitigated any real hard feelings.

The weather in NYC can be so unpredictable towards the end of August and unfortunately part of our stay was impacted by a typical NYC heat wave, high temperatures and humidity, not much different than in Florida and, in fact, some days, even hotter in the city.  One learns to live with it as NYC demands obeisance. 

Until one night there was a hall announcement in the hotel that Con Edison will have to shut off the power to the hotel around midnight, all power, including our beloved A/C in the middle of a heat wave, but it should be for only one hour.  We all know what a one hour estimate means in NYC so I wondered whether we could even take the elevator down from the 9^th floor the next morning.  There is a good side and a bad side to the story.  We lost air conditioning for a while as they had to reduce the power but when we woke up, it was working, as were lights and thankfully our one elevator.  However, the entire hotel was being run on a generator Con Edison brought in that night in a trailer truck.  We were told it was temporary, until the next day and the day after that until we checked out a full week later.

Luckily, for us, we were on the other side of the building and could not hear the constant drone of a powerful diesel generator which they kept going without stop, bringing trucks to refuel it, while they ripped up the entire street around the hotel.  A major transformer had caught fire with the heating demands and below the ground there was a hundred year old infrastructure to deal with.  I talked to the Con Ed guy outside and he said “don’t worry bout it, it’s gonna get better.  We’re gonna have dis wrapped up by tomorrow.”  Tomorrow never came, but credit due where deserved, that generator powered everything without interruption.

This entry is actually a continuation of an earlier one, just trying to catch up on the rest of our stay. That previous one covered thoughts about the neighborhood, our visit to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, seeing The Band’s Visit, and attending Downton Abbey: The Exhibition, which we learned will next be seen in West Palm Beach so those in our area who were fans of Downton are URGED to see it.  Truly unique.

Early each morning, I would take a walk, choosing a different route to catch as much of the neighborhood as possible. I note in photographs some of the eclectic sights.

Unfortunately, sometimes I passed homeless people who were still sleeping.  These are just a couple, one in front of a Victoria’s Secret store, the juxtaposition creating a sad irony, and another – obviously a resourceful person, picking the perfect spot and surrounding himself (or herself) with umbrellas for privacy. 

Always living in the past, I could not resist seeing my old apartment again at 66 W. 85^th Street, seen here on the left. Nearby, was a brownstone with a tenacious tree which thrived as a vine, growing from the basement level right to and beyond the roof.

Also, tenacious, the “shop around the corner bookstore” – right near where I used to live on Columbus.  It’s encouraging to see the independent bookstores thrive again.

One morning I snuck a look at the famous Dakota Courtyard, a building of such historical significance and the home of luminaries.

Staying on the Upper West Side entreated us to try some of the abundant alfresco restaurants along Amsterdam.  When we lived in the area nearly 50 years ago, there were only a handful of restaurants, and not a single one spilled out onto a sidewalk!  Now, they are cheek by jowl.  Obviously, no one cooks a meal anymore; everyone in the area eats out, picks up their meals, or has them delivered.  We ate several lunches at Bluestone Lane, a restaurant with an Australian flair, loving their Bondi Burger and their Kale Caesar or other yummy salad dishes (if you love avocado, as Ann does), this is the place!  

We ate at the one on the East Side right next door to the Guggenheim Museum, adjacent to the beautiful historic Church of the Heavenly Rest, as well as their new West Side location at 80^th and Amsterdam.   

We had a couple of sidewalk dinners at The Chirping Chicken (naturally, their Chicken is great), but as we sat outside watching all humanity pass by, kids, dogs, you name it, we marveled at The Chirping Chicken’s cadre of delivery folk on their bicycles, one peeling off with the regularity of LGA take offs carrying a delivery order, one after the other, the last one leaving as the first one returns for the next order.  What a business on 77^th and Amsterdam!

We both loved Sweetgreens on 75^th and Amsterdam for dinner as well, my becoming addicted to their Caesar Kale salad with tender pieces of roasted chicken.  Then across the street from our Hotel was a new Greek restaurant, Kefi, where we ate lunch once savoring a well seasoned chicken kebab and Greek salad.  We enjoyed the atmosphere and food so much, we returned for dinner as well, all these places jumping, throbbing with a sense of youth and energy.

Perhaps the most “happening” place was Jacob’s Pickles at 84^th and Amsterdam.  The sound level alone announces you’ve arrived at a vibrant place, but, the food, Southern Style, is unusual, especially in NYC.  Way too much of course and even though we were twice the age of anyone in the place, they seated us anyway! 

Then there were others, Italian and Mediterranean of course, but we were not there to simply eat, although one would be hard pressed to believe this. 

Our original idea was to concentrate on theatre and museums, which we accomplished in abundance. Luckily we had secured tickets early on to see My Fair Lady at the Lincoln Center Vivian Beaumont Theatre.  I’ve always felt that Lerner and Loewe lived in the shadow of Rodgers and Hammerstein, their collaboration being a little later putting them at a disadvantage as far as reputation is concerned, but My Fair Lady has to be one of the few really great Broadway musicals.  And this particular production at the more versatile, deep stage Vivian Beaumont, gave rise to a stunning production as we’ve never seen, a revolving stage with multiple scenes, and the ability to bring a two story study of Professor Higgins from the back of the stage to the front and to recede as well. 

Oh and I would be remiss in failing to mention a most spectacular lunch beforehand at Lincoln Ristorante, a glass walled dining room elegantly serving  delicate seafood preparations and other delectable Mediterranean dishes.  A memorable experience.

Lauren Ambrose who plays Eliza Doolittle helps one forget the Audrey Hepburn film version and Harry Hadden-Paxton, who was in Downton Abbey, was the perfect Professor Higgins.  It is remarkable how closely the show follows George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, but the show departs from the movie at the end, a more modern, sophisticated interpretation of how this stars-are-crossed love affair (Eliza’s out in the open and Higgins’ suppressed) would end today.  To me the entire production was breathtaking and the first thing I did when we returned home was to break out the score and play it on my piano.

But that is not the only score I broke out.  The other overlooked songwriting team I admire is Kander and Ebb.  Chicago is now one of the longest running musicals on Broadway.  It is now a show mostly for out-of-towners.  I suppose that is what we are now, although we’ve both lived in NYC and never think of ourselves as anything but New Yorkers.  

Ann saw the original show on Broadway early on in the run.  It’s the kind of musical we would normally avoid, but my love of the music prompted me at the last minute to get tickets the day before we left New York, having a pre-theatre lunch at The Glass Tavern on West 47^th Street, one of our go to places in the theatre district now, reasonably priced, good food, a quiet ambiance.

We expected little of Chicago but surprisingly it totally exceeded our presumptions by the startling performances.  Anyone looking for the fireworks of the movie adaptation might be disappointed, but this is live theatre, and in so many ways superior.  Amra-Faye Wright, in the role of Velma Kelly, has played the same part since 2001!  Think of playing this role for such a long period of time and STILL bringing on the pizzazz.  Michelle Dejean who plays Roxie Hart performed the role on Broadway nine years ago and returns to the role now after raising her son.  As she says emphatically in the program, “Hey, Broadway! It’s good to be back!  Her performance says it all.

If you ever watched Seinfield, you’d immediately recognize John O’Hurley as “J. Peterman.” He is a very credible Billy Flynn and I’d argue that he has a much better voice than Richard Gere in the film.  Special accolades go to Evan Harrington who plays Amos Hart, singing one of my favorites from the show, “Mr. Cellophane.”  Add to that song  some of the other iconic ones, "All That Jazz," "Cell Block Tango," "When You're Good to Mama," the tongue in cheek "All I Care About," "Razzle Dazzle," and my very favorite "Nowadays,” and one can see why Kander and Ebb were at the top of their game when they wrote this musical.

I enjoyed sitting next to a young couple from London, seeing their first Broadway Show.  Their wide eyed wonder was worth the price of admission.

One night we went to see the Emmet Cohen Trio perform with great tenor saxophonist George Coleman in a Generations of Jazz Fest @ Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola.  This is from their Lessons from Our Masters series which features a master of jazz alongside a younger multigenerational band. 

We got there early enough to get a front bandstand table but at an angle where we could view the young but extraordinarily talented jazz pianist’s interactions with the established great in jazz, George Coleman.  This was more than an interaction but true love and respect.  It was a night of awe.  Bassist Russell Hall and drummer Bryan Carter brought it home as well.  No video can do justice to the evening but here is a sample and some photos.

Aside from those shows, one museum almost every day was on the agenda during our two week marathon visit.  I wanted to see the Museum of the City of New York at 103^rd and 5^th.  This is sort of out of the way, but one of the best museums to spend lots of time in, not only for its permanent collection of New York City history but when we were there it featured a special exhibit of the photographs of Stanley Kubrick who was a photographer for Look Magazine before he was a filmmaker.

Some of the photos reminded me of those of Diane Arbus but most were simply great photojournalism.  I might add (back to food), their café has some delicious selections.

One photo was taken at the 81^st Street stop, juxtaposing a couple kissing to a homeless man sleeping below the subway stop sign.I took one of Ann in the same place, the mosaic sign unchanged.

Another day we did too much, starting at the Guggenheim which had a special exhibit of 175 sculptures, paintings, and drawings by the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti.  His elongated figures all reminded me of him.  Everything he sculptured and painted had him in it no matter what the subject. 

He was never satisfied by the finished piece of art as, so he said in a documentary shown there, if he had a thousand years to complete a work of art it still would not be finished.  Fascinating art and artist. There are better shots on line but here are some that especially caught my eye.

Only a few blocks down the street is the mammoth Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Maybe if we had a year we could properly see everything, but tired already, we decided to head to the Japanese art section, less crowded, but impressive, reminding us of the days we used to go to Japan on business.  I love Japanese minimalism and sense of simplicity.There we met Jonathan, our son for lunch and the museum.

We decided to stick close to the hotel during one of the hottest days, out of the subways (although they were fine, air conditioned cars and easy to get around), so a typical touristy visit was in order for the American Museum of Natural History.  I think the last time we were there was at least 45 years ago, probably taking my older son there.  We enjoyed the 3-D film “Amazon Adventures” about 19th-century naturalist and explorer Henry Walter Bates – and indeed, we had never heard of him; one thinks Darwin when it comes to cataloging the species.  Here we are with our 3-D glasses.

The Hayden Planetarium Space Show Dark Universe was equally enjoyable especially as it is narrated by the erudite Neil deGrasse Tyson.  Well worth the price of admission.

Unfortunately, for us, the rest of the exhibits were unappealing, dark, and not clear exactly how one thing related to another.  In fact, the exhibits seem little changed from decades ago.  Better lighting and organization would be a good investment for the future.

The following day, Thursday I think, there is Mah Jongg in Bryant Park.  Ann had brought her Mah Jongg card so we took the #1 subway from Broadway and 79^th downtown to Bryant Park.  Ann found the gathering and a group willing to let her sit in with their game and I headed over to the New York Public Library.

The library’s special exhibit drew a very large crowd: You Say You Want a Revolution: Remembering the 60s.  Strange to look back at that time in history but it was a time one lived through.  Of course a lot of it was a blur but now it’s been nicely dissected and mounted and can be explained.  At the time it was a roar, not unlike today’s.

But the special appeal to me of the New York Public Library was to visit its collections, to look for some of the books I published during my 40 year career.  I found one after another in the reference section.

 The NYPL call numbers covered the imprints on the bottom of the volumes, obliterating most, but I could easily recognize the distinctive black panel and gold foil we used to highlight the book titles on the spine.  Every such volume I pulled out was indeed one of my publications.  I started to photograph them, but stopped.  Just too many and to what end?  But here are some of the recondite titles I published, all those years ago.

Another fascination was just to walk the halls again.  Early on in my career we had worked with the NYPL to republish their precious collection of Edward Curtis’ 20 Volume The North American Indian.The work comprises narrative text and photogravure images. New York Public Library would not let the work leave for reprinting until properly prepared so I went there every day, I forget for how long, and went down, down, into their rare book collection to prepare the work. 

The images are startling and today one could easily access the work on the Internet to appreciate Curtis’ accomplishment.  In the mid 1960s, reprinting was the only option (other than microfilm).  So special attention was paid to the preparation and the final product to reproduce it as faithfully to the original.  I remember ordering a special “300” year heavy printing paper, neutral pH for longevity, calendered to highlight the numerous photogravure images.  It was one of the proudest achievements in my early years in the industry, on the production side.  I remember them fondly, and the NYPL was a big part of those days.

So a visit there, concurrently with a 1960s exhibit, was a double pleasure.  Afterwards, I picked up Ann at Bryant Park after an “exhausting afternoon” of Mah Jongg in Bryant Park.  Well it was in the 90’s with 100 percent humidity.  She had suffered.

Perhaps we saved the best for last.  Another organization I worked with in my publishing days was the New York Historical Society.  Their collection and museum is stunning. 

But it was a special exhibit I wanted to see, one that was closing that following weekend, Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms.  First, Norman Rockwell is among my favorite artists, and Roosevelt among our greatest Presidents and the topic of this exhibit doesn’t get more relevant than in times such as these. “The traveling exhibition, which was organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, explores how Rockwell’s 1943 paintings—Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Fear, and Freedom from Want—gave visual voice to Roosevelt’s call to the defense of freedom worldwide and took their place among the most enduring images in the history of American art. “

But with those four freedoms comes a responsibility, so the museum also had on display Langston Hughes poem, How About It, Dixie.  Ironically, it was written in 1942, the year of my birth, and, still (unfortunately) relevant to our day, maybe as relevant in these times as the day it was written in response to the Four Freedoms:

How About It, Dixie

The President’s Four Freedoms

Appeal to me.

I would like to see those Freedoms

Come to be.

If you believe

In the Four Freedoms, too,

Then share ’em with me —

Don’t keep ’em all for you....

Looks like by now

Folks ought to know

It’s hard to beat Hitler

Protecting Jim Crow.

Freedom’s not just

To be won Over There.

It means Freedom at home, too

—

Now — right here!

Langston Hughes

But many other Norman Rockwell paintings and drawings were on exhibit.  One forgets what a great prolific artist he was.  I love his work, one that captures the essence of the American spirit, one that is struggling to survive in these times.  What would a Rockwell painting look like today?  He wasn’t averse to taking on highly charged political themes, such as this one “Murder in Mississippi,” painted in 1965.  This was an unpublished illustration for Look.  One does not think of Rockwell in this light of reality.

Well and here I go again, but there is no way I could not mention the remarkable café that is attached to the New York Historical Society.  Caffè Storico is in the most pristine space surrounded by all white ceramic dishes lining the high walls up to the ceiling.  They conjured up the most amazing crispy but juicy chicken and vegetable dish as well as mouthwatering salads. It is worth slipping into this restaurant just to enjoy the food even if the Museum doesn’t interest you.

One would think that once we arrived at LaGuardia our history lesson would be done, but no, Jet Blue flies out of the old Marine Air Terminal where the Pan Am Clippers first flew.  The old luncheonette is still there, 1940s style showcasing walls filled with memorabilia from those days.  It was the right place to leave the memories of the prior two weeks.