New York City waits for nothing and no one. Washington, D.C., the power center of the world’s most powerful nation, cannot and does not stop. In Pennsylvania, there is peace.
In the 14 years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States of America is a nation largely recovered.
Students recently graduated in the class of 2015 were barely toddlers on that day. Virtually all of their education was received post-9/11.
The leaders of cities and the nation have changed. The Pentagon, charged with defending America and much of the world, was quickly repaired. Where once the Twin Towers stood in Lower Manhattan, two shimmering pools mark their footprints, next to the newly opened World Trade Center. At a symbolic 1,776 feet, it is the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.
A memorial stands among the peace and solitude in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 crashed, almost certainly sparing additional lives after the passengers took on the terrorists.
September 11 is now for many a remembrance. In New York City, the date remains a subject of importance, although time, like the city itself, goes on. It is more a somber memory of a painful wound than a scar, something that will likely never go away completely. For long time New Yorkers, a mere glance towards Lower Manhattan and the missing twin towers is a reminder of what was, and what happened.
A few months after September 11, I spoke with a receptionist working in a skyscraper on Wall Street. She talked about the day, which began beautifully with a brilliant blue sky over the city. Within hours everything had changed.
Along with a friend, she made it down to the street level, where the dust from the collapsed skyscrapers had turned the day into pitch-black night. She couldn’t see, she fell and in the darkness, she lost contact with her friend. She finally made it home after walking across the Brooklyn Bridge with thousands of other people.
Images of people emerging from that same dust are now iconic, with the power to bring back the raw pain felt that day.
At the John F. Germany Library in Tampa, some of that dust is on display. In an exhibit entitled, “And Then There was Quiet: New York After The Attack,”artist Dave Gordon brings photos and other items, with the hopes that the public can see another, more human side of the tragedy.
He arrived in New York only days after the attack and began to take photographs of the ordinary, the small things, and the human things. He realized that the national news coverage was missing something important about what happened: the many posters of the missing that had been plastered all around the city; along with the close human toll and the humanity in the city in the aftermath.
The dust he collected is in a clear container in what could be considered the center of the exhibit. The main entrance to the library includes facsimiles of the thousands of posters family and friends put up all over Lower Manhattan in the days after 9/11, looking for those who were missing; searching for those for whom the area hospitals had girded themselves to receive in emergency rooms but who never arrived; nor did they arrive home ever again.
In all, 2,753 innocent people lost their lives that day. Some would argue the death toll continues among those who worked in the dust in the hopes of finding survivors.
According to the artist’s statement, the power of the exhibit “derives its considerable power not by being spectacular but by providing calm, emotionally resonant, intimate views of a tragedy which was for most Americans frenetic, overwhelming, and inaccessible.”
The exhibit has appeared in a wide variety of venues over the years, including the rotunda of a U.S. Senate office building, the Massachusetts State House and even a train station. Gordon prefers non-traditional art venues and insists the exhibit be displayed at no charge.
“And Then There was Quiet: New York After The Attack” can be viewed throughout September at the John F. Germany Public Library, 900 North Ashley Drive in downtown Tampa.
Fourteen years later, in New York, in Washington, in Pennsylvania, the scars have healed but the wounds are remembered. The date is likely never to be forgotten. But with time, a different view of that day, filled with so much pain, confusion and fear, and an exhibit such as this, may provide a new perspective.