City's People Were Real Heroes

Jimmy Breslin

January 1, 2002

In the morning yesterday, Michael Bloomberg came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to hear a barrage of sermons and prayers and a little brilliant singing at a gathering of ministers of many faiths and hues of the city.

He walked into the place unobtrusively, understated.

It required nothing else. Just walking into BAM at a time like this was significant. The last mayor to come into BAM was the very, very heroic Giuliani, who was booed. The people didn't like him, and they knew that he didn't like them.

Bloomberg fit the place. He was a pleased guest, who listened attentively, made a short, understated talk in which he thanked them for their prayers but wished they had $4 billion for him.

That he had debt on his mind might indicate that it is not such a splendid idea for the city to spend a couple of billion for baseball fields that would be used for 81 games a year a piece.

Then he was through and walked to the door without the shameless handgrabbing of his adopted trade.

"I hope," somebody said, "that all this television doesn't destroy him like it does everybody else. The camera changes the formation of the brain."

"He doesn't watch television," one of his people said. "He thinks it's a waste of time."

Then he was off to Manhattan, to the glamorous part of a city that has allowed itself to be deluded into thinking that one person rushed in with a rope around his shoulder on Sept. 11 and hauled the whole place out of danger.

Which lives in the fantasies all around us. On that hot, frightful day in September there were tens of thousands - no, hundreds and hundreds of thousands - walking along all the avenues leading from the World Trade Center and the downtown financial district.

On Church, West Broadway and Broadway they came, heading uptown to safety. They crowded east onto the Brooklyn Bridge.

They all walked in the hot sun, walked quietly, without an angry word or glance, walked in great civility, with each stepping into someone else, causing an "excuse me," and now and then heads would turn and look back at the black smoke in so much of the sky and realize again that there was nothing in the black smoke except dead. The towers were gone.

After that, they would turn and walk on in the heat.

Never has there been such an answer to conflict and calamity in this city and country because there never has been so much immediate death. We know how we acted in New York and doubt if it could happen anyplace else.

A woman from the University of Richmond, a psychologist of the South, said, "If this was a NASCAR crowd, there would be panic."

Directing this crowd was the spirit of the people who made up the crowd. There were no police, no National Guard, and most of all, no political leaders anywhere near this crowd. Of course, politicians were not there. They didn't belong.

This was the City of New York expressing itself, and politicians have nothing to do with that.

That night, the whole populace got home and sat down in front of the television, and as they watched over the days, they decided that heroism was a face on television.

People who showed toughness and stamina that can be found nowhere suddenly heard that they were being saved by a mayor named Giuliani, that they were stricken and he gave them strength.

They were depressed and he raised them. Is that right? Am I really depressed? Am I changed forever? Did all of America change on Sept. 11? They tell me so.