Fear and reaction lasted through that surreal season
People in Pierrepont Place in Brooklyn watch as smoke billows from the remains of the World Trade Center in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001. Credit: AP/Lawrence Jackson
Once the Twin Towers burned and collapsed in al-Qaida’s murderous airplane attack on Sept. 11, 2001, homeland security became a visceral national mission. The sense of emergency persisted for a long time.
The World Trade Center catastrophe happened on primary day with voting underway. Municipal elections were rescheduled for Sept. 25.
One day during the resumed campaign, mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer sat in the back seat of a car waiting to enter the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. An Army tank was positioned in the middle of the plaza. Soldiers patrolled nearby, scanning vehicles.
Softly, Ferrer said to a reporter beside him, “We’ve never had this before. Not in this country.”
It was a surreal season full of public traumas too secondary to make the main news cycle. One evening, for example, an NYPD officer ran east down East 33rd Street toward Madison Avenue, shouting at those on the sidewalk to clear the area: “There’s a bomb in the Empire State Building!” The report proved false.
On Sept. 18, letters enclosed with lethal anthrax spores were postmarked in Trenton, sent to locations in New York City and Florida. By Oct. 1, Claire Fletcher, an employee at CBS News on West 57th Street, developed symptoms. She received antibiotics and recovered. In Florida Robert Stevens, of the tabloid Sun newspaper, inhaled the spores and died.
Soon a letter was received by city news organizations. “09-11-01. This is next. Take penacilin [sic] now. Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.”
The FBI probed for seven years before naming the perpetrator as Bruce Ivins, an Ohio-born senior biodefense researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Clearly disturbed, perhaps having craved attention to his work, he died by suicide as authorities were preparing to charge him.
On Nov. 12, 2001, American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in Belle Harbor, Queens, shortly after takeoff from Kennedy Airport. This disaster killed 251 passengers and nine crew members aboard, as well as five people on the ground. Terrorism was instantly suspected, but investigators conclusively faulted an overreaction to mild turbulence by an officer working foot pedals, causing the plane’s tail fin to separate.
By then, all kinds of security precautions were being instituted as never before. City buildings were sealed off to the uninvited.
At the Woolworth Building in the days following Sept. 11, you could walk in off the street, take the elevator to a high floor and find a hallway window to survey the pit where the towers once stood. That sort of random public access is no longer possible. Magnetometers cropped up everywhere. So did bollards and concrete barriers. Moving through the city meant facing a gauntlet of checkpoints.
The security state visibly snowballed into what we know today. The Patriot Act sailed through Congress and was signed by President George W. Bush effective Oct. 26, only 45 days after hijacked jets crashed in New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The law authorized expanded phone and digital surveillance, federal agency mergers and information sharing, and financial monitoring. And the war in Afghanistan was underway.
To Americans who remember, the government actions leave a double-edged legacy. Freedom of movement became more limited. Only now are non-ticketed visitors starting to be allowed to pass through airport security in some locations, for the first time since the Transportation Security Agency was created in November 2001. That restriction had been among so many that followed a disaster that struck, out of a clear blue sky, a quarter-century ago.
Columnist Dan Janison’s opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
