The 9/11 attack was a disaster by any measure, with nearly 2,000 people killed in NYC, the loss of 15 million square feet of office space, and months of disruption. But was the response, and the fear, disproportionate, with two wars and a host of new security intrusions? Is the actual toll of what happened on that day, as large as it was, small compared with the negative effect on the United States, economically, fiscally, psychologically, and in global relations? What shouldn’t be forgotten is that what actually happened that day was only one tenth what most people believed had happened, and/or feared might happen soon.
Given the number of people who worked at the World Trade Center, and how long it took to evacuate the buildings in 1993, I had estimated 20,000 killed plus or minus 10,000. It was months before the actual death toll was found to be far lower.
The only people with the expertise to predict the buildings would fall straight down had predicted they wouldn’t fall at all, so it was easy for the rest of us to imagine a cascade of collapses as buildings fell sideways and hit other buildings, wrecking all of Downtown.
We lost two subway lines, but a cascading collapse could have wrecked most of them and virtually cut most of Brooklyn off from Manhattan’s jobs. The two subway lines were mostly restored in a year, and in the interim re-routes restored travel.
The lost 15 million square feet of office space, at 300 square feet per worker, theoretically meant the permanent loss of 50,000 jobs – with who knows how many more lost by firms fleeing in fear of additional attacks. While the disaster did make the early 2000s recession worse than average in New York (whereas I predicted it would be milder than average here, like the late 2000s recession has been), the jobs eventually came back even though the office space has not.
Finally, with the ruins smoking it was easy to imagine additional attacks, not just in NYC but elsewhere. Today, few remember the anthrax letters. And when a plane crashed in the Rockaways a few months later, it was initially believed to be another attack, and all the roads were shut down again.
In short, as bad as 9/11 was, the way people feel about it is proportional to an even greater disaster, the disaster than was believed to have happened at the time. Thoughts immediately turned to the possiblity of an additional attack with weapons of mass destruction, or a slaughter at a school, as in Beslan. But no such attacks have occured.
If there is one way that 9/11 was worse than imagined at the time, it is in the slow pace of reconstruction. The anniversary has led to a great deal of chest thumping about how Downtown as recovered. I’ll take my wife’s view on that one, since she still works there. Because it is still a mess of construction, the center of Downtown remains a miserable place to walk around, and as a result the level of business on (for example) Nassau Street has never recovered.
Part of Downtown’s lost vitality is due to its transition from a back office center with far more jobs to a residential and entrepreneurial area, a transition that actually started in the early 1990s. But Downtown will never truly recover until most of the construction stops and the streets cease to be torn up. It should never have taken this long. New York City Transit completely rebuilt a large section of the 1/9 subway line in less than one year. But then it was back to normal for New York, with endless delays, cost over-runs and infighting.
I was Downtown on 9/11, where I had worked for most of my career until 2004. I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge and down Flatbush Avenue, with the cloud of dust over me the entire time. The could blew straight down Flatbush Avenue and Ocean Parkway and out to sea. But on that day, I believed it must be covering the entire metropolitan area, whereas in fact in most of New York the sun was shining. I wonder if the anniversay will allow many people really remember what it was like, and what was believed, in the days and weeks after 9/11.