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Headage The Horror of Empty Space Since the streets west of Broadway reopened a couple of months ago, I’ve been seeing that big hole in the sky over Ground Zero once or twice a day. There’s not much to see of Ground Zero itself—it is, after all, a hole in the ground now, mostly invisible behind construction fencing. But over the past few weeks, it was the sheer absence of the two buildings that began to weigh upon me. I would pause once or twice a week, gazing up into the sky where 50,000 people should have been working and going about their ordinary office lives. Sometimes I could almost see them there, floating hundreds of feet above me…phantoms hovering near copy machines, computers and water coolers.On Monday, I took a different route, avoiding that empty space: up Trinity Place for a block, then right on Rector Street, left on Broadway, and right onto Pine. I didn’t do it purposefully, not really…I just wanted a change of scenery on my brief morning walk. But my day, somehow, was better for it. So I repeated the walk at the end of the day, and each day since. I never would have thought that there could be anything more terrible than the smoking piles of wreckage that loomed for months after the attacks; I was wrong. That hole in the sky is the worst thing. This thought was hauntingly echoed by Leslie Robertson, the structural engineer who designed the towers. It was his innovative design—long floor trusses anchored to the building’s core and to its outer skin—that allowed for so much open, column-free rental space on each floor. That design required the four escape stairwells to be grouped close together, in the core. To save weight, the stairwells were clad with fire-resistant drywall. When the planes hit, the drywall was blown away from all four stairwells in the North Tower and three stairwells in the South Tower. With the walls breached, the stairwells filled with smoke and fire. People above the impact floors had no way down. Robertson’s office is not far from mine, and used to look out upon his towering work. Now it looks out into the open grave that is Ground Zero. I saw Robertson on PBS last night. He said, “I cannot escape the people who died there. Even if I’m looking down into a pile of rubble it’s still to me somehow up there in the air burning and I cannot make that go away.” It wasn’t just his words that were affecting, but his eyes: in them, I could see every person who died that day. Leslie Robertson is a man bearing a terrible burden. I wanted to tell him, it’s not your fault. You’re a builder. You create things. You’re not responsible for the inhumanity of those who only know how to destroy. I don’t think that such words—true though they are—would bring any comfort to him. “The people above, obviously they were suffering terribly,” he said at one point. “The people who elected to take their own destiny in their hands by jumping…I mean…it must have been an incredibly awful place above the impact.” I can walk a different way to work, and use tall buildings to shield me from the haunted void. But for Leslie Robertson, every tall building is a reminder. Every day, two ghosts 1,300 feet high beseech him. And from within those towering apparitions, 3,000 more cry out.
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