After Attacks Changed the World, The Recovery Changed a City

Congenitally contentious, Bill Dobbs is a war opponent, a fighter for gay rights and a tilter at windmills. He might be expected to cast a querulous eye at the memory of the twin towers, those monuments to David Rockefeller's capitalist vision. But he is also a New York chauvinist, and he admired the towers' brassy size and yearns for something like them to rise again.

"I loved those towers -- when the other buildings quit, those two just kept going," he says. "Look across the harbor from Staten Island -- God, it's horrible to see our skyline now."

Then there is the air. So many firefighters and police officers and paramedics and construction workers and good Samaritans pawed through the wreckage and tended to the rescuers and vacuumed out the high-rises that still stood. Andrziy Nereci remembers feeling like a hero. On the edge of Freedom Plaza, on the south end of Ground Zero, this Polish man with a bushy blonde mustache points to the skyscrapers he wiped clean of toxic dust: the Verizon building and Bank of America. He was handed a flimsy paper mask, he knew it wasn't enough.

"I risked my life and health," he said. "When we went to the 15th floor, the building could have fallen down; we didn't know."

Now he and thousands wheeze and cough. Mount Sinai Medical Center studied 9,500 people who helped at Ground Zero and other sites, and concluded in a report released this week that seven of 10 suffer from chronic lung illness contracted while breathing the post-9/11 air. This is the same air that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proclaimed safe. Federal officials also suspended workplace safety regulations for the cleanup sites.

Nereci overstayed his visa; he is not a legal immigrant. City and state officials have resisted paying lots of health bills for workers, but he is the lowest of the low. "In some sense, I regret it," he says. "If I had not worked there, I'd have a life."

Post-2001 New York has not been terribly kind to the $51,000-median-family-income New Yorker. In the first months, city and state officials held "listening sessions," and there was talk of parks and affordable housing.

Plans for parks remain, but it would take a microscope to find affordable housing in downtown Manhattan. Out of $2 billion in federal aid expended at in the neighborhoods around Ground Zero, officials have created 77 units of subsidized housing.

By contrast, bonds issued for redevelopment went to 13 new luxury residential buildings with 4,468 market-rate units, including one that was in the works before the attacks. The state also handed out $539 million in business-recovery grants. Hundreds of millions went to large corporations. Exactly $62 million went to owners of small shops and food stores.

Bettina Damiani lives in Brooklyn and keeps a sharp eye on downtown Manhattan for Good Jobs New York, which has scrutinized the spending. She sees an age-old New York story playing out. "Well, we certainly reinforced the status quo, which is that if the real estate industry is doing well, by golly, we all are," she said. "Here's my motto for downtown: Bring free-market capitalism back to Lower Manhattan."

Less clear is what the years since have done to the ephemera that make up a city's soul. Sarah Fisch is a classic New Yorker, in that she arrived in 2000 from somewhere else -- Texas, in her case -- and is pretty intense about her new home. After the attacks, her little subculture of poets and performance artists flowered.

"They were chomping at the bit," she said. "People performed out of a need to escape and wanting to connect with one another."

Then rents rose so high in Lower Manhattan, the tiny theaters and poetry clubs shuttered. People began to move, to Seattle, Yonkers, wherever. Fisch was broke and sick, and she saw the makeshift memorials in Union Square every day as she walked to one temporary job or another.

"It made me think I'm cannon fodder. I'm the girl in the office while everyone else is out having corporate breakfast," she says.

This autumn she began her second semester of classes. No more starving artist; she wants a PhD so she can get a steady teaching job. She too is the determined face of post-9/11 New York.