{"id":203,"date":"2020-09-12T20:57:06","date_gmt":"2020-09-12T11:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hnaau.com\/blog\/?p=203"},"modified":"2021-04-12T12:08:06","modified_gmt":"2021-04-12T03:08:06","slug":"hymn-for-new-york-19-years-from-911","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hnaau.com\/blog\/hymn-for-new-york-19-years-from-911\/","title":{"rendered":"Hymn for New York, 19 years from 911"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today is September 11th 2020, 19 years have passed since that event.\u3000In the summer of 2001, I was about to move to NY from Boston. I was finishing to work at the site office of Boston Convention Center, transferring to Rafael Vinoly Architects in NY and busy for preparing moving such as looking for room and etc. It was probably last weekend of August when I was finished packing up my little luggage and moved to new apartment at Upper West Side in Manhattan. During looking for an apartment in NY, the real estate agent enthusiastically recommended me an old apartment in Tribeca with Rent Stabilization. The room was very cool, a kind of loft style with high ceiling space. Something exactly like you can see in some movies of success stories in NY, for example “Big” of Tom Hanks. Rent stabilization is a legal guarantee that the rent will not raise for a certain period of time. It aims to protect the residence rights of the inhabitants rooted in that neighborhood and contributes to preserve historic city, especially like in NY. To exemplify it very frankly, the purpose is to protect the everyday life of common residents in Lower Manhattan and to fight against the soulless urban development of money-making-first real estate agencies, as Jane Jacobs and other folks have tried. Tribeca is the area where many cultural figures such as artists and university professors live. For example, Ryuichi Sakamoto, a Japanese composer, has a residence in Tribeca. The room in Tribeca was a bit over budget, so I have signed to apartment in Upper West.<\/p>\n

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\nView from the window of room on the 10th floor of the apartment at West 100 Street, looking north, Columbia University campus behind the tall apartments. I often lied to friends, “I can see Central Park and the Hudson River from my room,” but it was half true that “if” I leaned out from the window, I could actually see Central Park on the right and the Hudson River on the left. This apartment is also quite old, but it seems that it still exists.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Photo in December 2002<\/p>\n

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On the morning of September 11th, I was following unfamiliar commuting steps; walk about 3 minutes from the apartment at the intersection of W100 Street and Broadway, take the red line of the subway at the nearest station of 96 Street and get off at Houston Street, <\/span><\/span>then I was walking to the office on 50 Vandam Street. When went up to the ground from basement, I noticed the street was noisy. <\/span><\/span>A fire broke out at the World Trade Center (WTC), about 20 blocks away, and there revealed a large hole in the tower when taking a close look. At first, everyone was wondering it was an accident or something. We couldn’t understand that someone intentionally smashed the plane until “second” passenger plane flew very low over our heads, I saw the plane, and went straight down to the WTC. For the time being, I got into the office, watching the TV screen. In the broadcast, someone explained “Such modern skyscraper will never collapse” and nobody could expect that it would happen next. However, the camera perfectly captured that WTC twin towers were falling down to the ground very easily. The video image of the TV was exactly like that of a movie. Although it endured the impact of a passenger plane crash, due to the heat-sensitive structure of steel frame skyscraper, the failure of sprinklers cause to collapse “beautifully” like traditional Japanese Toy Game, DARUMA<\/em> OTOSHI<\/em> (DARUMA<\/em> Doll Drop). What happened after the collapse is exactly as you know of. Thanks to about 2km distance, we could avoid direct blast. However the black dust or ashes, like a huge cumulonimbus cloud, was slowly approaching, then I had to evacuate from the office.<\/p>\n