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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone. With the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on Saturday, now we continue our coverage of things that 9/11 changed. In this segment, we'll talk about how 9/11 changed Lower Manhattan and Middletown, New Jersey. If that seems like a weird pairing, consider this, Middletown lost more of its residents in the World Trade Center attack than any locality, other than New York City itself, 37 people.

What happens to a bedroom community after that, right away and 20 years later? What about Lower Manhattan, which went from warzone, mass grave, cancer swamp to a global tourism destination, a hot residential community that it never was before the attacks, and still the epicenter of investment banking? All now in question again, by the way, because of the pandemic.

With me now are two guests, New York Times' architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman, he has an article called Rebuilding Ground Zero Was a Mess, Lower Manhattan Bloomed Anyway, and Tony Perry, the mayor of Middletown Township, a mostly white and affluent bedroom community of around 65,000 people, sort of at the top of the Jersey Shore, if you know the map, in Monmouth County. It seems to always make those lists of the safest places to live in America, but it wasn't a safe place to be from on 9/11. Michael Kimmelman, welcome back. Mayor Perry, welcome to WNYC.

Mayor Perry: Thanks.

Michael Kimmelman: Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Mayor Perry, since you're a first-timer, I'll start with you. Middletown lost the most people of any place outside New York City, 37. Why Middletown?

Mayor Perry: Well, Middletown, we're only a 42 square mile town, like you said, at the top of the Jersey Shore. Sandy Hook is a part of Middletown. We're only an hour south of New York City, and our train rides south of New York City. That led to obviously a big number of our residents working in, not just Lower Manhattan, but all across New York City. It's unfortunate that we have this distinction, obviously, the 37 individuals that we lost on September 11th, but this community is incredibly strong. We rallied then and we rally 20 years later.

Brian Lehrer: An hour by train, maybe much, much less than that by ferry, because for people who don't know the map of New Jersey, and just how close to the Trade Center that tip is, and how visually striking it is, I've been there, to look at Lower Manhattan from the tip of the town, which is really just south of the city, can you describe where Middletown is in relation to the World Trade Center, and who lived there on September 10th, 2001, and what the connection is with the Trade Center in that community?

Mayor Perry: Yes, sure. You're absolutely right, Brian. We have an incredible view from pretty much anywhere in our town of Lower Manhattan. Now we look out and we see that beautiful Freedom Tower gracing New York City. 20 years ago, obviously, these were the final days leading up to the last time that the 65,000, 67,000 people that called Middletown home would see those two towers flying high above New York City.

Our town, we're a very socioeconomically diverse town. We have folks from all walks of life. Whether they were on Wall Street or tradespeople who were going into the city like they did every single morning, whether by boat, by train, or driving in, Middletown, still to this day, has a large number of its residents that are based out in New York City for their jobs.

Brian Lehrer: Before we bring in Michael Kimmelman, it's hard enough for a community to process a violent death of one person from the community, how as a community did Middletown start to figure out how to process the violent deaths of 37 people in one swoop?

Mayor Perry: Well, the community had to. That was their only choice. Sadly, many of us watched what was happening in lower Manhattan live on television or minutes after it had happened on television. Knowing that your neighbor, your friend, your parent, your children work in lower Manhattan, not just in the World Trade Center but anywhere in New York City, you had to jump up and do something. That's what Middletown did.

That's why we've embodied the "Middletown will never forget" line that we saw everywhere, that the President recited, that elected officials from all across the country recited. Middletown said it was never going to forget those. You bring up a good point in how do you rally around 37 individuals? The minutes and hours after 9/11, you felt and had to cope with what you had saw on television. The immediate aftermath, the minutes and hours and days, weeks, months after September 11th, you continued not only to see the adoption of these families by perfect strangers.

We had an organization, their name was FAVOR, Friends Assisting Victims of Terror, who immediately began raising money, and before January of 2002, had raised over $500,000, was delivering Christmas gifts to the children that had lost parents, that were helping them pay their mortgages, helping them and assisting them in any way that they could. It was a testament that, like I said, the days and weeks and months following September 11th, 2001 was a testament to the American spirit and to the giving and thoughtfulness of every single Middletown resident and people all across this country.

Brian Lehrer: You used the phrase there that I'm going to ask you to come back to later in the segment, "never forget," which a lot of people say, and coincidentally, we didn't set you up for this. Coincidentally, after we're finished with you two, we're going to do a call-in for listeners pegged to this 20th anniversary, asking, "What does the phrase "never forget" mean to you?" Because we do hear it time and time again with respect to 9/11.

I'm going to give you a few minutes to think about that, and I'm going to circle back to you later on and ask you what "never forget" means to you and to the people of Middletown. Michael Kimmelman, to the title of your piece in The New York Times, Rebuilding Ground Zero Was a Mess, Lower Manhattan Bloomed Anyway, remind us, how was rebuilding Ground Zero a mess?

Michael Kimmelman: Well Brian, I think the general thing I'd say is, as Mayor Perry did, that the longer-term story is of a remarkable coming together and resilience. I think that's what we've seen as well in the face of COVID, but in those early months, especially, and a couple of years even after 9/11, there was a mosh pit of competing interests, political interests, and economic interests, and architectural proposals and a rush to rebuild, both as a symbol of the city's resilience, but also as an urgent matter to help the city recover economically, and that neighborhood recover.

The best part of it really was that there were a lot of ideas out there for how we might rethink, reboot, essentially, Lower Manhattan in ways that were consonant with how the city was already evolving and the city's economy was evolving. The push was, I should say, for a mix of very understandable and less understandable reasons, the push was to create a memorial, one that was befitting the scale of this calamity and also to rebuild the office towers which had been destroyed.

It was so much something like 60%, I think, of the grade-- They're called class A office space in lower Manhattan was destroyed, not just there but in the general area and so there was an urgent need to rethink the business of Lower Manhattan. As a result, I think that neighborhood, that immediate area ended up being, shall we say, less integrated with the rest of the city and seems, well, to me, but I don't think I'm alone, as in some ways, a missed opportunity.

Brian Lehrer: You're still critical of the immediate new World Trade Center area, but to the larger downtown neighborhood, you remind us of the doomsayers who predicted that no one would ever live or work in tall buildings or that neighborhood again, and yet the residential population in the district bloomed to around 70,000 people, which happens to be around the same number of people as live in Middletown, New Jersey. What happened to that fear, Michael?

Michael Kimmelman: Yes, it's an interesting lesson for today too. We're always predicting the city's doom. You're always getting people coming out and telling you how the city's one calamity after another is going to be the death knell. Sure, after 9/11, those are the predictions. No one would live in or work in a tall building again, and Lower Manhattan was finished. I think one of the most positive effects was that 9/11 did accelerate a process of decentralization the idea that the city could have multiple business centers. It wasn't so much the hub and spokes model with the old notion that everything had to be agglomerated in a bunch of skyscrapers downtown.

The transformations of boroughs like Brooklyn and Queens and the growth of business centers in those boroughs as well, I think is one knock-off effect of that event, but it is clearly true that those pundits were wrong. In fact, we saw the biggest construction boom in the history of skyscrapers. We were talking earlier about the residential skyscrapers and these multimillion-dollar-- the towers in the ether, but there's also been a large boom, of course, in office construction as well. I think we have to be wary of these predictions. It's also a sign of I think, of the city's fundamentally organic nature, the city adapts. Sometimes you can't see those changes for years later.

They take longer, and that's why I think the rush to rebuild and to decide what had to be done there was precipitous. It took the country 60 years almost to build a memorial to Abraham Lincoln. In many ways, the development of a site like Ground Zero could have had a slower process that honors the calamity, but also brought that particular part of the neighborhood back to life. In the meantime [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: You're right, Lower Manhattan's viability came to be seen as based on more than rebuilding the towers and adding a memorial more on sort of a more modern kind of urbanism to attract the highly educated workers who were increasingly gravitating to lively streets, rejuvenated neighborhoods, signature parks, bike lanes, and loads of restaurants, and entertainment. Listeners, if you moved to lower Manhattan, let's say the immediate World Trade Center area or below, not other parts of Lower Manhattan, not so much East Village, maybe things like that. If you move to the immediate World Trade Center area or below, since 9/11/2001, why did you choose to live there and how did the legacy of the attack affect your decision to move there, if at all? 646-435-7280.

Did you debate whether you'd be moving into a terrorist bullseye or whether you wanted to live near the scene of such a horror at all, even if you felt personally safe? Were there financial incentives from the government that helped make up your mind? If you moved to the World Trade Center area or below since 9/11/2001, tell us about why and how the legacy of the attack played into your thinking or not at 646-435-7280. Is anyone listening from Middletown, New Jersey right now? I just have to say Middletown, New Jersey because there's also a Middletown, New York and a Middletown, Connecticut in our listening area.

There are probably more Middletowns even in Springfield in the United States. Middletown, New Jersey folks, if you live there now, or lived there on 9/11, help us tell the story of how it's been to be in the town outside the five boroughs that was home to the most people killed in the 9/11 attacks. How did it change you or the community at 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, as we continue with New York Times' architecture critic Michael Kimmelman and Tony Perry, the mayor of Middletown. Here's Darcy in Manhattan. You're on WNYC. Darcy, you have connection to both places, right? Darcy, do we have you? Do I have your name right?

Darcy: Yes. Hello.

Brian Lehrer: Hi, there. You have a connection to both places, right?

Darcy: Yes, I do. I used to work in Manhattan at the Pan Am building and commute every morning and evening on the North Jersey Coast train line. My mother would pick me up at the train station when I was scheduled to get in. The saddest thing about that day is that all the cars were waiting to pick up people who never came home. They were waiting all night. The next day, there were so many cars left in the parking lot that people never came back to. That is just the most horrible part of it for me. Having commuted so many years, I just can't imagine those poor people.

Brian Lehrer: That's a searing memory, Darcy.

Darcy: Awful.

Brian Lehrer: I really appreciate you sharing it with us because from the standpoint of never forget, if we can go there, it's 20 years later. There's a whole generation of people who didn't see that train station that day, even if they live in Middletown so thank--

Darcy: It was such a beautiful day.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Darcy, anything else want to say?

Darcy: No. It was no picnic watching 9/11 from my roof in the East Village either. I saw everything. It was just awful. Have a nice day.

Brian Lehrer: You too. Thank you very much. I think that was an important call, Mayor Perry and I see that the memorial that you have in town is near the train station. Does that relate to the scene that Darcy was just describing, that horrible scene of people waiting for their loved ones who didn't come home from work?

Mayor Perry: Yes. Darcy's story is right on point in terms of why our World Trade Center Memorial Gardens sits adjacent to the train station. I was just thinking about it and going back and talking with former mayors and people who were around on September 11, 2001. It was the families in, I believe, February of 2002, who made the decision to have our memorial adjacent to that train station. Even today, I've presided over a number of 9/11 memorial anniversaries and I almost use the train as my indicator to when to begin because undoubtedly, every single year, there is a train heading in the northbound direction towards New York City.

The exact train that Darcy was just referring to and that horn will blow and you'll hear it go. I almost think of it as my indicator that I should start this ceremony to begin this remembrance.

Brian Lehrer: Let me go to another caller. It's Sonny in the financial district. You're on WNYC. Hi, Sonny? Thanks for calling in.

Sonny: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much. I'm a big fan.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. You moved downtown after 2001, right?

Sonny: Yes, I moved down in 2006 because I was pregnant and I was having [unintelligible 00:18:42] and I wanted to buy and it was more affordable than other [inaudible 00:18:45] in Manhattan at the time because it was at the height of the real estate bubble. I was not excited about moving down there.

Brian Lehrer: When you say you were not excited about moving down there, how much did that have to do with the legacy of 9/11?

Sonny: It was part of it because I lived a block from World Trade Center. For the longest time, there was this [inaudible 00:19:06] and I saw this every day. I had just given birth to a new baby, so it was definitely on my mind. It wasn't primary. I'm a New Yorker. I'm a physician that worked there at 9/11. It's part of who I am, but it was just a daily reminder of what happened. It was a little surreal at first, but I got used to it.

Brian Lehrer: You're still there, it sounds like? How did that change for you over time?

Sonny: I love my neighborhood because it's become very residential, as you mentioned earlier. It's just lots of neighborhoods in New York, it's got a very neighborhood feeling. Actually, for my son, I think it's a great area history-wise because it's the oldest part of Manhattan and I'm proud to be part of the rebuilding efforts of Lower Manhattan. I'm actually really proud to be down here because I think it says a lot about New York City, that we are able to come back and it's a beautiful neighborhood, so I love it. [unintelligible 00:20:13] One thing that I did men-- [crosstalk] Oh, go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: No, you go ahead.

Sonny: The reason why I called is because I just came back from South Korea to visit my family last night. I landed in Atlanta first and what struck me was I saw some people wearing some 9/11 commemorative t-shirts and, and they were with a group that was also wearing the thin blue line t-shirts which always makes me nervous, but I realized that 9/11 has been co-opted by some in a way that makes me feel very uncomfortable. As somebody who lives a block from 9/11, it made me even more angry as if we would ever forget. To me, in some ways-- and I think I was blinded to some of the ugliness that was associated with, I don't know, the--

Brian Lehrer: The response to 9/11?

Sonny: Yes. It still jarrs because I had been out of the country, I come back and it was the first thing that I see, is a 9/11 20 year anniversary as if it's something to celebrate with t-shirts. I've been saying to my friends, as somebody who lives down here and who was here for 9/11 and then who lived in the pandemic, I am very stressed about just all the media attention and the fake patriotism.

Brian Lehrer: I hear you.

Sonny: It's very hard right now.

Brian Lehrer: Also anticipating our next call in, what does the phrase 'never forget' signify to you?

Sonny: I can't forget. I see the World Trade Center building every day and when people say that, I think that some people, it's very benign, but for others, especially with the [unintelligible 00:22:01] I saw last night, I feel like it's some sort of angry vigilante, fake patriotism, hypermasculine, I don't know. It rubs me the wrong way-

Brian Lehrer: I hear all that.

Sonny: -depending on how it's used.

Brian Lehrer: Sonny, thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it and everything you said in there. Let's go to another caller from Middletown. Christine, you're on WNYC. Hi Christine?

Christine: Hi Brian. It's nice to be a part of this discussion. I listen to you whenever I can and I'm happy to be able to call in today. My memory, similar to the first caller you had. I do remember seeing the cars that were in the train stations for days after days. I actually was going to school in Newark at the time that the Trade Center attack had happened. Our classes at the University of Medicine and Dentistry were canceled and you could just look down Bergen Street and see the big cloud of smoke.

Because our classes were canceled, I drove home and went to one of the ferries because we had heard that people were just being shuttled off of Lower Manhattan and really didn't know where they were or how to get in touch with anyone. An uplifting memory that I have is that it was such a beautiful day and there was a really good swell at the ocean. Many of my friends actually took the day off to go surfing. That beauty of the day actually changed their lives because they weren't in the city at the time that the Trade Center had happened. That is something that I will never forget.

Also, my mom had told me that 9/11 for my generation is something like when JFK was assassinated for her generation. It's something that you'll never forget where you were. You'll never forget how you felt and the world will really never be the same going forward.

Brian Lehrer: Christine, thank you so much for that. Please call us again. Nicole in Park Slope, I see you moved to Battery Park in 2007, but then out. Hi Nicole?

Nicole: Hi. I lived in Soho when the twin towers collapsed and six years later, the prices in Soho obviously skyrocketed and Battery Park was giving great incentives for housing and rental in their apartment complexes. It was one month free, it started very low. That was one of the reasons that I decided to move to Battery Park. I also worked in the financial district so it was the best way.

Then fast forward to 2016, that same apartment tripled in price because Goldman Sachs opened up right next to me. Then it was the development that was done over there and it was unaffordable for what I was of getting in pricing. What truly moved me to Battery Park was the affordability of living downtown. Then fast forward to eight, nine years later, I couldn't afford anything. It was just not livable.

Brian Lehrer: What was your own relationship as someone who moved there in 2007 to the fact that it was in the shadow of the World Trade Center and the attacks had taken place at that site six years earlier? What do you think it was for the people who moved in and priced you out by 2016?

Nicole: As I said, I lived in Soho, so when the attacks happened, I could smell the burnt. I saw people running up north. I was slightly north of Canal Street right by West Broadway-

Brian Lehrer: You were there anyway.

Nicole: -so I could see that. It wasn't something that prevented me. I was already there. They had blocked entrance only for the residents. I'd seen people running up. I was smack in the middle of everything, but the problem was, and the reason that I say the prices went up was because Goldman Sachs opened up there, then there was-- fancy restaurants that opened up there. When I went there, it was an Applebee's and one of those standard hotels, but then the Conrad opened up. It just attracted a different type of people.

Brian Lehrer: More upscale. Nicole, thank you very much for your call. We have a few minutes left in this segment with our guests, Mayor Perry, the mayor of Middletown, New Jersey, which lost more people on 9/11, 37, than any other town that was not New York City itself and Michael Kimmelman, New York Times' architecture critic, as we're talking about this weird pairing of how 9/11 affected lower Manhattan and Middletown New Jersey.

In our last few minutes, let me touch on a couple of things with the two of you. Mayor Perry, Michael's talking about how Lower Manhattan I should say, flourished as a residential community, not just as a business district after the attacks. So much changed down there as our callers from Lower Manhattan are also helping to document. What about Middletown? As the place that suffered the most 9/11 losses other than the city, but a place that was already a suburb, a bedroom community, a commuter town by and large to the city, did people shy away from living there or what happened in terms of people coming and going? I see from the new census number is that the population is exactly the same.

Mayor Perry: It's almost exactly the same. Just about 600 additional people have moved in since 2010. Going back, I don't think that there's all that much difference in terms of the nuts and bolts of Middletown. It's very much still obviously a bedroom community. One made up of a number of different areas and villages and parts of our great town. We were founded in 1664, so Middletown has been around for over 350 years.

The changes that have occurred really came from, obviously, there were immediate changes in terms of people not wanting to go into New York City after September 11th, people not wanting to fly and travel. We all know those stories, but largely Middletown, it remains the great town it was pre 9/11 and post 9/11. You really don't see all that much. Obviously, we didn't have the destruction that New York City had. We had the emotional destruction of families though. That's what was built up in the character and the strength of our people grew, not so much our buildings.

Brian Lehrer: Just very briefly, now we have the pandemic leaving many of Manhattan's business blocks, certainly downtown feeling like ghost towns and many affluent residents moving out, how has the pandemic affected Middletown? Are more tech or finance sector workers who might have chosen to live in Lower Manhattan in the last 20 years trying to buy is there now, for example, and do you have a lot of work from home families who might be patronizing local businesses would have been patronizing the downtown businesses?

Mayor Perry: Yes. As I said at the beginning earlier Brian, Middletown's a very socioeconomically diverse town and we do have a large percent of the population due to the pandemic that was able to work from home, but you also have the folks that they're still firefighters, they're still tradespeople, they're still police officers that day in and day out go into wherever they may work, whether it's Manhattan or any of the suburbs, they're still going. We do have obviously a larger work-from-home population, and there's no doubt in part a small silver lining of that has been the benefit to our businesses that are able to capture those work from home individuals that frequent [unintelligible 00:30:56]

Brian Lehrer: Which the business district people in New York City are really concerned about in Manhattan. Michael, is the pandemic going to do to Lower Manhattan, what 9/11 failed to do?

Michael Kimmelman: Well, I certainly hope not. One of your callers mentioned something about incentives that at various parts of the city with rents and it's worth pointing out that one of the ways that residents were induced to stay and then more to come was that there was an influx of hundreds of millions of dollars through things like the federally funded residential grant program and there was-- throught Liberty bonds to build new housing. There was a really a mix of supportive programs as well as just the changes in the neighborhood.

I think that's really going to be necessary now too. It's a very similar crisis, but not to end on a bleak note, but I do believe that the neighborhood will recover. I think the two things though really quickly that we have not dealt with in terms of Lower Manhattan and certainly the recovery from 9/11 didn't, one of them was the climate issues, which we now see are really the larger existential threats to the neighborhood. The other is what your caller said, which is just the lack of affordable housing. That was the desire to bring residents there, but not to build affordable housing.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Mayor Perry, I set you up for this earlier. I'm going to ask you to make the transition into our next segment. You used the phrase, "never forget" with respect to the people of Middletown in 9/11, what does "never forget" mean to you?

Mayor Perry: Brian, I have a one-year-old daughter and I think what never forget means to me is, I was 11 years old when September 11th occurred. I can picture it exactly as I could then, as I saw it then. I look at how my dad at that time struggled to explain the events of September 11th to an 11-year-old and to an eight-year-old. The history books that are written today are not going to be able to capture the emotions that all of us felt who watched it happen live and watched it happen on our TVs.

I think never forget means to me is ensuring that my one-year-old daughter understands not just the tragedy that happened, but the patriotism, the love, and the heroism that we witnessed, because that's what we should be defining 9/11 as, is that heroism that we saw, that patriotism that we felt and that's what never forget means to me.

Brian Lehrer: Mayor Perry, the mayor of Middletown, New Jersey, which lost more people, 37, than any place outside New York City itself in the World Trade Center attacks and Michael Kimmelman, New York Times' architecture critic, who has an article called Rebuilding Ground Zero was a Mess, Lower Manhattan Bloomed Anyway. Thank you both so much for giving us some time on this September 9th. Thank you very, very much.

Mayor Perry: Thanks, Brian.

Michael Kimmelman: Thanks, Brian

 

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