“Our skyline will rise again,” New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani announced to the crowd gathered at Yankee Stadium for a prayer service after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.
And they cheered. Loudly.
New Yorkers have become defiant in the weeks after two planes crumpled their tallest buildings. There’s an energy in the air, an electricity that wasn’t there before.
While the heroic stories are endless – from firefighters and police, to the New Yorkers who stood in line for hours to donate a pint of blood, to the volunteers who sifted through rubble, one bucket at a time – it’s the everyday people who are lifting the city’s spirits.
“It was inspiring,” said Glenn Blain, a newspaper reporter who was at ground zero two days after the strikes, where people lining the police barricades were cheering as the dump trucks hauled debris away from the piles of rubble.
New Yorkers have a new respect for one another, too. Someone will hand someone else a plastic bag for produce at the grocery store. Drivers, normally pushy and selfish, are letting cars merge with ease. Pedestrians look each other confidently in the eye.
When President George W. Bush stood amid New York’s broken buildings and called through a bullhorn: “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,” the crowd shouted: “USA! USA!” But even before that, New Yorkers had been shouting “NYC! NYC!” in their hearts.
Just two days after the planes hit, the streets of downtown Manhattan were desolate. But in the eerie stillness and dark of night, two men were climbing a traffic light pole, precariously balancing and dangling a United States flag – trying to hang it.
Sure, the entire country has been blazing red, white and blue, wearing it on their T-shirts, hanging flags from their porches, and attaching them to the antennae of their cars. But as drivers pass over the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan, noticing the empty void in their skyline, they are greeted with a mammoth flag hanging from the bridge’s superstructure. It’s bigger, and, it seems, better, than the others.
Before, New Yorkers seemed too aloof to appreciate Old Glory. Now they admire its significance, and respect it.
Mayor Giuliani has been an inspiration to the country, but especially to the citizens of his city. He has been compared to Winston Churchill, and been called “presidential”, and there has been talk of extending his term, which would end on Dec. 31, 2001.
“To those who say our city will never be the same, I say you are right,” the Mayor told New Yorkers at the prayer service. “It will be better.”
And they cheered. Louder than ever before.
