Abstract
This chapter studies New York’s post-9/11 agency. In the wake of the terrorist attacks, our analysis shows how New York went through three stages—woundedness, resilience, and arrogance—that have shaped its personality in powerful ways. After nearly a decade of organizational disputation about how to remember, the New York Police Department emerged as the dominant actor in the shaping of New York’s post-9/11 character as a twenty-first-century police city.
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Notes
- 1.
Stephen Brill, “Is America Any Safer?” The Atlantic, last modified September 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2016/08/the-atlantics-september-issue-fifteen-years-after-911-1-trillion-dollars-spent-are-we-any-safer/495047/.
- 2.
Jack Rosenthal, “The Way We Live Now: 9-1-02: On Language; 9/11,” The New York Times, last modified September 1, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/01/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-9-1-02-on-language-9-11.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fjack-rosenthal&action=click&contentCollection=undefined®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=search&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection.
- 3.
New York Magazine Staff, “9/11 by the Numbers,” New York Magazine, last modified September 2014, https://nymag.com/news/articles/wtc/1year/numbers.htm.
- 4.
Clyde Haberman, “NYC; Twilight Zone for ZIP Code At Ground Zero,” The New York Times, last modified November 14, 2003, paragraphs 1, 8, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/14/nyregion/nyc-twilight-zone-for-zip-code-at-ground-zero.html.
- 5.
Ann Wagner, “Recreating Cities as Bodies of Power, Knowledge and Space,” International Journal of Semiotic Law 32 (2019): 527–531.
- 6.
William Langewiesche, American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center (New York, NY: North Point Press, 2002), 75.
- 7.
David Friend, “The Man in the Window,” Vanity Fair, last modified September 1, 2006, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2006/09/friend-excerpt 200609.
- 8.
See Marc Redfield, “Virtual Trauma: The Idiom of 9/11,” Diacritics 37, no. 1 (2007): 69.
- 9.
Julie Salamon, “Art/Architecture; Reliving 9/11: Too Much Too Soon?,” The New York Times, May 12, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/12/arts/art-architecture-reliving-9-11-too-much-too-soon.html.
- 10.
Jennifer Pollard, “Seen, Seared and Sealed: Trauma and the Visual Presentation of September 11,” Health, Risk & Society 13, no. 1 (2011): 81–101.
- 11.
Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010).
- 12.
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 342.
- 13.
Rudolph Giuliani, “Giuliani, Go shopping,” ABC, Filmed September 2011. YouTube, 17, Posted July 2, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jx1QZskGFg.
- 14.
George W. Bush, “At O’Hare, President Says ‘Get On Board,” The White House, September 27, 2001, last modified 11 June, 2019, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010927-1.html.
- 15.
Redfield, “Virtual Trauma.”
- 16.
Taylor, Archive, 244.
- 17.
Redfield, “Virtual Trauma,” 69.
- 18.
Nancy Foner, ed., Wounded City: The Social Impact of 9/11 (New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 2005).
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Rosemary Barberet, “The Right to Commemoration and “Ideal Victims”: The Puzzle of Victim Dissatisfaction with State-led Commemoration After 9/11 and 3/11,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 11, no. 2 (2018): 219–242.
- 21.
Ibid., 8.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Wagner, “Recreating Cities.”; Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (New York: Verso, 2011); Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986).
- 24.
James Young, The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss and the Spaces Between (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018).
- 25.
Joshua Gunn, “Mourning Speech: Haunting and the Spectral Voices of Nine-Eleven,” Text and Performance Quarterly 24, no. 2 (2004): 91–114.
- 26.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 93.
- 27.
Johnson, Paul Christopher. “Savage Civil Religion,” Numen 52, no. 3 (2005): 289–324; Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (University of Texas Press, 2003).
- 28.
See, for example, Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010).
- 29.
Marita Sturken, “The Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero,” American Ethnologist 31, no. 3 (2004): 311–325.
- 30.
Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 164.
- 31.
Sturken, “The Aesthetics of Absence,” 314. See Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
- 32.
Patricia Yaeger, “Rubble as Archive, or 9/11 as Dust, Debris, and Bodily Vanishing,” in Trauma at Home: After 9/11 ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2003), 191.
- 33.
Sturken, Tourists of History, 178.
- 34.
Anthony Depalma, “Landfill, Park … Final Resting Place?” The New York Times, last modified June 14, 2004, paragraph 7, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/14/nyregion/landfill-park-final-resting-place-plans-for-fresh-kills-trouble-9-11-families.html.
- 35.
Lucy R. Lippard, “New York Comes Clean: The Controversial Story of the Fresh Kills Dumpsite,” The Guardian, last modified October 28, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/oct/28/new-york-comes-clean-fresh-kills-staten-island-notorious-dumpsite.
- 36.
Marita Sturken, Tourists of History, 208.
- 37.
See Darrel Enck-Wanzer, “Trashing the System: Social Movement, Intersectional Rhetoric, and Collective Agency in the Young Lords Organization’s Garbage Offensive,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 2 (2006): 174–201.
- 38.
See Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2011); Martin Arboleda, “The Biopolitical Production of the City: Urban Political Ecology in the Age of Immaterial Labor,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33 (2015): 35–51.
- 39.
See, for example, Puspa Damai, “Messianic-City: Ruins, Refuge, and Hospitality in Derrida,” Discourse 27, no. 2–3 (Fall 2005): 68–94.
- 40.
Susan Edelman, “2,500 Ground Zero Workers Have Cancer,” New York Post, last modified, July 27, 2014, http://nypost.com/2014/07/27/cancers-among-ground-zero-workers-skyrocketing/.
- 41.
Francesca Lyman, “Anger Builds Over EPA’s 9/11 Report,” NBC News, last modified September 11, 2003, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3076626/ns/health-your_environment/t/anger-builds-over-epas-report/#.V0NmgGZCyi4.
- 42.
Susan Edelman, “Nearly 10K People Have Gotten Cancer from Toxic Dust,” New York Post, last modified August 11, 2018, https://nypost.com/2018/08/11/nearly-10k-people-have-gotten-cancer-from-toxic-9-11-dust/.
- 43.
Depalma, City of Dust.
- 44.
Joanna Walters, “Former EPA Head Admits She Was Wrong to Tell New Yorkers Post-9/11 Air Was Safe,” The Guardian, last modified September 10, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/10/epa-head-wrong-911-air-safe-new-york-christine-todd-whitman.
- 45.
Anthony DePalma, “Air Masks at Issue in Claims of 9/11 Illnesses,” The New York Times, last modified June 5, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/nyregion/05masks.html.
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Corey Adwar, “Why NYC Cops and Firefighters Keep Getting Into Massive Brawls,” Business Insider, last modified April 21, 2014, paragraph 2, https://www.businessinsider.com/the-nypd-and-fdny-have-a-long-history-of-disputes-2014-4.
- 49.
The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Government Printing Office, 2011), 553–554.
- 50.
John Farmer, “Saving Our Lives and Protecting Their Turf,” The New York Times, last modified May 15, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/opinion/saving-our-lives-and-protecting-their-turf.html.
- 51.
Ibid., paragraph 7.
- 52.
Several other communication errors compromised duties such as different kinds of technologies, and frequencies, of the NYPD, FDNY, and EMS, leading to added confusion about response. For instance, one of the Ground Zero commander’s, Deputy Fire Chief Charles Blaich said the FDNY “lost control of who was going into the buildings” and “rescuers inside the towers failed to receive information from a police helicopter flying above that might have saved lives.” Alan Brown, “One Year Later: World Trade Center Tragedy Prompts Reassessment Response,” EHS Today, last modified October 24, 2002, paragraph 4, https://www.ehstoday.com/emergency-management/article/21914642/one-year-later-world-trade-center-tragedy-prompts-reassessment-of-response.
- 53.
Rachel Kapochunas, “Firefighters’ Union Takes Ax to Giuliani’s 9/11 Acclaim,” The New York Times, last modified July 12, 2007, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/cq/2007/07/12/cq_3065.html.
- 54.
Farmer, “Saving Our Lives,” paragraph 2.
- 55.
Ibid., paragraph 3.
- 56.
Ibid., paragraph 1.
- 57.
Ibid., paragraph 2.
- 58.
As we note elsewhere those types of temporary powers have a way of turning into permanent powers.
- 59.
J. David Goodman, “Critics of Police Would Make New Yorkers Less Safe, Bloomberg Says,” The New York Times, last modified April 30, 2013, paragraphs 4, 13, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/nyregion/bloomberg-says-critics-of-police-would-make-new-yorkers-less-safe.html.
- 60.
Craig Horowitz, “The NYPD’s War on Terror,” New York Magazine, last modified January 24, 2003, paragraph 9, https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/features/n_8286/.
- 61.
Ibid.
- 62.
Michael R. Bloomberg, Nicholas Scoppetta and Salvatore J. Cassano, “Terrorism and Disaster Preparedness Strategy,” Fire Department City of New York, 2007, http://www.nyc.gov/html/fdny/pdf/events/2007/tdps/terrorism%20strategy_complete.pdf.
- 63.
Brown, “One Year Later,” paragraph 31.
- 64.
See Brill, “Is America Any Safer?”
- 65.
See Benjamin Forest and Juliet Johnson, “Security and Atonement: Controlling Access to the World Trade Center Memorial, Cultural Geographies 20, no. 3 (2012): 405–411.
- 66.
The New York Times Staff, “The Reckoning: America and the World a Decade After 9/11,” The New York Times, last modified September 11, 2011, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/sept-11-reckoning/viewer.html?hp=.
- 67.
Theresa Ann Donofrio, “Ground Zero and Place-Making Authority: The Conservative Metaphors in 9/11 Families’ “Take Back the Memorial” Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 2 (2010): 150–169.
- 68.
Ibid.
- 69.
For an example of this kind of post 9/11 rhetoric see Editorial Board, Winston-Salem Journal, “Our View: Remembering 9/11,” Winston-Salem Journal, last modified September 10, 2019, https://www.journalnow.com/opinion/editorials/our-view-remembering/article_66f47918-5e70-5a6d-a018-c31d48347552.html.
- 70.
John Avlon, “The Resilient City: New York After 9/11,” Daily Beast, last modified September 10, 2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-resilient-city-new-york-after-911.
- 71.
Hamilton Bean, Lisa Keränen, and Margaret Durfy, “‘This is London’: Cosmopolitan Nationalism and the Discourse of Resilience in the Case of the 7/7 Terrorist Attacks,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (2011): 432; for more on resilience see Bridie McGreavy, “Resilience as Discourse,” Environmental Communication 10, no. 1 (2016): 104–121; Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Contaminated Children: Debating the Banality, Precarity, and Futurity of Chemical Safety,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 1, no. 2 (2014), https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/resilience.1.2.004?seq=1.
- 72.
Nicholas S. Paliewicz, “Bent but Not Broken: Remembering Vulnerability and Resiliency at the National September 11 Memorial Museum,” Southern Communication Journal 82, no. 1 (2017): 1–14.
- 73.
Bean et al., “This Is London,” 429.
- 74.
Joseph Pfeifer, “Adaptive Resilience Emerges From 9/11 and the 15-Years Following,” Homeland and Security Affairs: The Journal of the NPS Center for Homeland Defense and Security, last modified September 2016, https://www.hsaj.org/articles/11954.
- 75.
Brill, “Is America Any Safer?”
- 76.
9/11 Commission Report, 336.
- 77.
Brill, “Is America Any Safer?”
- 78.
William Finnegan, “The Terrorism Beat,” The New Yorker, last modified July 18, 2005, paragraph 133, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/07/25/the-terrorism-beat.
- 79.
Ibid., paragraph 149.
- 80.
Ibid., paragraph 130.
- 81.
Ibid.
- 82.
Setha M. Low, Dana H. Taplin, Mike Lamb, “Battery Park City: An Ethnographic Field Study of the Community Impact of 9/11,” Urban Affairs Review 40, no. 5 (2005): 655–656.
- 83.
Ibid, 659.
- 84.
Ibid., 660.
- 85.
Elizabeth Greenspan, “Daniel Libeskind’s World Trade Center Changer of Heart,” The New Yorker, last modified August 28, 2013, https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/daniel-libeskinds-world-trade-center-change-of-heart.
- 86.
Fredric U. Dicker, “Pataki Pits Freedom vs. W. Side$tadium,” New York Post, May 9, 2005, last modified June 11, 2019, https://nypost.com/2005/05/09/pataki-pits-freedom-vs-w-side-tadium/.
- 87.
Glenn Collins and David W. Dunlap, “Many Demands on New Tower at Ground Zero,” The New York Times, last modified June 7, 2005, paragraph 14, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/07/nyregion/many-demands-on-new-tower-at-ground-zero-seeking-better-security-a.html.
- 88.
Larry Celona and Bruce Golding, “WTC Neighbors Rip Fortress Mentality,” New York Post, last modified November 13, 2013, paragraph 1, https://nypost.com/2013/11/13/wtc-neighbors-rip-fortress-mentality/.
- 89.
Ron Rosenbaum, “Ground Zero Hype: Is Giant Skyscraper a Freedom Folly?” The Observer, last modified June 27, 2005, https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=Ground+zero+hype%3A+Is+Giant+Skyscraper+a+Freedom+Folly%3F.
- 90.
Ibid.
- 91.
Finnegan, “The Terrorism Beat.”
- 92.
David Dunlap, “Venting Ideas, Then Hiding Them, Turns Out to Be a Tall Order,” The New York Times, last modified September 15, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/15/nyregion/venting-ideas-then-hiding-them-turns-out-to-be-a-tall-order.html.
- 93.
Frankie Edozien and Michael White, “Still Just a Big ‘Zero’-Gov: Tower Redesign will Stick to WTC-Site Plan,” New York Post, last modified May 7, 2005, https://nypost.com/2005/05/07/still-just-a-big-zero-gov-tower-redesign-will-stick-to-wtc-site-plan/.
- 94.
Adam Brodsky, “Our Only Real Security,” New York Post, last modified May 15, 2005, https://nypost.com/2005/05/15/our-only-real-security/.
- 95.
Judith Miller and Alex Armlovich, “The New York Police Force That Doesn’t Work,” City Journal, last modified Autumn 2016, paragraph 5, https://www.city-journal.org/html/new-york-police-force-doesnt-work-14784.html.
- 96.
Ibid., paragraph 6.
- 97.
Mike Pride, “Outing the NYPD’s Surveillance of Muslims,” Colby Magazine, last modified Fall 2013, paragraph 1, https://www.colby.edu/magazine/outing-the-nypds-surveillance-of-muslims/.
- 98.
Ibid.
- 99.
David Dunlop, “Residents Suing to Stop ‘Fortresslike’ Plan for World Trade Center,” The New York Times, last modified November 13, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/nyregion/residents-suing-to-stop-fortresslike-security-plan-for-world-trade-center.html?ref=nyregion.
- 100.
For more on organizational disputes swirling around Ground Zero, see Lynne B. Sagalyn, Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan (Oxford University Press, 2016).
- 101.
See Bean et al., “This Is London,” 2011.
- 102.
Forest and Johnson, “Security and Atonement.”
- 103.
Ibid., 409.
- 104.
Elinor Light, “Visualizing Homeland: Remembering 9/11 and the Production of the Surveilling Flâneur,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 16, no. 6 (2016): 538
- 105.
McHendry Jr, George F. “The Re (d) active force of the Transportation Security Administration,” Criticism 57, no. 2 (2015): 211–233; George F. McHendry Jr, “Thank You for Participating in Security: Engaging Airport Security Checkpoints via Participatory Critical Rhetoric,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 16, no. 6 (2016): 548–559.
- 106.
Ibid.
- 107.
Bradford Vivian, Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture (Oxford University Press, 2017).
- 108.
Ibid.
- 109.
Graham, Cities Under Siege, xiii.
- 110.
Ibid., xiv.
- 111.
Stefan Kipfer and Kanishka Goonewardena, “Colonization and the New Imperialism: On the Meaning of Urbicide Today,” Theory & Event 10, no. 2 (2007): 3.
- 112.
Finnegan, “The Terrorism Beat,” paragraph 34.
- 113.
Ibid., paragraph 131.
- 114.
Charles M. Blow, “The Notorious Michael R. Bloomberg,” The New York Times, last modified February 12, 2020, paragraph 17, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/opinion/michael-bloomberg-stop-frisk.html.
- 115.
Philip V. McHarris, “Should Mike Bloomberg’s Stop-and-Frisk Record Disqualify Him?” The Washington Post, last modified February 16, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/16/should-mike-bloombergs-stop-and-frisk-record-disqualify-him/.
- 116.
Joshua Rothman, “New York City Crime in the Nineties,” The New Yorker, last modified December 5, 2012, paragraph 15, https://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/new-york-city-crime-in-the-nineties.
- 117.
Brill, “Is America Any Safer?”
- 118.
See Donofrio, “Place-Making Authority.”
- 119.
Erik Kain, “Police Militarization in the Decade Following 9/11,” Forbes, last modified September 12, 2011, https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/09/12/police-militarization-in-the-decade-following-911/#fad4afc5d7e6.
- 120.
Arthur Rizer and Joseph Hartman, “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police,” The Atlantic, last modified November 7, 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/how-the-war-on-terror-has-militarized-the-police/248047/.
- 121.
See Graham, Cities Under Siege.
- 122.
Kain, “Police Militarization.”
- 123.
Rizer and Hartman, “War on Terror Has Militarized.”
- 124.
Graham, Cities Under Siege, 8.
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Hasian, M.A., Paliewicz, N.S. (2020). The Fortification of New York City: Post-9/11 Memorialization and the Localization of the War on Terror. In: Memory and Monument Wars in American Cities. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53771-5_2
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