A FOREIGNER IN N E W YORK
STORIES OF TALL BUILDINGS
As we returned from Ellis Island, we stood at the front of the ferry again to observe the Manhattan skyline. It was spectacular but there was something missing - the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre. "I've never been here before," I said, "but I've seen this
view too many times on TV and in the movies. It's not the same without the Twin Towers." I looked at Elaine. Her eyes were filling with tears and I felt stupid for mentioning this. "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to upset you." "It's OK," she replied. "It's just that it's still a shock to me. I feel like a part of me has been amputated. When I look there, I still expect to see the Twin Towers." We were silent for the rest of the trip back to Manhattan. "Ground Zero is pretty close to here," Elaine said as we got off the ferry. "Would you like to see it before going to the Empire State Building?" "Sure," I replied. It's hard for me to describe what I felt while I stood in front of the enormous crater that is Ground Zero. Everything seemed so surrealistic! It was hard to believe that this was where the two majestic towers had stood. I remembered the horrible images on TV, but it was still hard to assimilate that so many people had died at that place. "I know someone who was here and survived," I finally said to Elaine. "You do? Tell me what happened," she said. "He's a friend of mine," I told her. "He's a lawyer who was sent by his law firm to work for their New York offices. He worked in the tower that was hit by the second plane. He told me that his extreme punctuality saved him." "What do you mean?" Elaine asked. "He had to be at a meeting at 9.00 am, so he got to his building 15 minutes early," I explained. "The first tower was hit a few minutes after he got to his desk. It took him 20 minutes to walk down the stairs from his office on the 40th floor. When he got to the street entrance, he saw that big parts of the plane that hit the first tower had fallen right in front of the main door of his building. Those parts would have killed him if he had arrived at the building a few minutes later."
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30 million people passed through there! I was really impressed by the photographs of the immigrants that were on the walls. Their eyes showed a mixture of hope, fear and determination. Most of them brought very little with them. "They left everything behind," Elaine said as we looked at picture after picture. "They left their countries, their cultures, their friends and their families for a new life in a new and unknown place. It's hard for us, who can travel anywhere in the world on a plane, to imagine what it was like for them. When my great-grandfather said goodbye to his mother in Naples, he knew that he would probably never see her again." Each room that we walked through seemed to have its own particular story. "I've read that almost every language in the world was spoken here daily," Elaine said as we walked through the great hall. This is where the immigrants went through the final stage before they were permitted to enter the United States. We passed a place called the 'kissing post'. This was where the immigrants who were going to stay in New York City were reunited with family members who had already immigrated there. "The people who passed through Ellis Island helped make this the great city that it is today," Elaine said as we walked to the ferry for our return trip to the city. "The only thing that they wanted was the opportunity to work and to make a better future for their children." CHAPTER 4
STORIES OF TALL BUILDINGS