People who work and earn good livings lived in the expensive apartments ringing the World Trade Center.[twin towers] After the WTC came down, other buildings were evacuated for safety sake. Some of those had windows shattered. All of those close by had layers of soot covering everything. For the first time, many people with five figure salaries were left homeless.
Some were able to find space in uptown motels and hotels. Others spent their days with their families in other parts of New York. Yet, a large number had no other resources. Their jobs were gone. Their homes were unliveable. They couldn't even return to obtain necessary supplies. My niece volunteered at the Armory where these new homeless found shelter. They slept in large rooms on cots, and were served food donated by the Red Cross and other organizations. "Women in designer clothes lined up for blankets and pillows," my niece told me. "It was like looking at a film from some foreign country where the people are in refugee camps."
Mayor Guiliane moved his forces quickly to help those in need. As soon as buildings were declared secure, crews of hazmat workers entered and started the lengthy job of cleanup. People were allowed back to pick up their belongings until their apartments were ready to be lived in again.
A reporter interviewed some of the people who milled around the disaster site. "I'm homeless," a city man said. He was dressed in a sweat suit. "My building is closed." He was obviously stunned and numb. "My home is a cot at the armory," he said, with disbelief.
The country pulled together to help those in New York and Washington. It was the scenes in New York that gripped us because of the sheer enormity of the lives lost. Some of the apartment buildings were recopened, but others had to be brought down because they suffered such great structural damage. New Yorkers found themselves scrambling to find a place to live. Everything they owned was destroyed, gone to rubble. The lucky ones still had jobs in one of the donated spaces in Manhattan, but many had no home, no furniture, no belongings, and no job.
It was a wake up call for the nation. The compassion of strangers reached out from as far away as California and the state of Washington to embrace those who lost so much. It was a taste of homelessness New Yorkers will soon not forget. As one man said as he returned to his apartment, "I'll never look at the homeless the same way again."
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