May 31, 2002
Editorial: The Last Steel Column
Manhattan's skyscrapers have always been an emblem of the city's power. But there has never been a more powerful emblem of New York's strength than the way in which the remains of the World Trade Center were taken away. On Tuesday, workers at ground zero cut down the last piece of structural steel from the ruins, wrapped it in black muslin and an American flag, and prepared it for removal during a ceremony today.
When, late on the morning of Sept. 11, observers in helicopters first peered through the smoke and ash from high overhead, they could barely take in what they saw. The clean outlines of the towers and the bare expanse of the plaza had been replaced by a chaos so disorienting that, looking back, we still scarcely know what to make of it. The first estimates concerned only the numbers of dead and living. The question of how long it would take to clean up the site, to remove those billions of pounds of debris, seemed almost unanswerable.
No one expected that it could ever happen as quickly as it has, three months ahead of schedule, under budget and without one serious injury in 1.5 million man-hours. Most of us have found our own ways to accommodate the meaning of Sept. 11. But for the crews that have been at work on that unimaginable site — and at the holding areas where the debris has been sifted and analyzed — the one way to deal with the tragedy has been to dismantle it, fragment by fragment, until there was nothing left. Those crews have served as our surrogates. The public displays of the first days may have passed, when crowds cheered the rescue crews and heavy-equipment operators as they moved toward the site, but the gratitude will be unceasing.
This is an emotional as well as a physical turning point for the city and for the country. It marks not only an ending but a beginning — and we have all been looking for meaningful beginnings in the past few months. Removing that last steel column marks the moment when the physical ruins of the terrorist attacks and their aftermath have been effaced. Some of us have been eager to push them out of sight, and some of us have been reluctant. But from now on, those ruins exist only in us. The touchstone for what happened that day can no longer be those hellish shards of steel sticking up out of the earth, the clouds of smoke billowing up from underground fires. The site has been cleared. The ground is open.
