September 14, 2001: Merging With a Crowd

I post this today not to “make it about me” but because the disoriented/disorienting memories of those days are still fresh in my mind and the “crowd-merge” impulse is one that fascinates me. These stories below represent the only times I have been in a situation where a group of disparate people merged into a classic Crowd. Everyone who was here in New York during that time probably has a similar story. We’ve all got ’em.

Nobel-prize winner Elias Canetti’s great philosophical work, Crowds and Power is an examination of crowd behavior.

A big group of people isn’t necessarily a “crowd”. If you walk through Times Square on a Saturday afternoon, you are surrounded by thousands of people, but that isn’t a crowd. People have maintained their individuality, they have not merged with the others. But if a bomb went off in the same area (knock wood), those individuals would merge into a crowd. A crowd that needs to flee.

Canetti analyzes every type of crowd you can imagine, and even some that you couldn’t imagine. Anywhere where people gather there is the potential for a crowd to occur. How do crowds behave? What is the difference between a crowd and a mob? What are the characteristics of a crowd?

A crowd in a movie theatre is one kind of crowd. A political rally is another kind of crowd. Canetti sees nations as crowds as well, with the potential to merge into something monstrous or beautiful, depending. The following excerpt from the book is long, but it is important:

These are the things that are said about crowds.

A crowd is mindless.

A crowd is primitive; it is barbaric; it is childish…

A crowd needs to be ruled. A crowd needs its patriarch – its despotic father, chief, tyrant, emperor, commander. It wants its Hitler, its Mussolini. A crowd is like a patient to a doctor, the hypnotized to the hypnotist. A crowd is a rabble – to be manipulated, controlled, roused…

The history of the behavior of crowds is a history of fear: of being a victim, of losing property, of a terror (and of the Terror) so powerful that it needs a name – to be accounted for, distorted into intelligibility, made safe. The history of the behavior of crowds is one of explanations. It has given us the politics of violence and its sociology. It has provided us with the models of revolution and the ego-ideal. It has shown us cause and effect, the details of oppression, the brutalities, the injustices, the prisons and the torture, the price of bread, the loss of land, the inequities of exploitative taxation, the mechanical contrivances and contraptions of a dehumanizing modernity. Crowd theory makes sense of the crowd and it violence, as if, as in a scientific experiment, the right conditions could and always will produce the same results. Crowd theory tells us why – relentlessly, breathlessly, noisily, as if by shouting the reasons loudly enough the terror can be explained away. But crowd theory rarely tells us what: what happens when it goes off, what the terror is like, what it feels like to participate in it, to be its creator.

I can think of two instances in my own life when I suddenly found myself part of a crowd, a crowd that had its own logic, something that now seems almost mysterious to me in looking back on it. All I recall in those moments was sheer panic, and a desire to survive.

On September 11th, 2001, I stood at the edge of the Hudson and watched the towers fall. The air was full of screams. A man in a grey suit beside me fell to his knees, howling. I was screaming. My sister worked in the building beside the Word Trade Center and would be missing in action for hours. (She walked 80 blocks uptown to my cousin’s apartment, covered in dust. She ran from the falling buildings with her sweater wrapped around her face.) I have no sense of time from that day, everything slowed down, way down.

It was later that day, maybe an hour, maybe two, when the jets arrived. They had been scrambled quickly to head to New York and patrol our skies. But nobody, obviously, had told “us” – how could they tell us? And who were they anyway? And who was “us”? There were thousands of us in Hoboken, thousands of us all over, how would you get the word out that Air Force jets would be arriving to zoom around our borders? That morning was chaos. Nobody’s phone worked. Unless you were at home, you had no access to television. It was amazing to me, later, to realize that people across the country, across the world, had a better perspective of what was going on in New York than we who were there that day. Because often we couldn’t see. We were in the thick of it. Our views were often blocked. We weren’t glued to our television, we were running down streets so that we could try to see what was happening across the river.

So when the first jet shot by overhead, and I was standing in the park down by the water, there was no anchor on TV to tell me who that was, and that they were members of our military, come to protect us. We had zero perspective on what was going on. All bets were off that morning. We had seen two planes hit the World Trade Center. I saw it myself. We watched the buildings fall an hour later. There was no organization, nobody was prepared, because how on earth could one be prepared?

It is difficult to describe panic. Everyone was already traumatized, people were missing, everyone knew someone who worked down there, in those buildings or nearby, and when that first jet shot by, the crowd down by the water, who had been hugging and screaming and crying, suddenly changed. I was a part of it. Everyone started running. Running for cover. But it was a big wide green park, there was no cover. Another jet whizzed by overhead. I was part of a giant migration, and my main goal … like a biological imperative … was to hide. But where? People were fleeing, running, their eyes overhead. I knew, like I know my own name, that they would start firing down on us. They would drop a bomb on us. They would shoot us, bomb us, things would fly down at us from above, the most horrifying thing you could contemplate. I knew it. I wasn’t screaming, at least I don’t think I was.

What I remember is a pin-light of focus, as I ran across the park, with the hundreds of others. It was the tunnel vision everyone talks about, something I had experienced only one or two times in my life. Another jet flew by. I threw myself onto the ground and crawled on my belly under a bench. I was not the only one. There were others under the bench. People raced by, trampling over each other, clinging to trees, in the hopes that that would give cover for when the next attack came.

I like to hope that I wouldn’t have pushed someone else out to secure my spot, but I am not entirely sure. The air was full of screams and total fucking chaos. I was not Sheila Kathleen at that moment. I was part of a giant fleeing organism. That is how I remember it. Then, suddenly, I heard someone yell, “Those are our guys! Those are our guys!”

That person could not have been heard over the entire park. He was not an official with a megaphone. He was just a guy, hiding under a tree.

But in that moment, organically, the crowd changed. The crowd suddenly hit a bump in the road, and stopped morphing into the giant fleeing organism it had become. It stopped, suddenly.

So others must have yelled a similar thing around the park, because it wasn’t as though one part of the park had “calmed down” while the other still raged and ran. We had run and hid, and then, by osmosis, we figured it out, and we all emerged from hiding, standing still, staring up at the phalanx of jets circling our city. The air filled with the roar of jets. What was, two seconds before (again, time was weird that morning – I felt like I had been running and hiding from the jets for at least 20, 25 minutes, but it can’t have been more than a couple of seconds) terrifying, a harbinger of doom, was suddenly the most beautiful sound in the world. People waved at the jets, crying, and then … the event was over. Or, that part of that terrible day.

The sudden surge in a large group when it becomes one, when It has a need that must be fulfilled. The crowd, in that instance, needs no organizer. It organizes itself.

The other memory that came up was also from September 11th, an event that, in my mind, stretches out over a week. There was the Day itself, and then the following days. They all blend together.

On September 14th, I went back in to the city to go to work. It was my first time back in Manhattan. Going through the Lincoln Tunnel was terrifying. I worked in Times Square. The populace was jittery, to say the least. People were crying on the sidewalks. Everyone helped each other. It was the first time I had seen my co-workers, and all we did was stand around and tell stories and listen to stories.

Everyone was on edge. Many of the streets were still blocked off. The trucks needed to get through. 7th Avenue was blocked off, and my building was on 7th Avenue, so if you looked out the window it was rather eerie, seeing people just walking down the middle of the street, getting out of the way for the fire trucks and dump trucks that were going through.

Now. Here is what happened. Or how I remember it.

I glanced out the window, down at the street, and saw that everyone appeared to be out of the buildings and on the sidewalks. Now I’m a New Yorker, so I’m very used to large groups of people about me at all times. There’s that creepy factoid that if everyone in New York came out of the buildings all at the same moment, there would not be enough room for everyone on the streets. You could see the truth of that with events like the 2004 blackout. That’s what New York looks like when no one is inside.

So on September 14th, I had of course been looking out the window all morning – and suddenly, I saw crowds on the sidewalk. Different from the normal passersby of a lunch hour. This clearly was a crowd of everyone leaving their buildings at the same time. “What’s going on?” I said, and other people had come to stare out too. It was a collective experience. Dread and fear. You could feel it rumbling at all times, even though life, of course, did go on. Someone was trying to pull up a local news site online, to see what might have happened in our neighborhood, but I now think that what happened is this: we were becoming a crowd.

I didn’t question it. Neither did my co-workers. If everyone is outside on the sidewalk, they must have a reason, so we must go join them. It was necessary to be together. Nobody thought: “Well, maybe everyone else is just panicking … I’ll stay put at my desk and wait it out.” Not after what we saw on September 11th when those who went back to their desks to wait it out were annihilated 20 minutes later.

Even if a bomb was going to go off, we wanted to be with those people down there. The crowd’s only desire is to stay a crowd, and when you’re in the thick of it that’s not clear – but it is clear to me now, looking back on it. We all grabbed our purses and walked down the 8 flights of stairs to the street. (It would be a long time before I got into an elevator again).

We joined the milling-about masses on the sidewalk. Everyone was talking to each other. “What’s going on?” “I have no idea.” “There was a bomb scare, I thought.” “Did someone tell you that?” “No, but that’s what I thought.” “Any idea why everyone is outside?” Nobody seemed to know. It had happened slowly, organically. We were now such a big group that we were spilling out into the street, but that was okay since there was no traffic on 7th Avenue that day.

And then, as if on cue, everyone started to run. Myself included. There had been no external stimuli, not that I can recall. No gun shot, nothing startling. But suddenly, as one, we started running down 7th Avenue, heading south.

We were like animals, that is the only appropriate analogy. A herd of wild horses, grazing, like the ones I saw on the high plains of North Dakota, seemingly still and content, and then, heeding some unknown call, starting to run. Why? Did something scare one of them? But they all seemed to start moving together. It wasn’t that one got scared and whinnied in alarm, startling the others. They were grazing and then they were running. With no segue. That is what happened to the crowd gathering on 7th Avenue and 39th Street that day.

There was nothing blocking us from forming into a crowd. We ran down the middle of the street. Other people’s panic fed into our own. If I saw a woman glance behind her, I would too. And I suppose if someone saw me glance, they would glance back too and on and on and on. There was ZERO thought involved.

We ran, as a group until we hit 34th Street, and then, just as suddenly, the group dispersed. Or I should say the crowd ceased being a crowd. We splintered off into our individual selves again. There was no bomb scare, there was no reason for all of us to start running, it was just a natural expression of the underlying panic that was running through New York on that day.

I don’t know if things were different on the Upper East Side or out in Queens, places far from the epicenter of Manhattan, but in Times Square there was a sensation that we had a big target on our backs, and so suddenly we all needed to flee. And so we did. It was odd, but I didn’t question it at the time.

And what did I do after that?

I went to a nearby Irish pub, a common gathering place for my co-workers, a place where I knew everyone. It was 10 o’clock in the morning, but the bar was packed. There were guys in there who had been working on the cleanup already underway downtown. The place was wall to wall people. The alcohol flowed. Everyone talked. It was the opposite of the panicked crowd in the street. It was the huddling-together of those who had experienced something horrible. Total strangers hugged. Everyone was drunk. People had been up all night. These were steel workers and construction guys. The place was so packed it might as well have been Happy Hour time.

I talked to one guy, Irish, who had also been working in the cleanup downtown. We were seated next to each other at the bar. We did a couple of shots of whiskey. His hands were filthy. The news was on the television. He told me that the night before, downtown, during the cleanup, he had reached out for a body and a woman’s face came off in his hands. “Her face just came off. I held it.” His fingers were thick. He was handsome in a rough Black Irish kind of way. I had seen him around before. This was his local. I had never talked to him.

We sat together at the bar, an accident of proximity, but within moments we were together. I have no idea how long I was there. Hours? It can’t be.

And it couldn’t have been more than 10 minutes after we started talking, and tossing back shots, that Black Irishman kissed me. I didn’t even know his name.

It sounds like such a cliche, but there were many cliches that went on those days. Traumatized people don’t behave in millions of ways. There are only a couple of ways, and these have been documented through the annals of history. And random romantic connections in the middle of a cataclysmic event is Cliche #1. I wasn’t even saying anything. I wasn’t even being a sympathetic listener, really. I was too wrapped up in my own shit. His kissing me had nothing to do with me, basically, and there was a strange freedom in that. Warm living bodies are something to treasure while you’ve got them. But I’m over-intellectualizing what was not intellectual at all.

I told him about running down 7th Avenue, he told me about the woman’s face, we did two shots in a row, and then he leaned forward and kissed me, his filthy hands on my face. I kissed him back, because of course. The second we started kissing, he stood up. and the way he stood up, getting serious about kissing me, changed the event for me and we literally could not get close enough to one another. Nobody even noticed. Or if they noticed, they didn’t give a fuck. These were people with grey dust on their boots. It was broad daylight outside, the television news with scenes of horror – the horror in our own city – blaring in our ears, the air filled with conversation, as I made out with this total stranger, with his black hair, pale skin, blue eyes. He had tears in his eyes. We were completely One.

Then, there is a jumpcut in my memory, and suddenly the two of us are down at the Salvation Army on 14th Street, helping unload the bottles of water that people had donated from all over the city, all over the country probably. There were trucks lined up on 14th Street, filled with water and supplies that needed to be unloaded.

I assume that black Irishman had known about this Salvation Army operation and had invited me to go, but I have no memory of that. We were on 35th Street, making out, and then suddenly we were on 14th Street, hauling water.

The air down on 14th Street was acrid and burning. We all wore surgical masks. My eyes stung. The smell was terrible, hard to describe. Burning, electricity, flesh. The air was thick, almost sweet. Every wall was plastered with HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PERSON fliers. You had to look at every face. They were part of our family, they were us, they were missing. We stood there and looked at all the faces. We joined the volunteers, carrying boxes of supplies and carts of bottled water into the Salvation Army. I remember random people walking by and giving us one bottle of water that they had in their bags. One woman came up and said, “What do you guys need?” and we told her, “We really need bottled water …” and she disappeared, and reappeared 10 minutes later, having bought maybe 15 bottles of water at a nearby deli to give to us.

So this was another kind of crowd. There was the same fevered urge to stay together, to be a collective, but the energy was different. I suppose at any minute the potential of the crowd surrounding the Salvation Army on 14th Street could have changed. That crowd could have started suddenly running as well. Like I said, anything was possible. Everyone was jumpy.

Then, there is a jumpcut again in my memory, and I am back home across the river. I have no memory of saying goodbye to my black Irishman. We had worked side by side at the Salvation Army, surgical masks on, for four or five hours. Did we eat? I don’t think so. We were tremendously busy. And then, flash, I’m home. Did I take the PATH train home? Or did I make my way north to grab the bus? I am pretty sure I would have taken the PATH, which is close to the Salvation Army on 14th Street, but I have no memory of it.

Did black Irishman and I embrace? We must have. I do remember him saying to me back at the bar, probably post-kiss, “I would be bad for you,” and I laughed out loud. This isn’t a relationship, honey, let’s relax. I said, “I don’t care,” and he liked that answer. What we were doing had nothing to do with anything else.

I never saw him again. And I never did get his name.