NEW YORK — Before the revelry really began, Church Street looked and sounded like it does on most Sunday nights as another Monday approaches: Cabs jostling for position, cars trying to make their way in and around the construction zone of Ground Zero. But as word of Osama bin Laden’s death started to circulate, the horns took on a different tone.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
Beep! Beep! Beep!
As the cars approached the former site of the World Trade Center towers, their horns mimicked the chant, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” The improptu symphony brought with it people of all walks. They came to celebrate, weep and remember what had happened here nearly 10 years ago.
They arrived every way imaginable.
Some walked, dressed in pajamas. Others took bicycles, dressed in suits. Some came by cab, fresh from a night in the clubs.
Within 30 minutes, the area in front of Ground Zero, at the corner of Church and Vesey Streets, saw nearly 2,000 people congregate. They sang, they chanted, they drank and they danced to the news of the death of the al Qaeda leader and mastermind behind the September 11 attacks.
Paul LaGrandier called it the best phone call he ever received.
The New York City firefighter from Engine 235 in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant had spent the day fishing and was in bed when his daughter called with the news bin Laden had been killed. He knew what he had to do.
“I had to be here,” LaGrandier said in the early morning hours. “So I put my uniform on and came down. It’s a mixed bag of emotions. I’m happy because he’s dead, but it’s a reminder of what happened here and all of the people we lost.”
He was here with friend Chris Steikowski, a retired FDNY Fire Marshal, standing a few hundred yards away from the raucous celebration. LaGrandier arrived at Ground Zero just as the North Tower collapsed and worked in the rubble in the days and weeks after. Steikowski was at LaGuardia Airport and doubled-back to his home on Long Island, grabbed a shovel and headed for Lower Manhattan.
“There’s some sense of closure,” Steikowski said. “It was something that we all needed. My heart actually skipped a beat when I heard the message. I think that the prevailing view will be that a sense of justice was served.”
While their hearts and minds were on the 343 firefighters who were killed that day — many of whom they knew — the two of them couldn’t help but enjoy the scene.
“Today’s a wonderful day,” LaGrandier said. “It’s been a long time coming.”
***
Howard Zapken walked amid the chaos on Church Street holding high a copy of the book Portraits: 9/11/01 and was proud to tell anyone who cared to listen about the man on page 37: His brother-in-law, Alvin Bergsohn.
Bergsohn, an equity trader on Wall Street, was behind the horrifying sound clip that aired alongside television broadcasts as the towers were about to come down.
“He knew he was dying, and his last quote was ‘We’re all (expletive) dying here,’” Zapken said. “That was reported out on TV and they said, ‘We have a very disturbing message.’”
So he left the comfort of his Roslyn Harbor, N.Y., home to walk around outside the place where it happened. Zapken considers his family lucky that they were one of the few that got a body to bury.
But there was something about the news of bin Laden’s death that seemed soothing.
“So the man who murdered my brother-in-law got what he deserved today,” Zapken said. “Not that I’m a vengeful person but he got what he deserved today. That’s why I came down here and felt like I should be a part of this.”
***
Ted Carousso handed over his enormous American flag just long enough to light a cigarette. He came as soon as he could from his home in Bayside because the memories of 9/11 can never seem to escape him.
He had a best friend who died there, Lt. Vincent Francis Giammona, a brother-in-law who’s working as an engineer on the new freedom towers and a sister who serves on the police and fireman widow and children’s fund. It was no surprise that, as soon as he heard news of President Obama’s impending address, he felt it in his gut: Osama bin Laden was dead.
“I said, if the president is going to speak tonight, it has to be bin Laden,” Carousso said. “Ten minutes later: Breaking news, bin Laden dead. I did, I did man I had a strange feeling.”
To Carousso, 45, he was hurt. But it provided America with a chance to fight back. In his eyes, he knew they would.
“It was a crushing blow to our city but not that bad, we’re resilient,” Carousso said. “We stuck together and I was really proud to be an American that day and I’m proud to be one today. We never stopped looking for him and now he’s dead. He’s going to stay dead.”
***
Sgt. Joseph Moresco has the scars to know why he had to be here.
During his multiple tours in Iraq, the Bloomfield native was injured by IEDs. He had to have part of his jaw reconfigured and he still has shrapnel embedded in his left leg, which makes it difficult to walk.
So, why was he here?
“To celebrate that we brought down the man that brought half of New York City down,” he said. “That we went in there after him and even though it took us 10 years to do it, we took him out.”
Moresco and his friend and fellow Marine, Anthony Malanga of Lyndhurst, were in the middle of the mess of bodies in the middle of the night. But they weren’t rowdy or boisterous. Instead, they stood there and took it all in.
But it was Malanga who summed it up in just one word, what it meant for the two of them to be here on this night.
“Freedom,” Malanga said. “It means freedom.”
On September 11, these were the same grounds where Daryl-Ann Saunders scrambled on her way to give blood to help those who desperately needed it. But at the hospital, they began to turn people away because there was no one left to help.
“All the people who suffered the consequences were dead,” she said. “We didn’t know what to do with ourselves to try and help. There was no help left to be given.”
People knocked on her door all day, showing flyers, asking if they’d seen her cousin, their mother, their sister. They could feel the spirits of the lives lost at the first Ground Zero memorial.
That’s why she and her husband, Norm Barber, had to come back last night.
They sat in their Brooklyn home watching the President address the nation, but something got them out of their seats. By now, Norm would have liked a new monument built, a place to show bin Laden the strength and resilience of a nation.
Daryl-Ann wasn’t sure. On a night like last night, it was good to remember.
“I’m glad there’s not one, in a way,” she said. “It’s sort of a skeleton, reminiscent of what it was like. If there was a whole new building there it almost would have been like it was erased.”
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