On September 11, 2001, I came into my office early, to follow the market, to watch the tech bubble slowly implode on the monitors in our bullpen that perpetually played CNBC and CNNfn.

I can picture our small company that morning, gathered in twos and threes around those monitors, as video played and replayed the first plane crashing into the North Tower.

We were still gathered around those monitors when the second plane hit, as we slowly realized that neither strike had been a mistake.

We were still gathered around those monitors, an hour later, when the South Tower collapsed.

##

Shortly after the second plane hit, I called my parents’ house in California. My father picked up. “I’m okay,” I told him. “I just called to let you know I’m okay.”

“That’s great,” my father said, still asleep, not understanding why I was calling. “I’m okay, too,” he said, before hanging up.

##

We were evacuated from the office before the second tower came down. We were a half block from Grand Central Station, and police feared an attack on that similarly iconic target.

Still, after I made it downstairs, I stood on the street corner by our office for at least fifteen minutes, looking downtown, watching smoke billow. Gusts of wind brought an acrid smell, a fine coating of ash.

I worked the game theory in my head: my apartment, nearby, was across the street from the United Nations, clearly unsafe. Some of my office-mates were headed to an evacuation center the city had set up at a West Side high school. But any terrorist group sophisticated enough to mastermind this complex an attack would have also known where large groups of evacuees would be directed by city plan, where they would gather as sitting ducks.

I stayed away from my home and from the evacuation centers. I stayed away from crowds, from city landmarks. I headed west, then north. I stayed away from the tall buildings of Midtown, from the crowds of Times Square, from picturesque Columbus Circle and Central Park.

By quiet side streets, I headed up to Harlem. There, I wandered, dazed, from one block to the next, listening to the news with groups gathered around radios on old buildings’ front stoops.

##

Late in the evening, I headed back towards my apartment, showing my ID to dozens of policemen as I inched closer to the UN.

Along the way, I reached my parents again briefly. Now, understanding, they were effusive in their relief.

Once home, I fell asleep nearly before my head hit my pillow. I slept badly, fitfully. And briefly: we were evacuated from the building early the next morning.

I headed to work, but after an hour, we were evacuated from there, too.

For days in a row, I was evacuated from one, and then the other. Unsure of what to do, I wandered the streets, still dazed. I considered heading out to relatives in New Jersey or on Long Island, but transportation was a mess. Besides, though I had only been here for three months, I already knew that New York was my city. I couldn’t simply leave it behind.

##

Months later, I was asked to contribute photos for a gallery showing of young New York photographers reflecting on the city in the wake of 9/11.

I thought about that week wandering, about how little I remembered of it. Where had I gone all day? What had I thought about?

I made two images for the show.

##

I visited my brother, a freshman at the University of Denver.

A woman who checked my ID there saw I was from New York and asked if I had been in the city during the attacks. I had, I told her.

“Even if we weren’t there, all of us were New Yorkers that day,” she said.

##

On the first anniversary of 9/11, I headed to the roof with my trumpet and played Taps facing downtown. I read the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Jewish prayer of remembrance.

I did that each year, until the fifth anniversary.

On the sixth, I didn’t.

##

In the wake of 9/11, we came together in a way that still awes me: with heroism, generosity, and community. We love our country. And, even if we don’t always show it, we love each other.

Yet much of what has come after 9/11, of what has been done in its name, has troubled me deeply: from the security theater of the TSA and the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security, to the serious violation of citizens’ civil rights by programs like the CIA’s warrantless wiretapping and the even more serious violation of others’ human rights at Guantanamo and through programs like extraordinary rendition.

We’ve slid slowly towards a security state, yet we remain ultimately insecure. We’ve run afoul of framer Benjamin Franklin’s cutting remark: that “they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

We’re now permanently at war. We piss away lives and hundreds of billions of dollars yearly, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and elsewhere. We have no clear objectives there. We have no clear exit criteria.

Like Britain during the Boer War a century before, we’ve spread ourselves too thin, have begun to underfund crucial long-term investments at home, like education, infrastructure, and scientific research, in favor of fleeting yet ever-expanding pursuits abroad.

Historians often argue it was the Boer War that ultimately ended the British Empire; I wonder if, a hundred years from now, historians will reflect similarly on our War on Terror.

##

A few weeks ago, Air Force pilot Chris Pace contacted me about a 9/11 fundraiser bike/run he was doing to benefit the Disposable Heroes Project, a nonprofit that supports wounded veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq, where he had done four tours of duty.

His plan was simple, albeit vaguely insane: leave Arlington Cemetery by bike on the evening of Friday, September 9th, bike 150 miles, then dismount in New Jersey and run 100 miles, all without stopping to eat or sleep, to arrive in New York City on the morning of September 11th.

He had been training for this simply by doing CrossFit workouts. So, he wanted to know, would it be okay if he used my gym, CrossFit NYC, as the endpoint of his run?

Obviously, I said yes. But I also thought about the patriotism and generosity and welcoming sense of community, that feeling of being in it together, that had made me proudest in the wake of September 11th.

So, this morning, I woke up at 4:30am, and met Chris (and his support crew) as he crossed the Verrazano Bridge into Brooklyn, to welcome him to New York, and to show him our support, by running with him for the final 12 miles.

##

After we made it to the gym, after we hooked Chris into an IV to rehydrate him, then packed him into a car to his hotel so that he and his crew could get some much-needed sleep, I hailed a cab home.

The driver asked what I had done that morning, so I told him. I told him about Chris’ 250 mile, about my joining him for the last New York stretch.

“Your friend,” said the driver admiringly. “He is very strong.”

Yes, I agreed.

“Not just body strong,” said the driver. “Strong in heart.”

The driver told me he was from Mauritania. And that, back there, ten years ago, his brother had similarly biked a 150 mile round trip, to and back from the capital. But there, he said, nobody had been proud; instead, they had been angry.

“We thought it was embarrassment!” he laughed. “We say, who bike 150 miles? Only poor people who have no car!”

But now, this driver told me, he thought about that differently. He thought about a lot differently. For ten years in the US, he had been able to consider his country from a distance. And he’d been able to consider this one with an outsider’s eye. He told me that each had good and bad. And that, for those ten years, he had thought carefully about where there was more bad, where there was more good. And, earlier this year, he had become a citizen of the United States.

For the past four years we’ve been living together, Jess and I have been in the apartment she rightly calls my former bachelor pad. So we’ve been looking, for a while, for a next place to live.

As of now, we don’t have kids. But, in the next few years, we’re likely to pop out a first. Which adds a whole new level of complication to the search. Ideally, we’d find a two bedroom. But if we’re looking to buy, rather than rent, here in Manhattan, nice two bedroom / two baths easily creep up to the $2m mark. Which is, obviously, ridiculous. And while Brooklyn is cheaper, it isn’t hugely so.

Plus, of course, there’s the issue of schools – New York being a place where parents unblinkingly spend $30k a year to send their child to pre-school, though only after having pulled strings and competed for slots in the “right” ones.

In the rest of the country, this is the prime argument for the suburbs. And, indeed, 25 years ago, someone with kids in Manhattan (aside from multi-generationally wealthy New York families who send their kids as legacies to Chapin) would have already moved out. Staying in the city meant having essentially failed; the nice house in the suburbs was the overt goal.

Amongst my peers, however, the equation has flipped. We apparently all want to stay. Moving to the suburbs is, it seems, an admission of defeat, a sign you couldn’t make it in the city.

Unfortunately, the math doesn’t work in this new world order. While more and more of us want in rather than out, the number of two and three bedroom apartments, and the number of slots in good schools, has remained largely the same.

But the suburbs of New York are equally problematic. Most, for example, are a surprisingly long commute away. Unlike other US metros, that are now populating their first wave of suburbs, New York is working on it’s second or third. It could be argued that New York, in fact, largely invented the suburb, with families initially moving on up to outer Queens and Brooklyn, upper Bronx, or Staten Island.

By now, however, Sunnyside or Yonkers have long since reached their peak, and starkly declined. So the real estate that would elsewhere hold prime post-city living has instead become no-mans-land, thirty minutes of commute to be passed through. (Though perhaps this isn’t entirely new, but simply enlarged, since Fitzgerald trained past the ‘valley of ashes’, en route to the ‘East Egg’ of Great Neck eighty years back.)

As a result, even New York hedge fund partners pay good money to commute to lower Connecticut, as much as an hour and a half each way.

And with most of those suburbs, there’s the issue of what you find when you get there. I grew up in Palo Alto, CA; Jess in Newton, MA. While both are ostensibly suburbs, they’re more accurately small cities that just happen to be near larger cities (San Francisco and Boston, respectively). Whereas many suburbs of New York are really suburbs. The two restaurants they have close at 9:00. On the plus side, they don’t have a Starbucks; and, on the downside, they don’t have a Starbucks.

All of which leaves Jess and me without much of a clue what to do next. We’re busy looking, weighing the advantages of a grocery store down the block against not finding somebody else’s underwear somehow mixed in with your laundry after a trip to the building’s ill-maintained laundry facility.
Fortunately, as demand and property taxes are working against us no matter what we choose, at least we’ll find a way to pay more than it’s worth for a solution that’s less optimal than it would be anywhere else. God bless New York.