On Sept. 10, 2001, I was working in the newly refurbished Chelsea Market on 9th Avenue and 115th Street in Manhattan. In another life, the building was the Nabisco factory where the Oreo was invented, and where my wife’s grandfather had baked Mallomars and Fig Newtons decades earlier. The building was now a trendy tech-hub of loft spaces with exposed-brick walls upstairs and an artisan bakery downstairs. Oprah Winfrey’s television venture and a modeling agency were rumored to be our neighbors.
The building sat at the intersection of gentrifying Chelsea, the Meatpacking District, and West Village. At night, you might be propositioned by hulking transvestite prostitutes or walk past affluent young couples holding Starbucks lattes pushing a stroller. Usually both. One block south, a person would hit a cobblestone road anchored by a seedy sex club. The place is a Mexican restaurant now. There’s a lot of nostalgia about New York, but the neighborhood is far more pleasant now. A lot of things are nicer.
We could probably see the Twin Towers from the break room at the Major League Baseball online office where I worked, not that anyone ever seemed to notice. The Twin Towers were for tourists to marvel at and locals to use as a compass. In post-9/11 cultural depictions, the buildings were romanticized. But, in my memory, a lot of New Yorkers thought they were unsightly…