The Broom Lady / Memorial to NY

When my husband and I lived in Brooklyn, NY in the 1990s, we lived at the far edge of a neighborhood called Carroll Gardens, just a block from the shipping docks along the Hudson River. Our apartment building was not part of the 19th century Italianate architecture this area of Brooklyn proudly displays. It was a humdrum span of plain brick residential space that housed an eclectic array of families, and this was its charm. If you looked off in one direction you were eyeing, so the local story went, mafia domain. If you looked in the other, the methadone clinic. But if you set your sights on the middle passage, you’d be guaranteed some of that sparkle moxie New York City is famous for.

Our zip code was 11231, and my husband was fond of pointing out that we lived in the absolute value of one-two-three (#math), but mostly we lived in a broad collection of realities that, bound together, made the city indescribable to those who never set foot there.

Each day we’d walk three quarters of a mile to our local subway station to catch a ride into Manhattan. My husband worked on one of the top floors of World Trade One, and I schlepped up to graduate school in mid-town. You could keep nice tabs on the neighborhood, morning and night, using this short walk. For me, it was a fascinating tour through the vibe of the folks I lived among. In the morning there’d be kids with backpacks dawdling their way to school for the day, delivery trucks handing off food inventory to the corner shops, and adults with eyes cast to the ground in their scurry to work. In the evening, there’d be some rush to get home to decompress from the day, but there’d also be people strolling about, kids skipping to the nearby playground, and dogs roaming the sidewalks stretching their leashes as far as negotiable. You would never ever not see something of interest in NYC during your commute.

It’s been two decades now since I lived in Brooklyn, but one of the enduring images I still carry with me is of the old Italian lady and her broom, aka The Broom Lady. I loved her even though I never met her or exchanged eye contact with her once. She lived on Union Street, halfway between the subway and my apartment, and to the best of my knowledge she swept her front walkway every single day. It didn’t seem to matter to her that the urban landscape was slower to accumulate debris than, say, a leafy suburb. The pristine maintenance of her stoop might have been a tangential driver anyway. There are certainly other benefits of such a daily habit: activity, meditation, fresh air, the simple continuity of it---a stringing together of days. Small early-hour actions like this are a celebration of the day, of the next opportunity to live.

While the Broom Lady’s constancy drew me to her, it was the tunnel-vision demeanor she kept while sweeping that was the true allure for me. She lived across from the area’s most hopping spot, a big corner pizza joint, which had the sidewalk action going from noon to night. Even so, she barely lifted her eyes from the ground toward the hollers volleying across the street, to the folks gathered around chatting, eating, neighborhood cops congregating. She didn’t seem to care a whit about the constant distraction that was Union Street. She was one hundred percent committed to her task.

The Broom Lady was a real shorty, too. My memory tells me she was in her late sixties. I never saw her wear anything other than a discreetly styled house dress, and thick stockings most of the year. She had workhorse arms, round hunched shoulders, a so-serious face. She had an old-country Italian visage, and from her body language I thought it was possible she didn’t speak much English. There were plenty of first-generation Italians in that neighborhood back then who only knew the mother tongue. I peeked at the recent census for Carroll Gardens and noticed that the Italian population in the neighborhood has waned, and I expect my Broom Lady has since passed on. Those folks back then created a particular brand of vibrancy for that crosshatch of Brooklyn streets. Everybody knew your landlord’s brother’s dogwalker’s cousin’s friend. To this day I haven’t yet had another experience where a neighborhood has lived so intertwined with one another. Hanging on the front stoop together in the evenings in Carroll Gardens went a long way in teaching me how to be human together. New York City is this kind of fabulous teacher.

It’s true that I don’t know what my broom lady was like or what the dedicated sweeping meant to her. Was it only a daily chore? Was it a substrate of her life? A pathology? Was it all these things? None?

The thing about her broom habit is that for me it has since become one of my symbols of an intact New York City. I want to think that NYC is still a home to that ordinary circadian trust in the day. It’s been twenty years this week since the September 11th terror attacks happened. On a moment like this, I want to see NYC as the special place I once knew it to be. Maybe it’s because after you’ve lived in NYC and then gone elsewhere, you’ll have left a piece of your heart there forever.

My husband had a brush with the 9/11 attacks that was too close for comfort. The memory hasn't faded much. My husband dodged the horrors of that day, so it’s hard to imagine how it feels for folks whose lives were scarred by the trauma. If not for a random phone call on the Friday before the attacks offering a last-minute Virginia-based job to my husband, he’d have been up with his old employer, Cantor Fitzgerald, on that day.

My husband left Cantor in 2000 for a new tech start-up job in Virginia which eventually fell off from the dot-com bust. The tech job market was a little tight then, so my husband went back up to Cantor’s NY office to initiate a consulting gig. He’d commute from VA until he found something better near our home. He arrived in NY the week prior to Sept. 11th and made his rounds at the top of World Trade One, saying hi to his old colleagues, swapping stories and “Hey! Long time no see!” The plan was for him to consult for Cantor starting first thing on Monday, 9/10. Because my husband was staying with his NJ cousins at the time, had he not gotten the last-minute job offer on Friday, his ride with them to the city would have had him settled in place at a desk well within the deadline for impact on the 11th. His cousins survived by scrambling their way out of the financial center while the sky fell around them.

When the towers fell on Tuesday, none of the Cantor employees in World Trade One survived. They had the largest loss of life for an organization that day.

Because Cantor’s business was an important piece of the US financial trading system, my husband and any prior employees were called up to midtown Manhattan for the weeks after September 11th to try to get their trading services back up. I’ll never forget the sleepless nights in our bed in Virginia while he was up there. I could not imagine what my husband was going through, let alone the city. My husband has a very rational, science-based worldview, so to see him panic in front of our television on that Tuesday morning in the minutes leading to the fall of the tower, “How are they going to get out?!” was almost as shocking as the event itself. When the tower crumbled to the ground, he let out a sound I hope I never hear again. His hellos three days before had unimaginably turned into goodbyes.

Our kids were babies. The United States had turned upside down. The skies were silenced for a long time as the country tried to come down from its shock. It took a long time. I still every so often look at a plane overhead and wonder what it’ll do. I can’t be the only one.

Today our kids are almost through college. On an anniversary like this one, twenty years, I think about what might have been for them. But mostly I think about how it’s been for those kids whose parents didn't make it out, who didn't get a chance call on Friday that would give them this past 20 years of life.

Our oldest was only two and a half on that terrible day. Our kids have no recollection, of course. The four of us recently trailed our way around the 9/11 memorial at ground zero as my husband for the first time read each name he knew to our sons. It was an especially freezing day, and windy, inhospitable. It reflected those past events still frozen in time too well.

And yet, after all these years, what I try to hold onto about that inimitable city and it’s meaning in my life is not a horrible memory, but the daily life of New York. The regularities that comprise an existence there, like pensive walks to the subway, daily exposure to the huge variety of people, the pageant of the lights at night, the thunder reverberating off the buildings, the ubiquity of the ships along the edge of Manhattan, loneliness juxtaposed with constant interaction, oh the amazing food, the stoop sweeping.

Even if my little old broom lady is still alive, I doubt she’s still sweeping up Brooklyn, but anything’s possible. If she is, she’s still sweeping away the dust that settles onto that great place, as dust will do. And she’d be one of many. The city bands together to move the day forward, each resident making his or her own unique contribution. New York City has greatness because its diverse people are lumped together and must coexist. It does this with pride, edginess, grit, and grace. Honestly, I think you can’t understand it until you’ve lived there for a while. It takes time for it to settle into your bones, and then you can feel it and become it. And then it makes sense. I will tell you--it changes you, sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better. I’m forever grateful it changed me for the better.

To those who were affected by the events twenty years ago, my heart is still with you.