SHAZNA NESSA's apartment sits in what was once the World Trade Center's shadow. In this essay, she talks about what it feels like to go to sleep each night in a neighborhood watched by the world.
Brunch at Ulysses on Stone Street. Local businesses are finally becoming destination spots. (AP Photo/Shazna Nessa)
Volleyball players and bikers at Battery Park City contribute to a more vibrant landscape in lower Manhattan. (AP Photo/Shazna Nessa)
Community gardens in Battery Park City. Revived hope in a battered neighborhood transpires from the care taken by residents nurturing their gardens. (AP Photo/Shazna Nessa)
I watched the first tower fall from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, where I lived on that day. The East River, a small body of water that separates Brooklyn from lower Manhattan, was playing tricks on my mind; the burning towers were less than a mile away, yet the scene felt far from home. The air shimmered with pieces of singed paper, blowing my way and landing on my doorstep as if to prove it all was really happening.
Perhaps it was that sense of distance that made me bold enough to consider living downtown when my Brooklyn lease ran out. A couple months later, I crossed the river (the River Styx, some might say) and moved into an apartment a stone's throw from the smoldering wound of the World Trade Center site. If I stuck my head out of my new studio window, I could see the hole in the ground. It was a no-man's-land, a dark place to be.
That first year, dust, debris and doubt -- not to mention a serious sinus infection -- followed me everywhere. What on Earth was I doing here?
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Five years later, I'm still living downtown, and I am part of the palpable resurgence of community. From the sound of children playing by the Hudson River west of the site to the roar of bar hoppers along the cobbled streets of the Financial District, the landscape has transformed before my eyes.
Construction is everywhere. Drilling and blasting resonate through the canyons, punctuated by delays whenever workers stumble across a ruin -- no surprise, since the area is so old. Tiny streets are being systematically gutted for a new transport hub.
New schools have been created, and families and couples looking to start them are moving in. Wine bars and gourmet food stores are opening for soon-to-be residents of ritzy residential buildings under construction, signed by world-class names such as Philippe Starck or Casa Armani. Word is that Naomi Campbell will be my neighbor, as will branches of Hermes and Tiffany's.
Through bold entrepreneurial moves, Peter Poulakakos and his father, Harry, made downtown a livelier place by luring in the sound of happy bar hoppers and diners with their businesses. Harry Poulakakos moved to America from Greece 50 years ago and quickly made himself at home downtown, opening "Harry's at Hanover" in 1972, which today is owned by Peter under the name "Harry's Café & Steak."
The Poulakakos mark is strongest on Stone Street, a cobblestone alley first developed by Dutch colonists in the 1600s. Today it is lined with eateries and European-style outdoor seating.
At age 30, Peter's empire includes Bayard's, an upscale dining room, and Financier Patisserie, a French pastry shop on Stone Street that opened 15 months after 9/11.
"Business suffered tremendously. Bayard's has never really recovered from Sept. 11," Peter Poulakakos says. "It was shattered. Everyone left, everyone moved out."
"Then," he says, "people started coming back."
They kept on coming. Weekend traffic at his pub "Ulysses" on Stone Street is proof that the area is not just an after-work hangout. It has become a destination spot.
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I was astonished and touched when I first stumbled across the community gardens in Battery Park City, just west of the World Trade Center site against the busy West Side Highway. Residents were caring for their little plots of earth, pruning and growing flowers and even vegetables -- sowing seeds of hope as the cars whizzed by.
As in Voltaire's "Candide," the absurdity of the world is countered by the simplicity of cultivating a garden, tending to what is local and immediate -- but in doing so, affecting the whole planet.
Five years later, for those of us living in a place so often used as a metaphor -- the shadow of Ground Zero -- it is these microworlds that give us hope.
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MORE ON SEPT. 11
For more stories related to the fifth anniversary of the attacks, look at asap's special report Living with 9/11.
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Shazna Nessa is asap's interactive editor.
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