Table Talk

YOU CAN’T work in the Financial District without thinking about death, at least some of the time. For instance, each morning, walking up the subway steps at Fulton Street, the first thing I see is One World Trade Center looming above the neighborhood. These are the jagged, winding streets of old New Amsterdam, where modern skyscrapers are clustered alongside Huguenot mansions, ATMs, newsstands, and grachtenpands (Dutch canal houses). As these buildings of different heights, shapes, and angles maneuver either to block or welcome the rising sun, there’s a strange dimensionality in the darkness and light, not entirely logical, a chiaroscuro which, from block to block, can find a pedestrian suddenly plunged into a tableau of radiance or one of shadow. It is within this labyrinth of skinny alleyways and glass towers that they were still finding undiscovered pieces of the planes, eleven years after the fact.

Security is tight, particularly on Wall Street and Broad, where checkpoints block cars from sensitive areas with raised hydraulic barriers. Trapezoidal bronze bollards—built to resemble modern art, but failing to fool even the least observant of tourists—are scattered everywhere, ensuring that nobody can drive a truck bomb up to the New York Stock Exchange. These safeguards can leave you feeling more unnerved than secure, especially when you realize the apparatus’ primary goal is to protect the NYSE and Federal Reserve. Your safety is beside the point.

There is a sort of nexus of absolute suffering directly to the west, where, within a few blocks of one another, you can find the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, the Museum of the American Indian, the American Merchant Mariner’s Memorial/East Coast Memorial (two monuments to sailors killed by U-boats), the Irish Hunger Memorial, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A