IN BOSTON

Stunned workers leave city empty, silent

THE QUIET: High Street, like the rest of the financial district, was deserted at 2 p.m. (Globe Staff/Suzanne Kreiter)

By Sam Allis, Globe Staff, 9/12/2001

oston went home yesterday, appalled and overwhelmed by the news from New York and Washington.

Downtown workers poured out of their buildings at mid-morning and went straight to the safe havens of family and friends, wherever they may have been. By lunchtime, the city was a ghost town.

''It's like even the cars are trying to show they're in shock by their being silent and obeying the rules,'' said Frank Connor, a Boston cabbie.

Everyone knew life had changed irrevocably.

Jo Reilly stood alone in Dorchester's John Joseph O'Leary Square yesterday afternoon and sobbed.

''I watched those towers disappear this morning, and I felt sick, like I was watching the beginning of the end of the world,'' she said. ''I had to run outside and see if everything was really still here.''

It was. But, Reilly said, ''It will never look like before. I can't imagine feeling that same exuberance here again.''

Outside Cuttin' Loose, a Dorchester hair salon, Steve Murphy said he had never lived through a day like this one.

''My parents told me about when Kennedy died, how that was a day they would never forget,'' he said. ''For me, this is that: a day that will scar my brain.''

''Sooner or later, something like this was bound to happen,'' he continued. ''Everyone hates the US, and it's not hard to do bad things to us if you just try.''

Impromptu gatherings had the feel of the grainy black and white photos from the 1940s, when civilians strained to hear war news from radios. Now, in front of 50 Federal St., in the lobby of the Hotel Meridien, in a bar on Bromfield Street, people stared slack-jawed at large television sets relentlessly broadcasting the devastation.

The contrasts in Boston yesterday were absurd. Panic coursed through the financial districts yet tourists ambled through the Granary Burial Ground, peering at the graves. The Common and Public Garden looked ravishing. Street people snoozed under trees as they always do.

But every siren sounded ominous. Every fire truck brought concern. During the downtown mid-morning chaos, noises seemed louder, movement unsettling. Traffic was reduced to an immovable solid.

''It feels a little shaky because there were terrorists in this city this morning,'' said Daniel Cunningham, an Emerson College student wondering what to do after his school canceled classes.

Carlota Resende was worried about her two children, ages 10 and 5, who go to school in East Boston. ''They're close to Logan Airport,'' she said as she folded clothes at the Upham's Corner Coin Laundry. ''What's going to happen to the Ted Williams Tunnel? I tried to get there this morning but got as far as Andrew Station and gave up with the traffic.''

There was also another kind of fear in Boston yesterday that members of its Muslim community, estimated over 60,000, confronted: ''I have two kinds of pain,'' said Salim Marhamo, 41, of Quincy, who came to the United States from Lebanon 13 years ago. ''I feel sorry for the innocent victims. They are paying a price for nothing. And I have the pain of fear of retaliation against our community.''

Marhamo, the father of six children, was unsure if he would send them to school today. Muslims, he said, are bracing for the kind of threats they received after the Oklahoma City bombing, when the culprits were immediately and erroneously assumed to be Muslims.

Ann and Tom Jackowitz of Wellesley were part of the herd that left the Financial District for home and family in the suburbs. Jackowitz, a lawyer at Choate Hall & Stuart, was on the 36th floor of Exchange Place when her husband called shortly before 10 a.m. from his office on Franklin Street, where he works for Fidelity.

''He told me to get out of the building as fast as I could,'' recalled Jacowitz, sitting with her husband and their two children at the West Mountain Creamery ice cream emporium in Wellesley early yesterday afternoon. ''It took us an hour and a half to get home. I was in the middle of `We need that document by 11:30' and then we just got up and left. It puts life in perspective.''

The exodus to the 'burbs was huge.

''It was brutal around here at 12:30,'' said James Dowling, an employee at the Wellesley Post Office, as he watched the volume of cars waiting at the nearby train station for early commuters.

Bostonians met the limits of technology yesterday morning. Cellphones were as ubiquitous as they were useless as people tried desperately to reach friends and loved ones in New York, only to find the circuits jammed.

Carole Copeland Thomas stood on Summer Street, defeated, trying to reach her niece, a graduate student at Pratt in Brooklyn. She had just finished giving a training workshop to Verizon employees when the word came about the explosions. ''We had a silent moment of meditation for the victims,'' she said. ''We tried to go on but realized we couldn't and stopped.''

Reactions could be unfathomably personal. ''I used to work in the World Trade Center and one of my best friends works there, and I think she died,'' said a woman, choking back tears and pushing an empty stroller as her son ran around Frog Pond. ''I'm just trying to keep my mind off of it. If I start talking about it I'll start crying.''

Amid the bleakness was the occasional good news. ''I feel blessed,'' said a Fleet Bank employee named Valerie. ''My cousin was supposed to be on that plane but missed it because of the traffic on Route 3.''

Andrew Custard, who works for Veritas software company, felt the same. ''My girlfriend had a 9 a.m. appointment on the 78th floor of the World Trade Center,'' he said. ''But she was late and missed it.''

Anger was rare yesterday morning, subsumed in grief and alarm. But it was there. ''If there is ever a call to arms, this is it,'' said Peter Gagnon, a carpenter working on the Big Dig.

Chris Koegel, a recent Williams graduate, thought war. ''I spent the morning envisioning myself in army boots and fatigues. Our parents lived through the Vietnam War, not knowing what they were fighting for,'' he said. ''But this is absolutely a war I would feel comfortable fighting in. It's about our friends and families.''

The scale of the carnage stunned everyone. ''This was worse than Pearl Harbor,'' said Sal Ingrassia, a top union official in town for a pension meeting. ''There are two costs: one is in human life, the second is the country as a whole. Business has stopped. Who knows when it will resume? I can't calculate the cost.''

In front of Filene's, a street evangelist paced back and forth, waving an American flag and intoning: ''Wake up, America. We are living in evil times.''

Globe Staff writers Tara H. Arden-Smith, David Arnold, Marcella Bombardieri and Anand Vaishnav contributed to this report.

This story ran on page A21 of the Boston Globe on 9/12/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.