We have been here in Murray Hill for a week and a day now. The northern part of Battery Park City has been reopened to residents, but only as pedestrians. They may be ready with the southern part soon. All I really would like to get is the car.

While we wait I'm going to continue to act as a "man in Havana" and give information from our perspective.

Stuyvesant High School is one of NYC's special schools, along with the Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Technical High School, which I attended. For the last few years, Stuy has been at its new home at the upper end of Battery Park City. Along with elementary kids that have doubled up with other elementary schools, Stuy students were sent to double up with Brooklyn Tech, and may be there for some time. At first they were to go on a double schedule that would overlap, but when they realized that would mean 8,000 kids at Tech at once, they shortened the periods to about a half-hour each. Tech kids go from early morning to 1:30 and Stuy kids from then into the evening.

We heard on TV that Battery Park City residents could go to the General Post Office behind Penn Station to get their mail, and we walked/rolled over there Tuesday. The PO was very helpful, but all we got were three pieces of junk mail. The balance hasn't yet been retrieved from the Bowling Green PO downtown. I arranged for forwarding to Florida. While sitting in a "vest-pocket" park near the PO to look at the junk mail, a woman was feeding some hardy NYC pigeons nearby. Bev was watching with her elbows on the armrests of the wheelchair and her hands clasped. One pigeon thought that would be a great roost and landed on Bev's clasped hands and they sat staring at each other almost beak to nose. Bev took it well and when I stopped laughing, I shooed it away. Doves are also really pigeons, right? Anything symbolic here?

There are "missing" pictures on most streetcorners. We stopped in Penn Station, and the next day in Grand Central, both under heavy police guard, and looked at the larger bulletin boards put up for the missing, with flowers and flags. Pedestrian activity is getting heavier. We stopped to read the Times in the park in Herald Square outside of Macy's, and the next day in Bryant Park behind the NY Public Library. Both parks were busy, but what was unusual was the sound of sirens going by every once in a while.

Coming back from Bryant Park after dinner we looked down Fifth Avenue and I wasn't surprised by what I saw. The Empire State Building for some years now has illuminated its top 20% according to the season: green for St. Patrick's day, orange on Halloween, red and green for Christmas. Only on Independence Day, and probably Memorial and Veterans' Days did it go red, white, and blue. Well, you can imagine what it is now. The second setback from the top is floodlit red, the first setback white, and there are blue neon lights inside the spire.

When I was growing up the Empire State Building was the tallest building in New York, in the country and in the world. More about tall buildings later, but it is ironic that it is once again the tallest building in New York.

Our hotel, and its affiliated hotel two brownstones down have been accomodating lots of rescue workers. We see uniforms all the time.

On our corner Monday I spotted Liz Smith, the gossip columnist. That's not very pertinent, but I thought I'd throw it in to see if you were paying attention.

The QE2 on its current round-trip Atlantic crossing avoided NY and called at Boston, instead.

New York is hurting financially, too. We've all heard about the airlines, and about tourism in general across the country, but tourism here is particularly bad. Restaurants are either partly full or empty. I saw discount signs on a small place on Lexington Avenue. The Plaza Hotel is considering closing it famous Oak Room and its Oyster Bar because of lack of business. Sheraton has two hotels diagonally across from each other north of Times Square, the Sheraton New York and the Sheraton Manhattan. They've upgraded people from the Manhattan to the New York, cleared the beds out of the Manhattan and put folding tables in, and the entire Sheraton Manhattan is now the temporary home of the Lehman Brothers brokerage firm.

Four Broadway shows that weren't that strong financially in the first place announced that they're closing this Sunday, including "If You Ever Leave Me..." that we just saw last weekend, and the show we're seeing this Saturday, "Stones in his Pockets". Then Tony-award winner for Best Revival "Kiss Me, Kate" became the fifth closing for Sunday. Most other shows are vulnerable, including the long running ones that now rely primarily on the tourist trade like "Phantom of the Opera" and "Les Misérables", which has been running for eleven years. The Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut cancelled the opening of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "By Jeeves" on Broadway because two key backers withdrew. The only good news is that Lloyd Webber came up with $1.5 million in backing in Britain, so it's on again. Actors and stage workers have taken pay cuts for the next month, and the Schubert, Nederlander, and Jujamcyn chains of theaters are foregoing rent on their theaters for the time being.

Although it is well known that the landfill for Battery Park City was taken from the excavation for the construction for the WTC, BPC has announced that all its buildings are built not on a foundation of landfill, but built into the same bedrock that most Manhattan buildings are, and all are structurally sound.

It is also well known that the airlines are hurting and rightly deserve the government subsidy that's just been voted on. However, Amtrak has been threatened for years and years with reductions and cutoffs of government help, even as it runs a skeleton system. Yet when needed, Amtrak was there to bring airline passengers to their destinations. Ridership increased 60% last week, and it is felt that a good proportion of that might remain, especially if airline security measures greatly increase the time needed to fly. Now Amtrak is asking for more subsidies as well, since it needs more rolling stock and improvements with all the increased ridership, and I think they should get it, as well.

We went to the Windows on the World restaurant on the 107th floor of the north tower twice, once with my mother on her birthday, long before we lived in the neighborhood. It was the highest grossing restaurant in the country. About 1/3 of its employees, 70 or so, were on duty that morning and all are missing. The master chef, on his way upstairs to work, suddenly decided to get his reading glasses fixed at his optometrist's down in the Concourse, and survived.

Also before we moved into the neighborhood, we used a mailing service on Vesey Street, across from the WTC, as our mail drop. You may remember us having a Vesey Street "address".

Although I have some strong opinions about the buildings and the entire complex, they had become a part of our neighborhood. Remember, the complex was a 7-8 minute walk from our home. We banked at the Citibank branch in the Concourse until we opened our Schwab account down the same hall. Bev used to go for her B-12 shots at a doctor's office up in one of the low-lying buildings. We regularly picked up discount theater tickets (just like in Times Square) at the half-price ticket booth in the upper lobby of the second tower. We shopped at Hallmark, Starbucks, Borders. Apparently the northeast corner of the complex is still intact to some extent. Borders up at the street level still has the escalator down to its Concourse level and out into the hallway past Sbarro's, but beyond, fallen girders have pierced the corridor like a knife cutting cake. Everything is covered in thick ash. The atmosphere is described as eerily Pompeiian.

I know exactly the last time I was at the WTC, August 20, because I have a post office stamp to prove it. It was late that evening that I was finally ready to send some important certified letters. I left Bev watching TV at 10 PM and walked over to the post office known as the Church Street Station in the Federal Building, because it's a 24-hour facility. The Church Street Station faces the WTC and is just the other side of it from us. Going, I made my way around the WTC along Liberty Street, turning left up Church Street, but coming back, on a whim, I decided to cut diagonally across the complex. I passed the upper level of Borders, and as I turned onto the Plaza, I noticed a new Dunkin' Donuts I hadn't seen before. I then cut diagonally across that vast open wasteland of a plaza, so out of human scale, past those elephantine towers, entered the back of the Marriott hotel, cut through the lobby, and left by the front entrance out to the street. It's all gone now.

You may have seen on TV how professional demolition experts bring down buildings by expertly imploding them in on themselves, hardly cracking a window on buidings across the street. Keep that thought in mind for a moment.

In the last year there was a commercial on TV shown repeatedly, done by computer animation, that included a scene of rather tall buildings falling down on each other in a domino effect. Keep that in mind, too.

As bad as the collapse of the towers was, it could have been much worse. All the buildings on the streets around the complex are 10, 20, 30 stories tall, and were filled with office workers. At least the towers collapsed down onto themselves and the complex. The collapse has been described as appearing like a controlled demolition event, going downward, with minimal effect on buildings facing the complex. Imagine what could have happened if the towers fell over, or even if they had disintegrated in different directions. Picture that domino effect.

I understand the Church Street Station/Federal Building, just across the street, is reasonably OK, even though a plane's landing gear hit its roof. Historic St. Paul's Chapel across the street is OK. When I said the new Embassy Suites Hotel and cineplex, a block or two away, was damaged, I said that was street rumor, and it turns out to be incorrect.

I don't wish to comment on the attack itself, or on whatever retaliation will take place. Enough has been said about that. I do want to give a personal opinion, however, as not only a New Yorker, not only a Manhattanite, but most specifically as a resident of what I'm going to start referring to again as the Lower West Side, in regard to 1) building height, and 2) potential reconstruction. My opinions may be different from what you'd expect.

Building Height   The attack on the towers has been described as obscene. I agree. But with all due respect to the victims, I think requiring human beings to work on a daily basis one hundred and ten stories above the surface of the earth is almost as obscene.

New York is not the birthplace of the skyscraper. The architect Louis Sullivan in Chicago is the father of the steel skeleton necessary for skyscraper construction. We have seen a number of his surviving buildings in Chicago. They are beautiful and of reasonable height, maybe 10-15 stories. New York, however, is the city that really took the skyscraper to heart, and has many in the 40, 50, 60 story height. When skyscrapers came to Europe, I remember people complaining about the newyorkization of, say, Frankfurt. But buildings there are of reasonable height.

The really tall buildings in New York, such as the 79-story Chrysler Building and the 102-story Empire State Building, are overtall, but not in the way you may think. They both taper considerably, with many setbacks. I'll use the Empire State Building as an example. It fills one block of Fifth Avenue, between 33rd and 34th Streets. Its base reaches back maybe halfway to Sixth Avenue. That's a substantial footprint. But maybe 1/4 of the way up it has its first of several narrowings. The uppermost part, and this is just an eyeball guess, has maybe half the footprint of the base.

Also, both buildings fool you because of their spires. Visitors to the ESB arrive at the observation deck on the 86th floor, which is a large roof area. That means the highest offices are only on the 85th floor. Visitors wanting to take an additional elevator go up to an enclosed room at the top of the spire labeled floor 102, for essentially the same view. There are no offices in the spire, only broadcast and other equipment. Those upper "floors" are essentially nonexistant.

But the WTC towers had a large footprint, I would guess larger than the ESB, but let's argue they had the same size footprint. But they didn't taper (visually boring, anyway) and went up all the way beyond the ESB's 86 or 102 to 110! Consider the mass of those things. And for a reason I never did understand, they built two of those monstrosities!

Now let's discount an attack, or even a "Towering Inferno"-type fire. Let's just say you had the simplest of emergencies, a power failure, and no elevators were working. How far down would you like to have to walk to the street with a flashlight in your hand and with hundreds of other people going down the stairs, maybe some in panic? 40, 50, 60 stories? Want to try 110? And how about the disabled? The blind, deaf, or wheelchair-bound? I watched three guys help Bev down just six stories in our building and saw what an effort that was. Did you hear on TV about the guy that helped a wheelchair-bound woman that he didn't even know down 68 floors of the WTC? That was heroic. But that he should have needed to have done it for so many flights was absolutely obscene. Equally obscene is having to send firefighters up the stairs in so insanely tall a building.

I think it's time to stop the newyorkization of New York. They say about 40 stories is ideal for the height of a tall building, in regard to how much space is needed for elevators and the like. Let's put a cap like that on all new skyscraper construction. Let's drop the mine-is-taller-than-yours mentality. Just because you can build to idiotic heights doesn't mean you have to or should.

The ESB is the tallest in NY. The Sears Tower in Chicago is the tallest in the US. But of the 16 buildings in the world over 1000 feet high, 9 are now in Asia. Good. If they want the records, let's let them have them.

Potential Reconstruction   In the 1960's David Rockefeller wanted to drum up business for Lower Manhattan. He got the Port Authority, which runs the bridges and tunnels, to go into a real estate venture, the WTC. At first they wanted to put it over on the East River, which would have decimated what has now become the South Street Seaport Historic District. Instead, they decimated the Lower West Side. His brother, Nelson Rockefeller, was then Governor of New York State, and helped get the ball rolling. When built, the towers were largely empty for years. It was called the World Trade Center, but there was very little trade involved. The offices that were filled were largely state government agencies. But eventually they were successful, and ended up sucking the life out of other buildings in the financial district. So many buildings on and near Wall Street were emptied of offices that by the 1990's, many were converted to apartments, and there is a substantial residential community in the financial district now. Even the beautiful terra cotta Woolworth Building across from City Hall, the tallest building in the world before WWI and known as the Cathedral of Commerce, is presently being converted to luxury apartments. But after the attack, I understand they're reconsidering.

Anyway, 12 city blocks covering 16 acres were assembled for the WTC site. That's a huge bite out of the compact neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan. Two major (for the neighborhood) north-south streets, Greenwich and Washington Streets, were closed, as well as several small cross streets, so that there was no longer a Cortlandt Street at the Cortlandt Street subway station under the WTC. The lower level of the complex, as said, was the Concourse, its roof was the Plaza, and the two towers and several other buildings rose out of both levels.

The effect on the neighborhood was like putting two elephants in your living room. You couldn't ignore them. To get from the front door to the kitchen you'd either have to go around them or duck under them. I described above getting to the post office. It was worse driving.

People who weren't familiar with the skyline before don't realize how clumsy those two oversized elephants made the other graceful buildings look.

Look how London and Berlin reacted to wartime devastation. When the relatively undamaged St. Paul's Cathedral became visible after buildings around it were bombed out, London chose to rebuild and block out the view of the Cathedral again, so only the dome is visible from a distance, as before. But Berlin, having lost most of its seven railroad stations in the war, decided to improve its situation, and is building a consolidated railroad station at Lehrter Bahnhof instead.

My point is, with all due respect to the victims, and realizing the tragedy of the attack, I would like to see the Lower West Side situation improved. I certainly don't want to see the towers rebuilt. A memorial park should definitely be part of the plan, but perhaps some streets should be put back through to make the neighborhood more liveable, with perhaps some low-lying buildings.

Let's just improve on what we had.