September 11, 2004

Sounds of a Silent Place

he World Trade Center did not go up or come down quietly. And even when it was standing, it moaned and creaked.

Shortly after the towers fell three years ago today, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, also known as the Kitchen Sisters, the creators of National Public Radio's Lost and Found Sound (a project to save the sound artifacts of various places and times, like Route 66 and the whole 20th century), set up an NPR phone line for people to call in with their audio memories of the World Trade Center. They also asked Verizon to save the phone calls made to and from the towers on Sept. 11.

From the hundreds of calls and audio clips they collected, the Kitchen Sisters created "The Sonic Memorial Project," which won a Peabody Award in 2002. (It is available on audible.com and NPR.org). And based on that, the Kitchen Sisters and Soundwalk, an audio walking tour outfit, made "Ground Zero: A Sonic Memorial Soundwalk," a one-hour CD meant for touring the area around the World Trade Center. It goes on sale today for $24.95 at various museums and bookstores in New York City, and online at amazon.com, barnes&noble.com, audible.com or apple.com/itunes.

The very concept of a sonic walking tour of ground zero sounds ghastly. What are the possible precedents, after all? Museum Acoustiguides? Audio tours of Jack the Ripper's London? And what about the content? Had someone taped the roar of the airplanes that hit the towers? The buildings as they burned and collapsed? The last phone calls home?

The ground zero sound walk, it turns out, is not so much Acoustiguide as funeral march for the World Trade Center, with stops along the way for eulogies. You put on your headphones and begin the tour outside St. Paul's Chapel, move along the periphery of ground zero, through the World Financial Center and out to the Hudson River.

In your ear, the voice of the guide, the writer Paul Auster, sounds low and priestly. "We came together after Sept. 11, 2001, radio producers, artists, construction workers, bond traders, secretaries, archivists, widows, firefighters - a nationwide collaboration to chronicle and commemorate the life and history of the World Trade Center and its neighborhood."

You hear the telephone calls that the Kitchen Sisters recorded. Each one prompts another queasy feeling. Is this the voice of someone about to die? Very rarely it is.

On the periphery of ground zero, you hear a message, dated Sept. 11, 8:59 a.m., from Sean Rooney, who worked for Aon Risk Management Services in the south tower, to his wife, Beverly Eckert. He's calling her from the 105th floor telling her about the attack on the north tower. "It's horrible," he says. In a second message, at 9:02 am, he tells her that his building is secure. (Mr. Rooney died when the south tower collapsed.)

You hear a remarkably calm call to Julia Sweeney from her husband, Brian, on United Flight 175, from Boston to Los Angeles. He knows exactly what is going on: "Hey, Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I'm on an airplane that has been hijacked. If things don't go well - and it's not looking good - I just want you to know that I absolutely love you. Bye, Babe." That absolutely, so of its time, so like a young man, is awful to hear.

The more ordinary and unassuming the audio clip, the starker it seems now. Nothing is more poignant than the fast, blithe bells of AM news radio: "This is 1010 WINS. You give us 22 minutes. We'll give you the world. Good morning! 64 degrees and 8 o'clock. It's Tuesday, Sept. 11. It's Primary Day, and the polls are open in New York City. It could be a beautiful day today. Sunshine throughout. Brilliant, splendid September day."

Other audio clips don't have the impact you might expect. Stephen Manning went to J&R Music World to buy Bob Dylan's new record on the morning of Sept. 11. He happened to have a tape recorder with him and turned it on as the north tower cracked open and collapsed. All you can really hear are sirens, people screaming and Mr. Manning yelling into the mike, "The whole building just fell down."

One powerful moment comes as you ascend a flight of steel stairs leading away from ground zero and over West Street. There you listen to Hillary North, who worked at the Aon Corporation in the south tower, reading her poem "How my life has changed." Each time she reaches a new line you climb another step. "I can no longer flirt with Lou. I can no longer dance with Myra. I can no longer meet the deadline with Mark. I can no longer drink coffee with Rich. I can no longer. " Ms. North was late for work on Sept. 11 because she stopped to vote.

Walking the new skyway that takes you from the World Trade Center site to One World Financial Center feels eerily like taking the old walkway, as if no time has passed at all. But then, on the CD, you hear a short call from a woman who observes that the revolving doors of the World Trade Center, constantly turning during rush hour, used to sound "like a heartbeat - thump-thump." You go through a set of those doors, making your own thump-thump. Who would ever have noticed that before Sept. 11?

Long before the World Trade Center was doomed, people did go out of their way to capture the noises it made. You can hear the sound artist Stephen Vitiello's recording of the towers' rumbles. Since the windows couldn't be opened, he attached contact microphones to them to listen to "the heart and soul of the building," as if through a stethoscope. He caught the traffic noise sounding like an "orchestra tuning up" and the sounds of steel and glass "creaking and cracking" in 1999 the day after Hurricane Floyd passed over New York.

Not everything on this sound walk portends the towers' disastrous end. "We wanted to keep 9/11 to a minimum," Ms. Nelson said. "Our point was not that moment."

And so, you hear old musical performances that took place in the plaza of the World Trade Center and the Wintergarden: Odetta, Bill Frisell, Stephen Scott. You hear about the neighborhood that was razed to make way for the towers. (It used to be called Radio Row, for the stores that were once there.) And you hear Mohawk ironworkers recalling the construction of the towers - the feeling of being "in this air that no one's ever been in before," one says.

But the history and the music are colored by the absences. It's thrilling to listen to Philippe Petit, the French aerialist who illegally crossed the gap between the twin towers on a high wire in 1974, remembering what he felt and heard up there: the vibration of the wire, the breathing of the buildings, the pause in traffic as everyone stopped to watch. But the meaning of those sounds has changed, now that this once-treacherous gap is just safe air. The danger has passed and cannot be had again.