90th Floor Frozen, Even as Ground Zero Changes

By JIM DWYER

Published: September 12, 2007

Anne Foodim, Manhattan apartment dweller, lighted three candles on her dining table yesterday morning, then switched on the television to hear the name of a slight man in a sport jacket. With a few soft words, some gentle squeezes to shoulders, that man, a colleague, helped save Ms. Foodim and others on the 90th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center in 2001.

His name — Ed Emery — would be somewhere around the 700th on the list of 2,750 read at the Sept. 11 memorial service. So Ms. Foodim absorbed the stately pace of the event, taking note of its scale six years after the attack.

On the first anniversary, she had been chosen to read names as a representative of those who had escaped. The city stood still. Thousands crowded the site, and others who could not get in stood on sidewalks, listening to the ceremony on the radios of parked cars.

Yesterday, on a showery morning, no more than a few hundred relatives and friends of the dead gathered on Liberty Street. Ahead of them, a grove of construction cranes rose from the pit of ground zero. Behind them, traffic heaved along Broadway, the soaring notes of a flutist’s “Amazing Grace” dueling with the diesel wheeze of buses.

The families hiked down a ramp to drop flowers into a pool. No one will make precisely that memory walk again; the ground will be built over next year.

Sept. 11, as a public occasion, has shrunk to life size: potent as ever for people holding photographs of fathers on their wedding days and mothers in their backyards, but unlikely to start wars again.

Babies are in first grade, children have graduated from high school, teenagers have finished college. Ms. Foodim, now 63, has effectively retired. She had been fighting cancer, and could barely get down the stairs that morning.

“In some ways, strange as this is to say, Sept. 11 was good for me,” Ms. Foodim said. “I didn’t know what I had in me. In certain ways, you could say Ed saved my life.”

The personal narratives of that day in 2001 were almost immediately overtaken by the cosmic. The initials N.Y.P.D. and F.D.N.Y. were stenciled onto T-shirts and hats, then onto the sides of munitions that were launched first into Afghanistan, where the Taliban had sheltered Al Qaeda, and later into Iraq, which had no connection to the attacks.

“I don’t know how the country could buy into it to begin with,” Ms. Foodim said. “Whatever happened to Osama bin Laden?”

Two presidential candidates, both New Yorkers, attended the memorial yesterday. One of them, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, was scarcely seen; the other, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, briefly spoke, quoting the writer Eli Wiesel on the need for a moral response to evil.

Other members of Mr. Giuliani’s administration were present, including his business partner and protégé, who was then the police commissioner: Bernard B. Kerik, who pleaded guilty last year to accepting $165,000 in home renovations while in office from a company suspected of ties to organized crime. In his path to the stage yesterday, Mr. Giuliani, whether by design or chance, kept well clear of Mr. Kerik, who was standing in a section reserved for dignitaries.

Ms. Foodim recalled the day six years earlier. She had gone to work, at the end of a long siege of chemotherapy for breast cancer; she was just starting the ordeal of radiation.

That morning, she said, “I struggled up the steps out of the subway at Fulton Street, and said, ‘I am so glad I’m alive because look at that blue sky.’ ”

She worked for Fiduciary Trust, which had offices in the south tower. When the first plane struck the north tower, she felt the heat through the windows.

Mr. Emery arrived with a sense of calm and command, she said. “Ed came running out of his office, and he said, ‘Come on, let’s go,’ ” Ms. Foodim said.

He ushered a group from the 90th floor to the staircase, and led them down to the 78th floor, where they could take an express elevator to the lobby.

AS she walked down the stairs, Ms. Foodim felt the weight of the moment, and the cancer treatments, wearing on her.

She paused on landings, exhausted. Through her illness, Mr. Emery had coaxed her along, encouraging her to get rest when she needed it, but welcoming her company at work. He had given her a book on tranquillity for her birthday a few weeks earlier.

Now, she said, Mr. Emery was talking her down the stairs. “Ed said, ‘If you can finish chemo, you can get down those steps,’ ” she recalled.

At the 78th floor, one of their group, Elsie Castellanos, who had also been working at the trade center when it was bombed in 1993, became upset. Mr. Emery patted her shoulder, and urged her onto the elevator with the others.

As they approached the elevators, they heard an announcement. “Exact words: ‘The building is secure, please return to your desks,’ ” Ms. Foodim said.

“I had been out the day before. I was always a good little girl. How could you go home, if the building is secure? Ed said, ‘You know what, it’s O.K., go ahead.’ ”

The Fiduciary group boarded the express car. “He promised to be down directly, but had to go back up for something or someone,” Ms. Foodim said.

Ms. Foodim and her group got clear of the building. Somewhere between 14,000 and 17,000 people escaped from the two towers, investigations later found.

Not Mr. Emery. He climbed to the 97th floor with another Fiduciary employee, Alayne Gentul, to evacuate a group of people who were working on the computer systems. They were trapped by the second plane.

For months after, Ms. Foodim worked as the Fiduciary representative at a family center set up by the city on Pier 94, helping with benefits and death certificates for the survivors of nearly 100 people. After two years, she had had enough; she attributes her own psychic survival to a therapist she continues to see.

She lives with two dogs and has a network of friends, women she has met over the last six years. Most of them are from her neighborhood on the Upper East Side. “I don’t keep in touch with anyone from Fiduciary,” she said.

She gathered with some of her friends at her home yesterday morning. She wept a little when the Brooklyn Youth Chorus sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water” at the memorial. And she lighted the candles, one for her lost Fiduciary colleagues, one for Ms. Gentul and one for Ed Emery.

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A Day of Respect, Except for the Ballot

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: September 11, 2007

On this, the sixth anniversary of the city’s longest day, most of New York will carry on as usual. Stores will be open. So will government offices. Broadway will put on its shows. The Mets, weather permitting, will play ball. Traders at the New York Stock Exchange will buy and sell.

In short, New Yorkers will go about their normal activities — with one exception. They won’t vote. That most basic element of American democracy, the ballot, is the one normal thing forbidden them on the Sept. 11 anniversary.

And our political leaders will reassure us that the terrorists haven’t won.

Customarily, Primary Day in New York State is the second Tuesday in September. That would be today. But in May, barely noticed by most New Yorkers, the Legislature and the governor delayed the primaries until next Tuesday, Sept. 18.

So we can shop, and go to a ballgame, and make money. But allow our democracy to function normally? Nope. That is somehow incompatible with Sept. 11.

Lawmakers reached this conclusion in virtual lock step, some no doubt fearing the potential wrath of 9/11 families. The State Senate voted for the delay unanimously. In the Assembly, the vote was 136 to 9, the tiny minority consisting of 6 Democrats and 3 Republicans.

Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader, called it “critically important that we reserve Sept. 11 as a day when the world looks back and remembers the many heroes who lost their lives.”

But couldn’t we remember and vote at the same time? Some might even say that democracy’s normal processes would honor those heroes while telling the terrorists in a powerful way where they can go.

“Yes, you can make the case for that,” said John E. McArdle, a spokesman for Mr. Bruno. “But I think there was a consensus all the way around that it was preferable to go this route.”

Much the same was said by Dan Weiler, a spokesman for Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker. He was asked for Mr. Silver’s reasons for seeking the postponement. As relayed by Mr. Weiler, the speaker’s response was, “We felt it was the appropriate thing to do.”

Well, that explains it.

Granted, this will not be much of a Primary Day, especially in New York City, which has nothing more exciting than a judicial race or two. Granted, some people still have bad memories of the aborted Primary Day that was Sept. 11, 2001.

Even so, did Albany bow to a new form of political correctness at the expense of respect for democratic tradition? Linda B. Rosenthal, a Manhattan Democrat who was one of the nine dissenters in the Assembly, seems to think so. She called the postponement “misguided.”

“The best way to recognize the significance of this attack on America and on its values,” Ms. Rosenthal said, “is not by postponing the opportunity to participate in the most fundamental democratic process we have.”

John A. Ravitz, executive director of the city’s Board of Elections, said that he and other election officials around the state had made a similar point to the Legislature. “We said, ‘What better way to prove that we had recovered and we’re not intimidated by what happened on 9/11 than to hold an election?’ ” Mr. Ravitz said. “But we were told that this” — the change in dates — “was a done deal.”

By now, it has become axiomatic among those in the political class that they alone among New Yorkers must be untrue to themselves on Sept. 11.

“I’ve given up,” said Jerry Skurnik, a political consultant. “We should vote on Sept. 11, but the problem is that people are going to attack candidates for campaigning.” Fernando Ferrer’s experience in the 2005 mayoral race is proof of that. You’d have thought that he had spit on the Constitution the way he was fiercely attacked for accepting the Rev. Al Sharpton’s endorsement on Sept. 11, two days before the Democratic primary.

What New York requires now is “a healthy public discussion about the need to move on and get back to the business of democracy,” said Dick Dadey, executive director of the government watchdog group Citizens Union. “There are many ways in which to show respect and honor that day,” he said, “but not at the continued expense of delaying the exercise of our democracy.”

It may be worth noting that Sept. 11 will fall next on a Tuesday in 2012, a year when major offices will be at stake. Perhaps by then New York’s political leaders will get their democratic groove back.

If it would help, we could all dye our index fingers purple that day.

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

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Towers Gone; ZIP Code Carries On

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: September 7, 2007

It’s pretty amazing, when you think about it. That was the feeling of a clerk at the Church Street Station, the majestic post office a few steps north of the World Trade Center site. He got no argument from us.

Six years have passed since that monstrous day when death filled the sky. It is time enough to get a simple detail straight, the clerk felt. “You would think they’d learn the new address,” he said the other day.

You would think. But for some reason, probably mundane, a fair number of companies and organizations keep sending mail to the twin towers, phantoms since that day in 2001.

At the post office at 90 Church Street, that mail arrives now in a trickle. “It’s down to maybe 200 pieces a day,” said Pat McGovern, a spokeswoman for the United States Postal Service.

That is piddling compared with the 85,000 pieces that poured in on a typical business day before 9/11. The number has steadily shrunk. There were roughly 7,000 pieces a day in early 2003. By the end of that year, there were 3,600. A year ago the figure was 300. Now it’s down to 200.

Still, you would think. Did some people not hear the news about the trade center?

More likely, Ms. McGovern said, “companies haven’t updated their mailing lists.”

Citing privacy concerns, she did not identify the companies that send letters and packages to the towers’ exclusive ZIP code, 10048, or the recipients. Postal Service higher-ups were also not interested in our request to talk with workers who sort the 10048 mail.

But generally speaking, “this mail is bundled up, and then the carriers send it back,” Ms. McGovern said. “We do have some caller service, where some companies come and pick it up,” even though it was sent to their old, ghostly address. For this service, they pay a fee. “It’s like having a post office box,” she said.

The sorting is done at the Church Street Station, home of the 10007 ZIP code. It is a survivor, somewhat akin to the World Trade Center companies that picked themselves up and moved elsewhere.

The terrorist attack damaged the station and left it contaminated by asbestos and other pollutants. But it bounced back to life three summers ago in all its marble and Art Deco splendor. On a wall near the entrance, neatly folded and packed in a triangular glass case, is the American flag that flew at the station on Sept. 11, 2001.

IN its time, 10048 was special for a bunch of reasons. Not the least of them was that in terms of income per worker, no other ZIP code in the city performed better.

After the attack, Andrew A. Beveridge, a Queens College sociologist and demographer, analyzed census data from 2000, the trade center’s last full year. He learned that 31,149 people worked in 10048, that they were paid an average of $101,006 (compared with a citywide average of $59,448) and that the $3.15 billion earned by trade center employees amounted to more than 1 percent of the New York metropolitan area’s entire payroll.

Some people, however, didn’t want to hear any of that.

They didn’t want to be reminded that the place was called the World Trade Center and that its spirit was commerce and finance. Four years ago, we quoted Professor Beveridge about the twin towers as a money machine. That led to some angry letters and e-mail messages, he recalled the other day. One woman who had lost a close relative was especially upset.

“I guess she felt it was demeaning to say that someone was trying to make a lot of money,” he said. He found the reaction to be “a little peculiar.” Reality is what it is.

And perhaps will be again. Final designs for new towers at ground zero were unveiled yesterday. Financial companies may yet flourish anew at the site.

If so, a tried-and-true ZIP code awaits them. At the Postal Service, 10048 remains very much alive. “There are no immediate plans for retiring it,” Ms. McGovern said.

E-mail:haberman@nytimes.com

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Lafayette’s 250th: Iraq Aside, We’re Still Grateful to France

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: August 31, 2007

Relations between the United States and France seem to have climbed out of the musty sub-basement where they had lingered since the start of the Iraq war.

Of course, many here still resent France, perhaps because it deemed the war a bad idea several years before most Americans came to the same conclusion; few people love a premature realist. But in the main, the days of Bordeaux boycotts and “freedom fries” Babbitry are over, thanks in part to the ascension of a pro-American French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

With France no longer the bogeyman it once was, permit us to note that next Thursday, Sept. 6, is the 250th anniversary of the birth of a fellow who, for Americans, may be the most significant Frenchman not named Gérard Depardieu. That would be Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier. Without his help during the Revolutionary War, we might all be eating bangers and mash.

You probably know him better as the Marquis de Lafayette, though over time he preferred Lafayette, plain and simple.

A soldier from the age of 14, he volunteered his services to the Continental Congress, fought the British as a member of George Washington’s army and became Washington’s lifelong friend. He arrived on these shores, ready to do battle, when he was all of 19. Those were the days.

In a rare action, Congress made Lafayette an honorary American citizen five years ago. But do many people have a sense of him? Not judging from a recent survey by the New-York Historical Society.

That quaintly hyphenated organization dispatched summer interns to different neighborhoods, including two of the streets in the city named for Lafayette, in Manhattan and in Brooklyn. The interns, history students at U.C.L.A., asked dozens of people what they knew about the old boy. The responses boiled down to: Lafayette, we are clueless.

“Definitely among the younger generation, not a soul knew who Lafayette was,” said Louise Mirrer, the historical society’s president. Even older New Yorkers offered responses like “Never heard of him” or at best, if they were really on the ball, “Sounds French.”

“But one fireman knew quite a lot,” Dr. Mirrer said. “That was reassuring.”

Most likely, Lafayette’s birthday will come and go with few New Yorkers taking note. The historical society intends to keep him in the public eye, though, with an exhibition planned for mid-November. The focus will be less on Lafayette’s Revolutionary War exploits than on a 13-month return journey that he began in 1824, 10 years before his death.

That trip, through all 24 states that then formed the United States, began at Castle Clinton in Lower Manhattan. It was a landmark event, said Richard Rabinowitz, who is the exhibition’s curator, working with his wife, Lynda B. Kaplan, a media producer. The United States was in the early stages of figuring out what it thought of itself as a nation, Mr. Rabinowitz said, and Lafayette gave the process a caffeine-like jolt.

There he was, Washington’s buddy, showing up at age 67 and “schlepping around 6,000 miles of the United States,” Mr. Rabinowitz said. “This was like a return of your grandfather’s sidekick” — and with the sidekick telling people at each stop that “we were doing everything right.”

“If Europeans complain that Americans are too self-congratulatory,” he said, “they can blame Lafayette.”

We were doing everything right? Uh, wasn’t there a little detail known as slavery? Lafayette indeed considered it “a blight on the country,” Mr. Rabinowitz said. But “he thought it would disappear, that it was incompatible with American liberty.”

With his pre-Sarkozy affection for America, Lafayette was lionized. Wherever he went, Ms. Kaplan said, there were parades, banners, dinners and what can only be called, in perfect non-French, tchotchkes: ceramic bowls and plates, brushes, snuffboxes, children’s shoes, all bearing his image or scenes of his visit.

“This was really the beginning of the T-shirt craze,” Mr. Rabinowitz said.

He was joking. But maybe we should be grateful that all this took place more than 180 years ago. Today, you’d have “I ♥ Lafo” T-shirts and the like. There’s just so much that anyone should have to take.

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

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In Day of Mass Arrests, Divergent Versions of Events

A man at the New York Public Library was among the
roughly 1,100 people arrested on Aug. 31, 2004.
--Photo by Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

By JIM DWYER

Published: August 29, 2007

Along the terrace of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, two teenage girls played guitar and sang. A yoga teacher hunted for a friend from New Orleans. A young woman who had spent the summer traveling around the country struck up a conversation with two men from Quebec. Hundreds of others sat or stood on the steps, holding flags and signs.

That peaceful moment, a few minutes before 6 on the afternoon of Aug. 31, 2004, would not last. It was the second day of the Republican National Convention in New York, and a date set for multiple demonstrations, some of which had unconcealed agendas of civil disobedience. For months, undercover police officers had been collecting information on groups planning protests. The library had been listed on Internet sites as a gathering spot for people interested in civil disobedience.

That day, in the space of about four hours starting about 4 p.m., some 1,100 people were arrested around the city, and many were held for 30 or more hours. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has said the police stopped many dangerous troublemakers from creating havoc. Now, though, the city faces 605 federal lawsuits; it has already paid $694,000 to settle 35 such cases, according to the city comptroller.

If the absence of widespread violence during the convention reflects successful police work, as the mayor has maintained, the narratives slowly emerging from the lawsuits are revealing the hazards of mass arrests made that day.

***

At the library, that included scores of people who, it appears, were not doing what they were charged with, according to testimony and video from the lawsuits, as well as video recordings collected by I-Witness Video, an organization that documents public demonstrations.

“I met up with these two men from Montreal, and they said, ‘Would you like to help us hang a banner?’ ” recalled Amber Tejada, now 27, who had timed a cross-country trip so that she could join protests.

The three had just stretched the banner along the base of one of the library’s famous lions when Capt. Ronald Mercandetti approached. A videographer recorded the moment.

“Excuse me,” Captain Mercandetti said. “You can’t hang signs on Parks Department property.”

They immediately took down the banner.

“You can hold it, but you can’t hang it,” Captain Mercandetti said.

Two seconds later, as the men stood on the steps, holding ends of the banner, other officers moved in and arrested them.

As their wrists were bound, people on the stairs shouted that the officers should let them go.

“What did they do?” hollered one.

The answer, given in the police criminal complaints, is strikingly different from what videotape showed.

Although Ms. Tejada had been well up the stairs of the library, she and the two men were accused of “obstructing the entire intersection” of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue “so that no cars or pedestrians could pass through.” The complaint also said police officers had ordered her “to leave the area on numerous occasions and the defendant refused.” And, the arresting officer said, she had paraded through the intersection with at least 50 other people but did not have a permit.

“I’m totally willing to be held responsible for any violation of the law, but this was ridiculous,” Ms. Tejada, who lives in Oregon, said in an interview last year.

The only part of the complaint that resembled the situation on the steps accused her of hanging a banner on Parks Department property without permission.

After the uproar over the banner arrests had quieted, two girls then in high school, Gwynn Galitzer, who was 16, and Grace Kalambay, 17, sang and played guitar at a cafe table, the music drifting across the terrace.

Then the police searched the backpacks of at least three people on the steps. Although none of them were arrested, a fresh outcry rose from the crowd, and more police officers moved to clear the crowd.

“I had made the determination that it was no longer safe in the mezzanine area,” Chief James P. O’Neill, a police commander at the library, testified in a deposition. “There were a tremendous amount of people. It was loud, there were chairs, there were tables that can be used as weapons.”

The fracas swept up the two guitar-playing girls. Once again, the criminal complaint placed the action elsewhere: Both girls were accused of holding a banner and blocking the intersection of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue and of parading without a permit.

With the library steps cleared, the crowds streamed away. Among them was Ben Kappel, pulling his luggage on wheels; he had arrived on the airport bus after flying in from New Orleans, and met a friend, Wendy Tremayne, on the library steps. They were heading for the subway, Mr. Kappel said.

“We’re about to cross 42nd and Sixth, police said, ‘You can’t cross here,’ and turned us around,” Mr. Kappel said. Blocked from going west, they found that they also could not go east, south or north. “They countered us with those orange nets,” Mr. Kappel said.

The nets had followed the crowd from the library down 42nd Street. A police commander, holding his own video camera, gestured to the people trapped in the pen. “Sit down,” he ordered. The crowd — shoulder to shoulder, backpack to bandanna — sank awkwardly to the sidewalk.

Among them were Ms. Tremayne and Mr. Kappel. When they saw their arrest documents, many hours later, they discovered that they had been accused of disorderly conduct: for sitting on 42nd Street and blocking traffic.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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About New York: A Moist Finale to a Summer of Movies in Bryant Park

By JIM DWYER

Published: August 22, 2007

At the drizzling dot of 5 on Monday evening, security guards dropped the barriers to the Bryant Park lawn. Hundreds of people began a slow-motion dash across the lawn for the park’s final night of free outdoor movies this summer. By the time “Psycho” started four hours later, about 2,000 people had grabbed a few square feet of grass and the unlimited romance of a city night outdoors.

The summer of 2007 was getting its last licks. In a few days, colleges will open and the freshmen will peel off; there are sales everywhere on three-hole loose-leaf paper.

On the park lawn, people spread picnics and pizza boxes, then popped open contraband bottles of wine and beer. The rules say alcohol is not permitted in city parks, but those rules are not all that vigorously enforced. Waiters from sandwich kiosks moved through the crowd, taking orders and using helium-filled balloons to mark the spots for deliveries.

By fair-weather standards, the audience was small — it can run to as high as 10,000 with the right movie and clear skies — but given the light rain and the cool dreary night, it was a big crowd. Before long, even the stairs on the east side of the park were packed.

“A horrible night for weather, but it was the last movie of the summer,” said Ethan Lercher, who is director of events for Bryant Park and has gone to just about every Monday night movie for years. “And it was ‘Psycho.’ ”

Alfred Hitchcock, who made his last film in 1976 and was dead long before many of the spectators were born, could probably draw a crowd in a blizzard. He made “Psycho” in 1960, and it remains a classic of suspense about an insane man who operates a run-down motel and the young woman who makes the mistake of stopping there to hide out.

This is the 15th summer that free movies have been shown in Bryant Park. When the program began, it seemed like a defiantly countercultural statement, even though it was sponsored by HBO. In 1993, the city after dark and Bryant Park were generally seen as unfit for decent people, or the indecent, for that matter. (Even three years later, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani rejected a proposal to put giant television screens in city parks for the 1996 baseball World Series; the security issues, his aides said, would be too difficult.)

By then, however, outdoor movies were thriving, and not only in Bryant Park. Now, in places across Lower Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn, independent films are shown in the Rooftop Films festival, which continues into September.

The Bryant Park films are sturdy classics — “Annie Hall,” “Wait Until Dark,” and “Casablanca” were on this year’s calendar — but the movies are practically beside the point. Couples kiss. Friends meet. Strangers connect.

“Quite a few people have said that they met their husband or wife at the films,” Mr. Lercher noted. “I mean, it’s the perfect opportunity. You’re sitting on a lawn. You have four hours to hang out from the time the lawn opens until the movie starts. I think there are people who just come to eat on the lawn in a crowd and then leave.”

As darkness fell over the park, a short cartoon was shown. Then an HBO preview trailer ran, with an old theme song for the network.

With that, as happens every Monday night when that commercial plays, people climbed to their feet and danced.

“Why?” asked Mr. Lercher. “I can’t explain it. A few people just started dancing one year, and more people joined, and now you have it every Monday night. All the better that no one stood up and made an announcement that people should dance.”

The movie began, a crisp black and white print. The crowd cheered the appearance of Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins. Along 42nd Street, about two dozen police cars rolled by with lights flashing, in one of the city’s daily counterterrorism drills.

The spectators appeared to stick with the scary scenes on screen. They screamed when Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh, stood under the running water of a shower and a shadowy figure holding a knife appeared.

The rain fell harder. Umbrellas popped up, and lines of kids leaned against each other to share the shelter, as if they were in little fortresses, unafraid of the dark.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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A Life of Protest and Forgiveness

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: August 21, 2007

Ben Chaney stood to the side watching mourners fill a grave with the New York soil that gave Carolyn Goodman her eternal blanket.

It is Jewish custom for family and friends to bury the dead themselves, instead of leaving the task to hired hands. In life, Dr. Goodman was hardly an observant Jew. But on Sunday at Mount Judah Cemetery in Ridgewood, Queens, she exited this world in traditional style.

Ben Chaney was there to say farewell. “God put his angels here at the right moment,” he said as clumps of earth thudded across the plain pine coffin.

The “angels” were his mother, Fannie Lee Chaney, and Carolyn Goodman, women whose lives might never have converged had it not been for a brutal June night in 1964 in Neshoba County in Mississippi. Each lost a son that night. James Chaney, 21, and Andrew Goodman, 20, disappeared, along with Michael Schwerner, 24. Six weeks later, their bullet-scarred bodies were found in an earthen dam.

The three civil rights workers.

That’s how they came to be linked for eternity — two white boys from New York, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Schwerner, and a black kid from Mississippi, killed for daring to affirm the right of black Mississippians to vote freely. That right was not universally accepted in the “freedom summer” of 1964. The deaths of the young men at the hands of Ku Klux Klan members proved a pivotal moment for the civil rights movement.

Now, life has run its unrelenting course for their parents. Mr. Schwerner’s mother and father died years ago. Fannie Lee Chaney died in May at 84. On Friday, time ran out for Carolyn Goodman. She was 91.

“It’s been a rough summer,” said Ben Chaney, who was 12 when his big brother, James, was murdered.

Yes, he repeated: “God put his angels here. They carried a hell of a burden for a long time. A hell of a burden — knowing that your sons were murdered and the murderers were out on the streets going free.”

Seven Klan members, convicted of federal civil rights violations, served but a few years in prison. Decades later, in 2005, an eighth man, Edgar Ray Killen, was found guilty of manslaughter by a state jury in Mississippi, and is serving a 60-year term.

“Strong women,” Mr. Chaney said. “They were able to endure, and continued to have faith. They never lost faith. My mother didn’t, and neither did Carolyn.”

Dr. Goodman, a clinical psychologist who lived on the Upper West Side, did many things in her long life. With politics that fell decidedly leftward, she had taken on liberal causes well before Andrew, the second of her three sons, was killed. But perhaps inevitably, it is as Andrew’s mother, a civil rights symbol, that many know her.

There she lay on Sunday, beside her first husband, Robert Goodman, and in front of a long, swooping headstone marking Andrew’s grave. Robert Goodman, a civil engineer, died five years after his son’s murder.

“Everybody says Bobby died of a broken heart,” said Judith Johnson, a family friend.

On Andrew’s headstone, three sets of arms reach toward one another, above words borrowed from a Stephen Spender poem: “He traveled a short while towards the sun, and left the vivid air signed with his honor.”

MANY of the 65 people who stood over Dr. Goodman’s grave took turns remembering her. She was caring but tough, they said. She would hear out opponents, they said, but not hesitate to speak her mind.

Jane Mark, a relative, told of getting a phone call from Dr. Goodman in 1999, during the protests and mass arrests over the police killing of the unarmed Amadou Diallo. “Jane, we’re going to get arrested tomorrow,” Ms. Mark recalled Dr. Goodman as saying.

“On the spur of the moment, she could decide to get arrested,” Ms. Mark said. “But she wanted to have friends with her.”

Stanley Dearman, a former editor and publisher of The Neshoba Democrat, a Mississippi newspaper that called for justice in the murders, said Dr. Goodman felt no hatred for the killers. “She was too fine a person for that,” he said. That point was reinforced by Kalman Goodman, a grandson of Dr. Goodman.

One day, a man who spoke in a Southern accent went to her apartment and said he had played a role in Andrew Goodman’s death. He was now asking for forgiveness.

His grandmother, Mr. Goodman said, told the man: “If you want my forgiveness, work in your community and help other people. That way lies forgiveness.”

As far as he knows, the grandson said, the man went home and did just that.

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

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A Good Deed Is Rewarded, With a Catch

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: August 17, 2007

Brooke Astor, whose 105 years will be celebrated at her funeral today, donated a fair chunk of change to the New York Public Library. That gave her something in common with Ruth Cooper Jacobs, practically a kid by comparison at 98. Ms. Jacobs also sends money to the library, pretty much every year.

Granted, as a philanthropist she is not exactly in Mrs. Astor’s league (but then, as she says, she hasn’t had the same sort of, um, issues with her son that Mrs. Astor had). Her contribution is to buy a couple of tickets in the library’s annual fund-raising raffle.

The “dream raffle,” as it is called, offers more than 200 prizes — stuff like flat-screen televisions, digital cameras and gift certificates. This year, it raised $287,105, which can buy a bunch of Harry Potter books and leave enough to pay a few salaries.

As in years past, Ms. Jacobs, a retired public-school teacher and guidance counselor, bought two raffle tickets, for $10. She does the same with other organizations, she said, especially groups concerned with cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

“I don’t expect anything from any of them,” she said the other day in her Upper West Side apartment. “I didn’t expect anything from the library. I was more than surprised that I’d won first prize.”

That she did. A few weeks ago, she learned that she had won an eight-day river cruise for two in Europe. Between now and next July, she can sail the Rhine or the Danube — her choice, and not a bad one, most would agree.

Ms. Jacobs, whose husband died in 1998, figured it would be nice to travel with her daughter, Louisa Craddock, who works for the Department of City Planning. But she had to say aye or nay rather quickly. And that’s when the trouble started.

The riverboat has no elevator, and the cabin being offered is on the lower deck. The restaurant and lounge are on the upper deck. “I Googled the boat,” Ms. Craddock said. “The minute we saw pictures, we all groaned.” Her mother would have to walk up and down stairs several times a day. Those 98-year-old legs couldn’t take it.

To look at Ms. Jacobs, you might guess she is in her mid-80s. Mentally, she is sharp as can be (crediting her regular bridge game with helping to keep her alert). But the legs are not what they were. “Let me put it this way,” she said. “When I step off the bus, I have to sort of wait a couple of seconds until I’m stable.” Her cane is indispensable.

She asked if there was an alternative prize, or if she might transfer the cruise to, say, Ms. Craddock and her husband. Not a chance, she was told. Reluctantly, Ms. Jacobs said she would have to decline her prize.

But hold on. Maybe there was another way to go at this. The boat turned out to have an upper-deck cabin that is handicapped accessible.

The catch, though, is that this cabin would be offered to her only if not sold to a paying customer. Its availability would be uncertain at least until 90 days before the boat sets sail. Long before then, Ms. Jacobs would have to accept the prize and, with it, taxes she would owe, estimated at $2,500. That means committing now to a gift — and a tax obligation — that in the end might prove untenable.

“In other words, I’m taking $2,500 and gambling with it,” Ms. Jacobs said. The gamble did not seem worth it to her.

Hold on again.

“We really want her to take the cruise,” said Anthony Calnek, the library’s vice president for communications and marketing, who couldn’t resist adding in this week of Brooke Astor’s death that “we’re feeling particularly loving toward older women.” The library agreed to pick up the tax tab should Ms. Jacobs discover belatedly that she could not make the trip.

Mind you, neither Ms. Jacobs nor Ms. Craddock pretends that this matter looms terribly large in a world filled with mayhem. Both agreed that people at the library had been most sympathetic.

Still, there is an issue, Ms. Craddock said. It is the wisdom, even fairness, of offering a prize that is not truly possible for everyone. “There’s a whole group of people that can’t use it from the get-go, no matter what,” she said.

What her mother will decide remains unclear. But one thing is evident: This is a city where even a good thing comes with complications.

You know, Ms. Craddock said, “I think Mom would have settled for dinner for two in a very good restaurant.”

“That,” her mother agreed, “would have been very nice.”

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

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Simple Civility on the Subway Can Be a Matter of Inches

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: August 14, 2007

At the height of last week’s deluge, subway riders were understandably angry over not knowing what was going on. No shock there. Communicating clearly during a crisis is not the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s long suit.

O.K., the authority doesn’t always treat its customers well. Everyone knows that.

But it is perhaps not a crime against democracy to point out that those same customers often don’t treat one another terribly well, either. And no crisis is required. Not everything is about crises. Even when all runs smoothly, a lot of people in the subway can’t be bothered with the inconvenient fact that they can be bothers.

That point was reinforced by another event last week, one not nearly as earth-rattling as a flood. The newspaper that is in your hands at this moment got slimmer, by an inch and a half. The change had consequences for many subway riders.

In a sense, life got slightly better for them. They may now be somewhat less bothered by the fellow sitting next to them who inconsiderately spreads the paper wide as he reads it. With an inch and a half lopped off at either end of that spread, they have gained three inches of breathing room.

But that may be meager consolation. A subway reality remains that virtually all readers of newspapers, be they broadsheets or tabloids, insist on opening the pages to maximum width. If this habit of theirs invades the space of people in adjoining seats — well, that’s just too bad.

Long gone is a basic subway courtesy of the past. It used to be, to paraphrase an old Kenny Rogers song, that you had to know how to hold ’em and know how to fold ’em.

Even in the rush-hour sardine can, social graces required that you stayed out of the other guy’s personal space. It became instinct to fold the newspaper lengthwise in half, and then in quarters and even, if you wanted to be really finicky, in eighths.

This was a fundamental urban skill, one that helped promote social harmony. Somewhere along the line, it was lost. Why? Who knows? Whatever the reason, you now rarely see anyone on a train who knows how to fold a newspaper and, literally, keep out of other people’s hair.

Then again, that sort of social grace sounds almost quaint, given the way that many riders cannot trouble themselves to follow hard-and-fast subway regulations, many of them designed with harmony in mind.

The rules posted in stations and on the authority’s Web site clearly state that it is forbidden to put one’s foot on a subway seat or to take up more than one seat if it interferes “with transit operations or the comfort of other customers.” Try pointing that out some day to riders with legs spread so wide that they take up three seats.

Nor is panhandling allowed. Nor may one lie down in a train, or “block free movement,” or “engage in unauthorized commercial activity,” or “carry bulky items likely to cause inconvenience or hazard to yourself and others,” or “litter or create unsanitary conditions,” or “use amplified devices on platforms.”

Raise your hand if you saw none of these rules violated yesterday.

Uh, we don’t see many hands in the air.

BUT how silly of us. It’s only crises that we should worry about, right? That is what some politicians would have us believe, anyway. Post-flood, a few of them who are not known for camera shyness went before the lenses (après le déluge, moi) to demand that the transportation authority move faster to install a cellphone network underground.

Try imagining the weary end-of-day ride home while several dozen people scream into their phones.

As for crises, need it be said that cellphones can be used to detonate bombs? Besides, in any disaster so many people are likely to pull out cellphones at the same time that they will render the system useless. Remember 9/11?

But at least you will be able to read all about it on the train the next day — in a newspaper that you will of course have thoughtfully folded in half.

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

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Albany Parses the Purposes of State Trips

By JIM DWYER

Published: July 25, 2007

At 11 a.m. on April 5, state troopers drove Joseph F. Bruno, a politician who lives near Albany, to a helicopter and flew him to Manhattan. He arrived in time for lunch. The first hint of a public purpose for his trip came in a meeting that began at 3:30 and lasted 30 to 40 minutes. Participants said the subjects involved both legislative business and Republican Party affairs.

After that, Mr. Bruno had a 4:30 meeting that is said to have involved state matters in some manner, shape or form. This lasted all of 10 minutes.

Then it was time for Mr. Bruno, leader of the Republicans in the State Senate, to fly back to Albany, where state troopers were waiting to drive him to his next stop.

So for the better part of a day, Mr. Bruno commanded the use of state vehicles, state helicopters and state troopers as chauffeurs and pilots in order to conduct a grand total of about 30 minutes of legislative business in Manhattan. That’s all, folks.

These details can be found on the 48th page of a 53-page report issued by the state attorney general in one of the fastest investigations in the history of political warfare.

A few weeks ago, Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s staff leaked information about Mr. Bruno’s use of state aircraft. Mr. Bruno said the governor was using troopers to spy on him. Everyone involved was outraged — outraged! — and demanded investigations. The attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, complied.

It turns out that trips like the one taken by Mr. Bruno on April 5 — and others in which he was flown to Manhattan on the dates of major fund-raising parties — are entirely O.K. under the current state rules, according to the attorney general’s report. As long as a few minutes of public business are blended into the trip, the use of state aircraft is allowed.

Apparently, the main scandal is how the public came to learn about this.

By page count, 80 percent of the Cuomo report has to do with various sneaky things done by Governor Spitzer’s aides to collect and leak information about the Bruno flights. They got State Police officials to recreate itineraries for trips taken by Mr. Bruno, but not for travels of the governor or the lieutenant governor.

Then, a reporter from The Times Union in Albany sought details of the trips under the Freedom of Information Law, quite possibly by invitation; any journalist would welcome such an invitation.

Given the energy devoted to this project by senior members of the governor’s staff, as documented in the Cuomo report, the only surprising thing is that Mr. Spitzer himself did not personally deliver the records to The Times Union.

Many branches of government stall for months or years before releasing ordinary public records, much less go to the trouble of creating new ones. Alas, fans of open government can hold their applause. Despite the exemplary speed in rushing out the information on Mr. Bruno, the governor’s aides were not nearly as thorough in assembling details of trips taken by Mr. Spitzer and other leading figures in the state capital.

The folly of this venture is plain, though it appears nowhere in the Cuomo report. The purpose of the leak was to embarrass Mr. Bruno. But if officials can be flown to Manhattan by the State Police, then driven to Aqueduct Racetrack by state troopers, and meet ethical standards for publicly paid travel because they have a “legislative business” meeting at the track, then it is pretty clear that embarrassing anyone in Albany is a cause long and hopelessly lost. (The horses, by the way, were not running the day of that meeting, listed as May 4 in The Times Union’s account.)

THAT the governor’s office did not know better is a strong hint of powerful hubris. As of the spring, the Republican Party in New York State had all but gone toes-up. It had lost the governor’s office, and its one remaining bunker of power, a majority in the State Senate, was eroding. Now, rallied by its leader’s persecution over his helicopter flights, the Republicans have all but called in Amnesty International. And they are vowing to investigate Mr. Spitzer’s own fund-raising, back to 1998.

No one — including the attorney general — is volunteering to document how many thousands of dollars, and hundreds of hours of state police time, are used to carry politicians to events that are strictly party politics. “Whatever facts we had are in the report, which speaks for itself,” a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo said.

Apparently there is such a thing as too much information.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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On East Side, Addresses Lose Panache

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: July 24, 2007

As far as we know, neighbor has not set upon neighbor in a jealous rage. No one has organized a torchlight protest. The peasants haven’t picked up pitchforks and stormed the barricades.

Not that there are many peasants on the Upper East Side, or pitchforks, except maybe a few that are destined for country estates. But there are unhappy people in that part of town.

Three weeks ago, they lost their ZIP code.

For some, this was no small loss. They felt a magic in that number: 10021. It speaks of wealth and status, announcing that those within its walls dwell in a state of grace. And in a cruelty of fate, thousands on the East Side have had it snatched away.

On July 1, they found themselves cast out of Eden and into new ZIP codes decidedly lacking in cachet. The 10021 code, which had covered East 61st Street to East 80th, between Fifth Avenue and the East River, was divided into three parts. Just as Iraq might be some day, come to think of it. Hardly an encouraging thought, is it?

The 10021 zone still exists but it is shriveled, stretching only from East 69th to 76th Street. The southern section of the old zone is now 10065, the northern part 10075.

When the change kicked in, some East Siders were distressed, dismayed, distraught and all other disses imaginable.

“Some people were a little hot about it,” said Pat McGovern, a spokeswoman for the United States Postal Service. Quite, said Betty Cooper Wallerstein, president of the East 79th Street Neighborhood Association. “Some people said it was a great ZIP code,” she said. “They were very proud of it.” A senior aide to an elected official on the East Side, trading candor for anonymity, summed up the situation this way: “It’s a classic example of the foibles of the bourgeoisie.”

“There was a hue and cry,” the aide said. “But it’s died down.”

That it has, Ms. McGovern and Mrs. Wallerstein agreed, as did Jessica Lappin, an East Side city councilwoman. “There are some people who feel very passionately about this and others who say, ‘What’s the big deal?’ ” Ms. Lappin said.

“Some people are refusing to accept the change” and vow “to continue to use 10021 forever,” she said. Nonetheless, “what’s the big deal” seems to be the prevailing sentiment.

That New Yorkers can summon the strength to soldier on, defying adversity, comes as no surprise.

Remember how upset many once were when the 718 area code was carved out of the 212 code, like Eve from Adam’s rib? At first, those living in the new 718 — the four boroughs beyond Manhattan — felt relegated formally to second-class status. New York meant 212. But they got over it. If anything, 718 is ascendant these days, equivalent to the cool kids’ table in a high school lunchroom.

The Postal Service says it did not Balkanize 10021 to make a social statement. Pragmatism ruled. “We had such an expansion of addresses in that area that we really needed to add on these other ZIPs,” Ms. McGovern said.

Similarly, Mrs. Wallerstein said that pragmatism guided the objections. Some East Siders hurled into the new ZIP codes report magazines arriving late and mail being returned to the senders as undeliverable. No one, understandably, is thrilled about having to order new stationery.

Then, too, some wonder if they might have retained their beloved 10021 with a few letters tagged on to make mail sorting and delivery more efficient, much the way that the “ZIP + 4” system adds extra digits to the basic code.

Letters are not unheard of. Saks Fifth Avenue (ZIP code 10022) is about to open a new shoe department called 10022-SHOE. “Our new shoe floor is so big that it deserves a ZIP code of its own,” said a Saks spokeswoman, Lesley Langsam Kennedy.

The Postal Service has played along, permitting the store to use 10022-SHOE in its mailings. This was done solely to be nice to a major customer, and without Saks paying extra for the privilege, Ms. McGovern said. As a practical matter, post office machines are unable to read SHOE.

But who’s to say that such letters will not become the real deal some day? Think of the possibilities.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral is right next to Saks. Why not 10022-HOLY for its mail? How about 10036-PLAY for the theater district? Clubgoers could head downtown to 10014-LOUD.

As for those East Siders unable to shake the blues over losing their ZIP, the choice is all too obvious: 10021-ENVY.

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

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Compelled to Remember the Big One

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: July 20, 2007

We in New York are getting pretty good at assuming the worst when something out of the ordinary happens, like the steam pipe explosion that shot vapor and muck into the air on Wednesday.

For most of us, terrorism is as bad as it gets. When things go wrong, fear of terrorism is the city’s default position. It’s no wonder, given our recent history and given that federal officials and certain presidential candidates flash incessant warnings of doom. They are the opposite of F.D.R., those politicians, cautioning us that we have everything to fear, including fear itself.

Anything short of terrorism somehow becomes bearable. We saw the phenomenon on Wednesday: Yes, a woman died, and others suffered bodily harm, and life turned upside down for many thousands. But at least it wasn’t a terrorist act. Whew!

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg gave voice to those feelings while trying to reassure the citizenry. “There is no reason to believe that this is anything other than a failure of our infrastructure,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

Only an infrastructure failure. Why that should be a comfort is a mystery. It meant that death could reach up from below and grab hold of us at any time.

But at least it wasn’t a terrorist act. Whew!

Years ago, people who heard an explosion routinely told reporters later that they felt as if an atomic bomb had been dropped. Never mind that none of them had a clue what a nuclear attack looked or sounded like (unless they happened to have been in Hiroshima or Nagasaki in August 1945). That was how they described it all the same: like an atomic bomb. The cold war was on, and nuclear holocaust was the cosmic fear.

You don’t hear A-bomb references too much anymore. You didn’t hear them on Wednesday from people at the blast site, near Grand Central Terminal. The cold war is long over. We have moved on to new fears and, inevitably, new metaphors. Now, 9/11 is the template. Events either fit into it or they do not.

In a sense, that is natural in this city, especially with scenes at Grand Central that slightly resembled that terrible day in 2001, among them people running from clouds of debris that billowed behind them.

But not everyone had 9/11 in mind. Those who didn’t could count on news gatherers to tell them to get with the script.

Even after it had been made clear that this was not an act of terrorism, some news organizations refused to let go. “If you look at these scenes,” one television broadcaster said on the air, “you can understand why people were so emotionally disturbed, because it is evocative of 9/11, and that was of course the most traumatic event to occur in the city’s history.”

On another local station, a witness to the disaster was interviewed by phone. As he told his story, he made no reference to Sept. 11. For him, the situation was scary enough without that embellishment. But for his interviewer, it wouldn’t do. He felt obliged to nudge the witness onto 9/11 terrain. “At first,” he asked, “did you think it was a terrorist attack?”

Appeals to fear almost invariably produce skeptics in a populace that has endured its share of orange alerts that proved dubious and, conversely, assurances of safety that proved flimsy.

People who feel they were lied to about Lower Manhattan’s air quality after the 2001 attack were not likely yesterday to accept at face value the official statements that no asbestos was found in the air after the Midtown explosion. Asbestos was found in the muddy debris, officials said, but not in the air. In any event, they said, brief exposure to asbestos should not create a long-term health problem.

Early blogosphere reactions to those statements suggested strongly that doubters abound. How, went a recurring theme, can the government be unblinkingly trusted, given its post-9/11 record? A few people went so far as to ask why we should even believe the official assurances that this latest disaster was not a terrorist act.

At least others could set them straight on that score.

Writing to City Room, one of this newspaper’s blogs, a Queens woman who had been near the explosion, and who gave her name only as Adrienne, said she called her father to tell him she was fine.

“But terrorists could have blown up the steam tunnel,” he said to her.

“Relax,” Adrienne replied. “New York is falling apart without their help.”

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

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