Emotions Emerge as Public Gets Peek at Trade Center Site

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

Dec. 31, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

NEW YORK — Thousands of people, mostly tourists, waited hours in teeth-chattering cold Sunday to catch a three-minute peek at the smoky rubble of the World Trade Center on the opening day of a new observation deck.

“It’s horrible.”

“It’s sad.”

“So many people died here.”

Over and over, bundled-up visitors tried to find the right words as they trudged away from the site.

The observation deck, a 13-foot-high platform of freshly cut plywood, offers the public its first unobstructed view of ground zero. Built at the edge of the disaster zone, it’s a place “to say a little prayer and reflect,” Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said.

Before it was built, crowds of people had clogged the streets of lower Manhattan trying to peer through police barricades and chain-link fences to watch rescue workers perform the grim work of clearing debris and removing bodies.

Even with the clear view, though, there’s not much to see. It looks like a building site in the early stages of construction. It’s a huge pit of scooped-out earth, dotted with cranes, bulldozers, dump trucks and dozens of workers hauling girders and pieces of building. Some rubble piles are still smoking from fires burning deep underground.

Most of the action, however, is too far to see from the new deck. Though rescue teams almost daily remove human remains from the site, none were recovered Sunday.

There was not much time to get emotional. Most visitors, after waiting an average of three hours, were limited to about three minutes at the front of the platform.

“Stop. Take your picture. And move on. Stop. Take your picture. And move on,” a police officer ordered. “Come on, people! Let’s keep it going.”

However brief their experience, it seemed to mean a lot to many visitors.

“I feel anger, big anger,” said Michael Gonzales, a 23-year-old Santa Ana student visiting friends in New York this weekend. “I mean, look at this place. You can smell it. You can see it. You can feel what happened on Sept. 11.”

Many families lined up to see the site, some people bouncing on their toes to keep warm, others nursing steaming cups of hot cocoa. It was one of the coldest days this year in New York, about 20 degrees with a biting wind.

“These kids got to know what it’s like for their country to be attacked,” said Jose Palacios, a real estate broker from Virginia who brought his three children.

The deck, which holds about 300 people, is the first of four similar platforms to be built at ground zero. There is no charge, and it’s open every day.

Already, its wooden railings are embroidered with patriotic graffiti.

“Have strength, America,” one person scribbled in thick blue Magic Marker.

“I’ll remember you,” someone else wrote.

“We’re all very sorry,” signed Cape Cod, Mass.

New Yorkers tended to stay out of the ground zero crowd. “The line starts in Ohio!” one man with a thick Bronx accent yelled to his buddy. “Let’s come back some other time.”

But for tourists like Charles Wei from Taiwan, it was well worth the wait.

“I knew this place was totally destroyed,” he said. “But I needed to see it.”