Twenty-Five Years: Please Join Us on September 11

September 11  •  The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary

Twenty-Five Years

Why the Block Association stands at the 13th Precinct every September 11 — and how you, our neighbors, showed up in 2001

Dear Neighbors,

On Friday, September 11, the Gramercy Park Block Association will gather with the officers of the 13th Precinct, Emergency Service Truck 1, and Patrol Borough Manhattan South for our Remembrance Ceremony, as we have every year since 2002. This year marks twenty-five years. Please stand with us — the service begins promptly at 8:30.

Why the Block Association

The 13th Precinct stationhouse is on East 21st Street, a short walk from the Park, with Emergency Service Truck 1 housed inside it. Its officers patrol every block this Association exists to look after, and our partnership with them is the one the Association was built on in 1994.

When the stationhouse became a command center for the City’s response to 9/11, that response ran through our neighborhood.

The Block Association has one job: the blocks, and the people on them. That September, officers from our community came off the WTC pile at three in the morning, hungry, with nowhere to sleep. Nobody was assigned to them. The Block Association took that job, and you took them in.

That Morning

Of the 2,977 people killed on September 11, 2001, twenty-three were New York City police officers. Two were from this precinct: Police Officers Moira Smith and Robert Fazio, partners who went downtown that morning and did not come back. Fourteen were Emergency Service officers, among them Brian McDonnell of Truck 1, housed at this stationhouse. Forty-four were our neighbors. We remember them, and those from this stationhouse who have died in the years since of illnesses carried home from the pile.

When Officer Smith’s remains were brought home the following March, the procession passed this stationhouse, and her fellow officers stepped out onto 21st Street to salute her.

That is where we will stand on Friday.

How You Showed Up

Many of you lived what came next; for those who have arrived since, this is the story. It is also the answer to how a neighborhood could do it at all: the Block Association was already built for it. By 2001 we had seven years of working alongside the precinct, a list of every building and merchant around the Park, and the habit of neighbors calling on one another. We turned that list into a schedule. You were the rest.

In the first week, the Block Association worked with our neighbor Danny Meyer, whose kitchen at Union Square Cafe cooked the meals, and we organized the neighbors who carried them to the triage center at Chelsea Piers, the family center at the Armory, St. Vincent’s, and the 13th and 10th Precincts.

By September 12, the stationhouse was a command center, and the Block Association set up a relief operation inside it that did not close. We organized it building by building and restaurant by restaurant, and we made sure every shift was staffed, around the clock, from that day until mid-December. You filled those shifts — the residents of some fifty buildings, and more than a hundred restaurants, shops, and hotels — preparing and serving meals, opening your homes to responders who needed a bed, and keeping the supply tables stocked for our own police, fire, and emergency units, and for the rescue units who flew in from across the country to work at Ground Zero.

You brought your children in, too. For months they baked cookies for the officers and covered the precinct walls with letters, drawings, and banners. Over the stationhouse door we hung a banner that said what you felt: They Cannot Dim the Light.

Through the fall and winter the Block Association kept changing the work to fit the need, and you kept answering. We organized a prayer vigil at Calvary Church, and you walked the candlelight procession to the Brotherhood Synagogue. We planned Thanksgiving dinner for Truck 1, and you cooked it. We staged a benefit for the families of our fallen officers and a toy drive for their children at Christmas, and you filled both. With the Olive Leaf Wholeness Center on 23rd Street, we made a place where relief workers could shower, sleep, and talk to a counselor. And we put a film crew together so the fellow officers of the fourteen Emergency Service members who died could record their memories for the children they left behind.

The recovery at Ground Zero lasted eight and a half months. Truck 1 worked it on top of their regular duties, and the Block Association kept neighbors feeding them, several times a week, until it was done. The photographs, articles, and films from that year are gathered on our World Trade Center page.

What Remained

In May 2002, the Block Association planted a garden on the sidewalk at the precinct entrance with the kindergarten children of the Epiphany School. It is a piece of the neighborhood’s streetscape, and we keep it the way we keep the tree gardens around the Park, replanting it every Easter, Memorial Day, September 11, and Christmas. Its plaque reads NYPD, You Make Us Proud — the words on the eight-foot photographic installation inside the precinct as well. The Thanksgiving dinner for Truck 1 still happens. So does the holiday party for the officers’ families. And every September 11, we stand together on 21st Street.

The story of what you did, and my own recorded account of it, are now part of the collection of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. But its real home is here, in the bond between this neighborhood and the people who protect it — formed in the worst weeks any of us have known, and not loosened in twenty-five years.

This is the Block Association’s work.

You showed up then. Please show up on Friday.

With love and gratitude,

Arlene Harrison
President, Gramercy Park Block Association