How 9/11 Changed New York Forever | Interview with Mario Cuomo

That's— we could be here a long time answering that question because there are all kinds of people and it means different things to different people. I would suspect— I hate saying this, it's probably a sin— but most New Yorkers never saw it, really. The way people from other parts of the world see it, because they look for it, they're attentive to it. They come in in a small plane or a big plane landing, they're stunned by it, they study it. But if you're born here the way I was, you never look at it. You take it for granted. I mean, there are people my age who lived here all these years, never been up to the top of the Empire State Building. Why? Well, it was there. They didn't have to, you know. Yeah, we know. It's ours, the Empire State Building. So, to a lot of New Yorkers, it probably doesn't mean a whole lot. To the rest of the world, it means New York. I mean, it's like the Twin Towers were, may they rest in peace. It's like the Empire State Building.

It's like the Statue of Liberty. You know, as soon as you see it, you say, yeah, that's New York. And anything that reminds me of New York, in my case, it's my whole life, you know. Everything about me is associated with, connected to New York, and in a way, it's responsible for everything. My mother and father came here from another part of the world, like a lot of others. Most of the people who came with them, they're all dead now, but the generations they produced, most of them have left. You know, they go from New York City out east or up north when you get a little money and you want a little more space. And then your kids leave and you go to Florida and get eaten by the mosquitoes. But I'm, I'm still here with a, with a handful of them, and for people like me, it's very much a religious experience.

Well, you know, the towers became the Statue of Liberty. The towers replaced the Statue of Liberty. And it remains to be seen. I saw a bus that had a— that used to have the towers on it, on the side of the bus, a sightseeing bus that now had, I think, the Empire State Building. I don't think it works. The towers became the symbol of the Empire State Building. The towers were not the most beautiful thing ever built in New York. I'm not an aesthete, I’m not an architect, but to me, they weren't the most beautiful thing ever built. We have a lot more beautiful things. I'd rather go look at St. John the Divine Cathedral than the towers, but they became— New York, and therefore they became America. People say they became the financial center of New York. No, they became New York. When you saw the towers, you knew you were talking about New York City. and to me personally, they were more than that because it was my office when I was governor, the office in New York.

And I surprised anybody that I loved coming back to the city from Albany, which I once described as constant Lent, to my regret, because they printed it, but, but Albany was very nice. But New York City was my home. So the towers were New York, and they are in New York. And to me, they were a reminder of all the years as governor and what might have happened to me if I had won another term. That's a difficult question. I probably am going to regret my answer. At the time, there wasn't any particular emotional experience that you might treat— you might regard as special, special warmth. I don't think there was anything like that. It was a great big building with a lot of people in it. Could even have been a pain in the neck, frankly, because it was so big and it was so vast, it was hard to relate to.

Everything was going on there. You didn't know where it started, where it stopped. So there was no special feeling— this is for most people, not for me. It was my office, and that gave me a different feeling about it. Plus, I had been in the construction— I'd represented people in the construction industry, so I knew a lot about it from the very beginning, you know, and I had a different view of it. But I think to most people, there was no special feeling when you were in that building. There is now thinking about it, and always will be, but that's because of 9/11. There's no particular warmth to it, and in a way, it didn't really represent the old New York City. It's not as though you built 2 great towers that captured the history of old New York. They didn't. They didn't try to. It was a new New York they were building, a new modern building, you know, a new modern reach to the skies. And that was fine, and that was another stage of New York, but it didn't— it wasn't a place for reminiscence.

And that's it. I mean, there was nothing special about being in the building for most people. Now there's a really difficult question. I mean, you. Not a difficult question. I think the answer is difficult to handle. Why you mourn anything. I mourn because I lost people I loved. I've lost people I knew. I mourn for them, but really, you mourn more for you. It's what you lost. And what frightens you about your own mortality. And what it said, as dramatically as it could be said, is, look, the way they went, you can go in a flash, just as improbably, just as unexpectedly. And you take that and it frightens you and it makes you anxious and it makes you angry and you react in one of two ways.

You say either, well, now that I know the only thing that really counts is the life I have left, I'm going to make the most of it. And then you either make it that you see yourself as a basket of appetites. I love baseball. I'm going to see all the games I can. I love to eat. I love sex. I love power. Whatever it is, I'm just going to fill myself with the good things, boy. Or you say, man, that doesn't work because I'm getting old and the basket's going to fall apart and my ability to fill it is going pretty fast too. And so there must be something else. And you come back to the things you're surest of in your heart. more than in your mind. The family you love, the guys you grew up with who you haven't seen in a while that you really miss, that one guy that you had a fight with 10 years ago, you know, and you don't even remember why. And you say, to hell with this, I'm going back and straighten that out. Well, of course, nobody knows, and probably nobody will ever find out exactly what reason they gave themselves for doing it, but I think the logic of it is fairly apparent.

If you were— if you had decided finally to attack the Great Satan, which is the United States in their opinion, if you made that judgment, which they did, then you wanted to attack a place that would be, in addition to accessible to you, that would be most visible and would have the greatest impact from your point of view. So you wouldn't attack a building in Iowa, great state that it is, or Florida, or even California. California is much larger, but California is not as related to the nation instantly in one's perception of things as New York is. There is the additional rationale, I think, that it is associated with a financial center, and I hear that a lot, and I've even used that for my own purposes, but that's just a hangover from my religious— from my political days.

I think it was mostly that this was the symbol of America to many people. It was the most visible symbol of New York and therefore the United States of America. It's like the Statue of Liberty. They might have selected that as well, but then they couldn't have done as much damage at the Statue of Liberty because they wanted to take life. And that was a kind of perverse thought by them. These people who were willing enough to give up their own lives, as a matter of fact eager to give up their own lives, knew that holding on to life means everything to Americans, and we will fight for it, and we will mourn it for a lifetime when it's gone. They knew that, and so they wanted to take as many lives as possible because they knew that would be a great measure of their efficacy. I was on my way to an office on the Equitable Building.

It's between 6th and 7th, between 51st and 52nd. And it was odd. I was walking with Benito Romano, former United States Attorney who replaced Rudy Giuliani over in the Southern District. He's a partner of mine. And we were chatting, and somebody rushed up to me and said, Governor, Governor, a plane hit the Trade Center. And he looked disheveled and a little strange, and then he just ran off. And Benito said to me, ‘well, do you get that often?’ And I said, well, yeah, you know. They recognize you And then 3 people walked up and said the same thing, and it was clear then. We walked a little bit more, and I think we got to Park Avenue and looked over and saw the smoke and everything, and then went directly to the building and got my information there. How did you feel? Disbelief at first, you know, like everybody else. I had greater familiarity with the building, etc., but I did think, I must confess to you, I did think, oh my God, you know, I would have been there on the 57th floor if I'd won the election in 1994.

I mean, I certainly wouldn't have moved my New York City office. I put my New York City office there over everybody's objection. They all wanted me in Midtown because that was more convenient than this. I said, no, I want to be in the State Building. It belongs to the state, and that's where I want to be. Why should I pay my rent money to somebody else? And everybody had the same feeling, the same combination of feelings: confusion, anxiety, great anxiety, great anxiety. Great anxiety. Now, I lived through the Second World War. My brother went off to that war. I was born in 1932, which means 1941, when the Japanese hit. You know, I was I was nine years old, so I was around. I was making sense and I could see. And we were in a grocery store, which means that people were coming in all the time and getting all kinds of impressions, and you're nervous and you're frightened. And when they do air raids at night, you know, and they practice, well you think about bombs dropping.

Now, we didn't have television and so we didn't have the impact that created. But you had the morning papers, maybe nearly a dozen of them in New York at that time, and you could see pictures and stories about people getting blown up. And you're frightened. You frightened all the time, and you don't think about other things. But we were never attacked. That was fright by proxy, if you will. Now, for the first time in your lifetime, and I've been here a long time, they actually got to you. They got right to your country. They brought down the damn towers. That means they could bring you down in a flash. That's what it said to a lot of people, and it still does. It frightens you because of the sudden revelation of your vulnerability. It's very difficult to live a whole lifetime in New York without ever being attacked, with everybody around you being attacked, everybody, it seems, the whole rest of the world, but not you. And after a while, you get smug about it.

No more. That's gone. And so that feeling was there. And then there were the questions that, again, the questions about why would it have happened and what does it mean to my life, etc. And you get very philosophical about it. And I think a lot of us are still in that stage. I know I am. And there's something good about that, you know, anything that forces you to think more about your life and what really matters to you, and what you should do about it, and what you should do with the time that’s left. Well, the most obvious thing about the reaction, and therefore probably the most striking— after a while, when you thought about it, it became the most obvious reaction and a complicated one. But the most striking thing was The thing that all the politicians boasted of and all the papers wrote about and still do, and the people themselves talked about, and that was unity and the coming together.

People holding hands and singing hymns and singing God Bless America and crying and hugging one another and apparently putting aside all the superficial differences, at least for a while. I think what happens is, when there's a threat to you, a serious threat to you, like 9/11, which was the greatest threat we ever faced because we lost so many lives and it was so dramatic, the first instinct is to come together. You know, you're a family. It's the kids, you know, all joining together and huddled up. And if you think of what happened to Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki, they're the parents. In a situation like that, your president, your leaders, you know, people you didn't vote for, people you don't like, but they're your leaders, and you look up to them. And now, not only did we huddle and sing all together, we looked up to our leaders. And if you dare say anything negative about any of them, boy, you're in trouble. Why? Because we need them. This is my fight. Are you kidding? You know, this is— we're in trouble here.

This is our salvation in a very real way. Forget about the old Democratic instinct for, well, let's argue about this before we do it. That's gone now, because this is emergent, and this is bigger than us, boy. They have to handle it. And that was the most striking thing about the reaction, that coalescence, that sudden coalescence, that emergence, that sudden emergence. What explains Rudy Giuliani going from 40% as a mayor to 99% as a leader a week later? You needed him, you wanted him, and he gave you exactly what you needed. He was perfect for the moment. I mean, if you had to write a script for him, you couldn't have done it any better than he did it. And he didn't do it by contrivance, he did it naturally. I mean, whatever it is that is in his mind and heart, I mean, it all came out and it worked perfectly. So the— that phenomenon of people needing one another out of desperation almost, And the way it was expressed, that's, that's what struck me most.

If we can deal with grubby reality, which I guess we're forced to, some very big, big differences are in your economy. You lost thousands, millions feet of space that were rented and that were producing wealth. You lost jobs that you'll never get back. You lost tourism. You chased people away. You attracted some people who wanted to come and see, and, and some loyalists and patriotic-type people who wanted to come and just share your pain because it was so important to America. But you lost a lot of business, lost a lot of tourism. And on a psychic and emotional level, the urgency, the anxiety, the concern, all of those things are with us still. They'll be there for, I'm sure, the rest of my lifetime. And they'll be there for, in diminishing quantity, all the people who remember.

Big, big, big impact on the firemen and the police. And this is something I've never understood, and I'm terribly disappointed about as a citizen of New York. And I've said it publicly a couple of times, and it gets a bad reaction. We lost all those firemen. We lost police. We had this fantastic contradiction of people who hated you so much that they were willing to give up their life to take yours, and people who loved humanity so much that they were willing to run into the darn building, in the smoke and flame and— just to save the life of somebody they never met. And that's ineffably beautiful. There's no better definition of love. There's no, there's no more inspirational, no more inspiring, no more— Near to saintly conduct that you can think of than what they demonstrated. Now I'm going to confess something.

I think they changed instantly and for a while, but for a short while, because they're going to go back to the way they've always felt about New York. A vague unease about it. What— because New York is different. The diversity is unlike the diversity anywhere else. And even if you could show me a place that had whatever the number is, 184 different ethnicities, I stopped counting. But even if California could say, we have 212. Yeah, but you don't have them in this small a space, you know. So the diversity put together with the density, the history that is unmatchable, where all the action started. We were the first capital. This is where they came, the Dutch and then the English and the Chinese that they brought and all the other people. This is where they came. These are the first immigrants came.

We invented banks. We had Alexander Hamilton. You messing around with our paper? You say our paper is not as good as your paper? We started that game. And we're— because we live in this density with people who come from all over the world who are quintessential ambitious types, quintessential people of aspiration, people who want. I mean, I think about people like my mother and father. You know, my father didn't weigh 160 pounds. He walked with a limp because he had a baseball— a bicycling accident when he was a child in Italy, wore glasses, had no muscles on him, was a ditch digger, couldn't read, couldn't write. A wife who was similarly uneducated, came just before the Depression. What are you doing here, my God? No money, no friends, no skills, no nothing.

Better than where I came from, because over there, there's no future. Well, what are you going to do here? I don't know, whatever it takes. Well, there are people like that from all over the world. These are some of the toughest people in the world's history. They're not tough in the sense that they could break you in half with their hands. They're tough in the sense they can take on the unknown. They could sacrifice for a whole lifetime just for their kids. They could do it without having any religion or philosophy because nobody ever gave it to them. They could do it just because they're human beings and they felt this is the way you're supposed to live. I'm supposed to make the most of what I can. I'm supposed to take care of my kids. Now, these are tough, beautiful, successful, talented people, all kinds. You put that whole mix together, that ambition, that struggle, that desperation to get ahead, you know, the history of the place, and we're a tough place to understand. We're a frightening place to be part of if you're not part of it, you know, just walking through it. Good morning.

They're used to saying good morning in Butte, Montana, and the guy said, how are you doing, Charlie? You say good morning here, somebody's liable to say, “what's it to ya?” You know? And so there's that little bit of edginess with New York generally, not with every one of us. We have gentle souls. We have philosophers. We have pipe smokers. We have everything. But the sense of the place is there's that tension, that constant tension, and that little bit of edge. You know, that's what a New Yorker is. And that's the way it's portrayed all over the world. 9/11, how can you possibly use it for good purpose?

You think about it. You think, as we've suggested before, you think about, look, what this reminds you of is the importance of your own life and making the most of it, because you, you can lose it in a flash. And if that's all you learned from 9/11, if that's all you remembered, that my God, you could extinguish life so suddenly, so unexpectedly, and it could happen to me, and therefore I should think harder about the way I spend my life instead of just wasting it. Now, it's not going to teach you what to do with your life, but it will teach you to do with your life and to do it more and quicker and better. And that can be extremely valuable. It's had that effect on me. Yeah, no, I do.

But I'm, but I'm, you know, I'm one of the older people. The— I miss the lights that replaced the towers, the two beams of light, you know, for a while there. I became utterly impractical and said, why can't we keep them forever, those lights? And unfortunately, we couldn't. But yeah, yeah, you'll miss them. But then the great beauty of living is newness, infinite newness. Every minute brings a new opportunity. Every minute brings new growth, new experiences. And there will be— there'll be sadness and nostalgia, et cetera. but there'll be much more new excitement, new thrills, new levels of civility. New York City very much embodies that for me. They—it just keeps coming. You know, it has problems, the street blows up, 9/11 occurs, and, and you're going to rebuild, and after a while the memory will be there, but there'll be something new there and different and functioning and— electric. So, yeah, the, the image of the towers will be there, but there'll be a new reality as well.

It won't be just the memory. There will be the moment that we'll be living in, and it'll be beautiful.