Life goes on for two New Yorkers
Two New Yorkers reflect on what’s changed — and what hasn’t — about the Big Apple.
By Priya Abraham
Managing Editor

Ebony Russo used to be a girl from Queens. Now all of New York belongs to her.

It’s a sense of pride and strength she says has grown among New Yorkers since two planes plowed into the Twin Towers and changed the Manhattan skyline forever.

Russo, a junior sociology major, has been home twice since the terrorist attacks, and said her hometown is getting back to normal.

“Traffic is still a problem,” she said with a wry grin. “It’s still New York. Minus the change in the skyline, we’re still the same rude, fast-paced people.”

New York’s the same — and then again it isn’t, says Jeffrey Roet, a geography lecturer who grew up in Brooklyn.

“I felt I lost a piece of the geography of New York,” said Roet, who used the panoramic view from the Twin Towers to teach his students about the layout of the city.

Roet’s father was a structural engineer for Leslie E. Robertson Associates, a company that helped design the World Trade Center. Harold Roet was called out of retirement to re-design the center’s basement after the 1993 bombing.

But that couldn’t compare to last year’s attack.

“He was extremely heartbroken and he lost a friend there,” Roet said. “When I went back to New York, I went up to my father’s offices. These people talked about what it was like being in a skyscraper and looking down at Ground Zero every day. They had to keep the shades down because they couldn’t bear to look at it.”

A year ago Russo watched the South Tower crumble in a balloon of smoke on her TV screen. She buckled with it: her mother worked three blocks north of the World Trade Center.

“I thought she had died, and I was preparing myself for that,” she said.

Frantic calls home on Sept. 11were met with dead phone lines. It was nine hours later that Russo’s mother finally did contact her. She had evacuated her office and been forced to walk across the Williamsburg Bridge out of Manhattan.

About 3,000 people died in the attack, just more than 300 of them New York firemen and policemen.

“Everybody in New York knows somebody who was in the building,” Roet said. “Everybody’s separated by six degrees of separation — in New York it’s like two degrees of separation.”

As the nation continues to grieve, Russo said she doesn’t just want a memorial at Ground Zero.

“I want to see new buildings there,” she said. “(With) a floor or building in dedication to those who lost their lives so they don’t think moving forward means forgetting.”