NEW YORK CITY, NY - Counterfeit FDNY hats: $5. Inkjet printouts of the Twin Towers: $3. Cheaply made American flags: $2.
These are among the offerings that sidewalk vendors are selling to the gawking crowds at New York City's newest tourist attraction: the multi-acre graveyard known as Ground Zero where the World Trade Center towers once stood.
Although metal police barricades keep pedestrians several blocks from the site, thousands of tourists flock to the adjacent streets on any given day, paying homage to those who perished, witnessing history in the making, and, in many cases, searching for a souvenir to take home.
German and Japanese mingle with English, Spanish, and other foreign tongues. Police officers and National Guardsmen shout at the crowds, attempting to keep streets and intersections open to vehicular traffic. Amateur photographers armed with street maps and telephoto lenses climb signposts, hoping to capture images of the smoke that continues to rise. Proselytizers set up prayer booths and distribute religious pamphlets to potential converts. And vendors, using everything from shopping carts to storefronts, sell souvenirs of the disaster.
"It's worse on Saturdays," said Alicia Milograno, a Voter Registration Coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Group. Unlike many tourists, Milograno doesn't have much of a choice when it comes to seeing Ground Zero: her office is just three blocks away.
Yet until Oct. 11, Milograno was not allowed back to work until Oct. 11, a full month after the disaster. "I think that a lot of people are there because they're already in New York, why not go see it?" she said.
But like many New Yorkers, Milograno says she is offended by the commercialization of the disaster. "They're selling a lot of pictures, pins, and American flag paraphernalia," she said.
And just as out-of-towners are hungry for souvenirs of the disaster site, they also want to leave their mark on the city. "A lot of people who come in big groups wearing the same T-shirt or the same hat or something put up banners from their hometown to show support, to show where they're from," Milograno said.
Thus far, the City of New York has made no official comment on the vendors' presence, and the mayor's press office did not respond to inquiries for this story. "The cops are standing there every day, doing their shifts right alongside the vendors," Milograno said.
Although Milograno acknowledges the possibility that the crowds may have come to join the city in its mourning process, she said she questions why visitors would want to see the disaster site itself. For her, one of the hardest things about being so close to Ground Zero is enduring the ever-present cloud of acrid smoke that hangs over Lower Manhattan.
"Right now, I'm in one of the back rooms of our office, and we have a direct ventilation system to the outside air," she said. "Today is one of the worst days."
Milograno is beginning to feel displaced by the tourists' presence. During her morning commute from Brooklyn's Prospect Heights, thousands of office workers arrive at the nearby subway station - one of the few still open in the neighborhood. The tourists are already there, blocking the exit stairways and making it impossible to walk on the sidewalks.
"It seems very unnecessary to me - sometimes we have to have police escorts to get here," she said. "We have to show our IDs to get to work. We can all accept those things, but when you have a hoard of people getting in the way, it makes things a lot more difficult," Milograno said.
"They're making it more work for the police, more work for the military, and adding that much more confusion," she said.
For Brooklyn's Tom Jones and his wife, Sonya Baehr, visiting the former site of the towers was an integral part of the mourning process. Jones, father of Tufts sophomore Vanessa Baehr-Jones, is an education administrator on Long Island. His fascination with the site began on his daily commute. On his eastward trek, he drives along an elevated section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway from which "a panoramic view of Manhattan, all the way up to the Bronx," is visible.
"For a number of days, I'd seen the smoke coming from the site, the absence of the twin towers," Jones said. Less than a week after watching the towers collapse on television, he decided to journey as close as possible to the site itself.
"My wife and I went over the Sunday after the attack and I think part of it was - it seems very odd in a way - but I think one of our reasons was to verify what it was, what it looked like," Jones said. "Somehow we wanted to be down closer to it. Maybe it was morbid. I don't think so. Maybe it was to get a sense of the enormity of it... [an act of] mourning for me and my wife and an acknowledgement of what really happened."
At that time, however, the heaviest recovery and cleanup efforts were still underway, and the NYPD would not allow pedestrians south of Canal Street, roughly half a mile to the north. "We couldn't get very close, but that was enough for me," Jones said.
After her initial visit to the site, Baehr took family friends to see the wreckage during Columbus Day weekend. "Sonya took them over Sunday morning," he said. "They got out of the subway on the Brooklyn side and got up on the Brooklyn Bridge... and they found the smell of the site was very strong, very pungent... it was the smell of death," Jones said. "As they went across the bridge it kept getting stronger and stronger. They were very somber after the experience."
Junior Katie Finkelstein found herself among the thousands who arrived at the site that same weekend - albeit accidentally. Like Milograno and Baehr, Finkelstein was overcome by the pungent smell of smoke emanating from the ruins of the Twin Towers.
"We were actually going to SoHo, which is pretty close, so when we got out of the subway at that station... we sort of just ended up there," she said. Finkelstein, who said she was surprised to recognize the smell immediately upon leaving the subway station, walked a half-mile south with her friends.
At the site, she was shocked to find thousands of tourists crowding the streets. "I thought there were a lot of tourists there, just to see the site, which I thought was sort of sickening," she said.
Once there, she couldn't help but notice the active business in which souvenir vendors were engaged. "There was so much," she said. "Everybody was selling flags and signs."
Jones, who has not been to the site since his initial visit, was shocked to learn of the boundless commercialism that has sprung up in the streets around the site of the worst terrorist attack in US history. Chalking it up to New York's "crazy mix of the modern and very primitive," Jones said "the idea of it as an image to be recorded, a souvenir to be bought, a profit to be made adds to the sadness."
Trading disaster souvenirs had briefly become a national phenomenon, with widespread rumors of actual rubble and other paraphernalia available at online auction marketplaces.
"Past experience tells me that any time an event becomes a center of media attention, some items - sometimes figments of people's imagination - find their way to eBay," said Kevin Pursglove, senior director of corporate communication at eBay Inc., a San Jose, CA-based online auction site.
"One of the issues we were concerned with was anybody trying to exploit the tragedy of Sept. 11," Pursglove said. "That's why at the end of that day we'd put in a temporary ban on any items related to the Twin Towers and the Pentagon," he said.
During the week following the attacks, eBay's Customer Service Department removed "several hundred" fictitious or offensive listings.
While eBay has started a charity action program and has kept a close eye on the listings its users post, the souvenir trade continues - seemingly uncontrolled - in the streets of New York. "Less scrupulous individuals will try to exploit a disaster," Pursglove said.
"I guess when you meditate on it, you won't be surprised at all," Jones said. "It's New York, it's an incredibly corrupt, complex place."
