New York CIty's Union Square is normally a gritty, heavily populated urban center. But when I recently visited the square -- less than a mile from the wreckage of the World Trade Center -- it had been transformed into a site of mass mourning. Pictures by local grammar-school kids of firefighters holding hoses and hatchets were taped next to posters that pleaded for "peace" and "justice." Tall, flickering religious candles from local bodegas illuminated the plastic-wrapped, ghostly portraits of Saint Roch and Saint Lucy attached to their glass casings. Jewish yahrzeit candles burned steadily beside Christian crosses propped up against trees. Impulsive, heartfelt messages written in English, Yiddish, and Arabic were scrawled on the macadam paths and cottage-like buildings. NYFD: WE LOVE YOU, R.I.P., PRAY FOR THOSE WHO ARE LOST, SAVE US. Flowers -- some fresh, some wilting, most disintegrating -- were placed, shoved, mounted, crowded, and strewn everywhere. But most conspicuous and arresting of all were the photocopied color pictures of the missing men and women who had been at the World Trade Center when the planes hit and the towers fell. The signs were fastened to trees, walls, fences, makeshift monuments. Later that day, as I walked around Lower Manhattan, I was overwhelmed by them -- thousands upon thousands were posted on store windows, bulletin boards, church doors, bus-stop shelters, lampposts, and phone booths. The cityscape had been literally transfigured by the pain, loss, and grief embodied in these posters.

Walking around this New York -- a city I have known well for at least 40 years -- I was staggered. Although New York overflows with emotion, it is never this nakedly vulnerable. Such open displays of bereavement are as abnormal for this city as the news footage of the planes hitting the twin towers.

In many ways, the posters signal a profound change not just in New York, but throughout the country: they testify to the democratization of death. Residents of Manhattan are not mourning a great fallen leader or public figure. They're mourning thousands of perfectly ordinary people like themselves, who died because they were in the right place at the wrong time -- not because of who they were, or what they did, or who they aspired to be.

THE FIRST time Americans gathered as a nation for such an openly emotional act of communal grief was at the unveiling of the Vietnam War Memorial in 1982, in Washington, DC. The looming, solemn granite tablets became a cross between a town square, where people could meet and talk, and a national depository of artifacts -- from Bronze Stars to teddy bears to letters. With its mementos and wisps of memory, the monument became a sort of Jungian Smithsonian for the collective American unconscious. Something similar is ritually enacted, on a more local scale, at the site of the memorial for the Oklahoma City bombing.

For the most part, however, Americans mourn the way we live: privately. For a nation that, in many ways, is so public -- think of our confessional talk shows -- we really are a very private people. Rarely do we congregate in large numbers except at sporting events, in shopping malls, at national political conventions every four years. We spend most of our time in small, self-selected groups that reinforce our specific religious, ethnic, gender, sexual, racial, and class identities. Americans tend to worship privately, join narrowly defined organizations, and live in neighborhoods marked more by homogeneity than by variety. The decade's long slide into gated communities is simply the logical conclusion to this trend, just as privately owned shopping malls -- complete with private security guards -- have replaced the publicness of Main Street. Is it any surprise that mourning, one of the most personal forms of emotional expression, should also be private?

It may sound like a cliché, but this privateness is a lingering remnant of our British Puritan heritage. (After all, Puritanism was concerned, in part, with political control: people are more easily controlled as individuals than as a group.) Certainly, prevailing social codes and standards throughout US history have emphasized emotional restraint in public. At the end of the 19th century, for example, one of the principal complaints about the behavior of immigrant groups -- especially Italians, Irish, and Eastern European Jews -- had to do with their animated public life: the Italian saint's festival, the neighborhood Irish pub, the Jewish street market. Similarly, African-American culture -- so public in its music and its vibrant social and street life -- has been alien to mainstream white American sensibilities.

Not surprisingly, these "foreigners" were the very groups that, on occasion, made their mourning public. A case in point is the enormous 1911 rally in Union Square itself to commemorate the 146 young Jewish and Italian women who died on March 25 in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (eerily prefiguring September 11, many of the women had jumped from high windows to escape the flames). So, too, are the large public funerals that occurred after events such as the execution of the Italian and German anarchists accused of instigating the Chicago Haymarket Riots of May 4, 1886 -- riots that many believed were incited by a police agent provocateur. But even in these cases, public mourning was almost secondary to the political nature of the gatherings -- which epitomized Mother Jones's exhortation to "mourn for the dead but fight like hell for the living."

To be sure, there have been a few notable instances of mass public lamentation in US history. The assassinations of Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, and of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, summoned nationwide grief of vast magnitude. The same might also be said of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, and John Lennon on December 8, 1980, and the deaths of Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who died aboard the Challenger space shuttle on January 28, 1986, and John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in an airplane crash on July 16, 1999. But the outpouring of emotion in these instances -- the public gatherings, the funeral processions, the solemn memorials -- came as people drew together to mourn the loss of a single life. The mourning was communal, but each loss was limited to a specific individual, however much the deceased might have symbolized some aspect of American greatness.

TAKEN TOGETHER, the posters plastered throughout Lower Manhattan attest to a very different type of mourning. Walking down Fifth Avenue, I tried -- it was an impulse half journalistic, half sociological -- to take in as many "missing" posters as I could. This effort lasted for just over two city blocks. Gazing at each name and face quickly became unbearable. The photographs were of people at parties, at dinners, in the office. They were smiling, looking silly or playful. It was excruciating to read their ages, their years of birth, their nicknames, which floors they worked on. The terror of those who made and hung the posters was as palpable as the lives that had been captured in all those quick snapshots. MISSING ON SEPT. 11. IF SEEN PLEASE CALL . . . followed by a phone number in Queens, New Jersey, Staten Island, Connecticut, Brooklyn. It wasn't simply the multitude of posters and images and names that was emotionally straining -- although that was one mark of this very different sort of mourning. It was seeing the same poster, like a specter, half a block later. The sheer numbers, the repetition, and my attempt to remember the details -- who was holding the black-and-white cat? who was waving into the camera at a birthday party? who looked half-drunk at an after-work party? -- drove home the awful personalness of the event. A scholar once noted that it was a mistake to say that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. One Jew was killed, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another. In this case, it would be a mistake to say these were "people who worked at the World Trade Center." These were simply -- and not so simply -- individuals, each one caught in the horrors of history.

There's only one true precedent in this country for trying to deal with random death, loss, and pain on such a massive scale: the Names Project AIDS Quilt.

NEW YORK'S "missing" posters appeared out of urgent necessity: the immediate need to find loved ones. The AIDS Quilt came into being just as spontaneously. In 1985, a small group of friends in San Francisco decided to do something to commemorate their dead lovers and friends. The result was the quilt: it was an unguarded, unorchestrated response that became, of necessity, a public display. And just as the "missing" posters pack an emotional and spiritual punch by communicating something intimate -- quickly and publicly -- about a lost loved one, so does the quilt.

When I first viewed the AIDS Quilt, when it was displayed in Boston in the late 1980s, I read with great interest all the individual panels that listed the interests of the dead: the clubs to which they belonged, their favorite songs, their most cherished movie stars, their hobbies, their biological families, their dreams. Some panels had teddy bears sown onto them, others had mawkish poetry or song lyrics. At some point -- after an hour dissolved in tears -- I realized that I would not have liked many of these men. We had nothing in common, we had drastically different politics and taste; we would have avoided one another at bars and parties. But the power of the quilt -- of this mammoth talisman to the democratization of death -- was that none of that mattered.

I was struck by the same thoughts as I walked around Lower Manhattan. I knew none of these people; I may not have had anything in common with most of them. Yet the question of liking or not liking them was entirely irrelevant. Like the quilt, these posters and fliers brought the hard, harsh reality of death and grief into public view and made visible the fears and sorrows that we Americans usually keep private.

Perhaps one of the reasons Americans have maintained our emotional privacy is that we feel safe in private. But this kind of safety is a false safety. It is an individualistic, stingy, even selfish refuge from the world. One of the reasons turn-of-the-century immigrants were so public with their lives and emotions was that they realized there was safety in community. The great power of the Names Project was and is that it represented a claiming of public space by a community under siege. After September 11, New York -- along with the rest of America -- no longer feels safe. Yet by grieving in such a public manner for the thousands who died, we are attempting, in small, intuitive ways, to create a new type of community. Perhaps we are only as strong and safe as we are able to be open, honest, and emotionally vulnerable in public.

Michael Bronski can be reached at mabronski@aol.com.

Issue Date: October 12 - 18, 2001

Illustration by Scott Getchell