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Excerpts

From After: How America Confronted The September 12 Era

Monday, September 17, 2001

At 7:00 on Monday morning, September 17, the police allowed Sal Iacono back into what was left of his store.

The windows were smashed. The two doors, the one at the front of the fifteen-foot-long store and the brass door leading from the other side into the lobby of the office building that sat on top of the store, lay flat on the floor. That brass door, which to Sal was the one shining piece of elegance in his work life, was black and twisted.

Inside, three firemen were spread out on the floor asleep, two in the middle of the small customer area, one behind the counter. They and their brethren had obviously been using Continental Shoe Repair as a relief station. And as a bathroom. In a corner, just under where the picture of the Virgin Mary still hung by a nail on the wall near the front window, there was a large plastic bucket filled with liquid and solid excrement. In the other corners were puddles of more urine. The place reeked.

As Sal looked up from the bucket he saw that his walls had been stripped bare, except for some shoe polish. The 200 or 300 sole insets, arch supports, and heel cushions he kept in stock and sold for $5 or $6 apiece were gone. Sal supposed that for firemen and rescue workers to have taken items that might make them a little more comfortable was okay. It was as much a part of the cost of that horrible day as was the damage to his expensive leather-shaping machinery, now sitting behind the counter under a mound of gear-jamming dust and debris. But the bucket of human waste? The urine on the floor?

Well, maybe even that could be explained, he thought. Who knew what these rescue workers had gone through, or if they had had access to any real bathrooms. But then he looked at his cash register. It had been forced open. (Almost anyone could have done it, because in the hours following the attack all varieties of people, not just police and firefighters, were at Ground Zero.) Because Tuesday was Sal's regular day of the week for taking cash to the bank, there had, he would later say, been $1,400 in there when he'd left on the morning of the 11th. None of it was there. Not even the coins.

Sal was furious. Why did they have to destroy the shop that he had always regarded as another of his children? Why did someone have to take his money? When he got home, he tearfully told his wife that he had lost everything. Franca Iacono, reminding him that he was sixty-seven, told him it was time to retire.

Copyright © 2003 by Steven Brill