Behind the Scenes:
Gotham Gazette's Rebuilding NYC

http://www.gothamgazette.com/rebuilding_nyc/

By Jonathan Mandell
Gotham Gazette Editor-in-Chief

Gotham Gazette, a Web site about New York City, had been in business for exactly two years when the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center across the street from our office. Those of us present before 9 a.m. were forced to evacuate, and we were unable to return for a month. Still, we did not miss a single day of publication. We began our coverage on the very day of the attacks, writing an account of what we witnessed and posting it on the site by 4:30 p.m. The next day, working from our homes, we set up a message board for people to offer help, to give vent to their feelings and their fears, to try to locate their loved ones, and to offer their opinions and ideas. It is a message board to which people are still contributing. That same day, we also ran a piece a staff member wrote about the city's history of dealing with emergencies; by coincidence, she had been working on it for a while. Our regular weekday e-mail newsletter, which we call the Eye Opener, included a request to our readers for ideas about rebuilding. We received via e-mail three informed and detailed essays - from two professors of urban planning and a community leader - which we posted on the site.

I should explain that because of our relentless focus on the city, our readers include the people who know more about New York than anyone else in the world, and in those first chaotic days, many of them were unable to get their information virtually any other way than from the Web . (The television antennae atop the twin towers had been destroyed, newspaper trucks were barred along with all other traffic from traveling below 14th Street, etc.). Our Web site has always functioned as four publications in one: a daily digest of news about the city, taken from the metropolitan dailies and assorted weeklies and monthlies;  a news operation of its own, focusing on the broad issues facing the city;  a policy magazine, serving as a forum for ideas about New York; and a reference work for serious researchers and students alike. In those first few weeks, when virtually every article in every newspaper and magazine was about some aspect of Sept. 11, we were overwhelmed by the volume and variety of information we were digesting, and we were sure we were not alone. We decided that the way we could do our part was by helping other people sort through all of it. When we created our sub-site about the aftermath of Sept. 11, it made sense for us to concentrate not on the shocking details of the attack or on the stories of those who had died, but on what everybody almost immediately called the rebuilding. That's why we named it Rebuilding NYC.

From the beginning, when New Yorkers talked of rebuilding, they were defining it in many different ways. Some meant the physical reconstruction just of the 16 acres known as Ground Zero; others, the economic recovery of Lower Manhattan or of all of New York City. Still others were talking about the spiritual and psychological recovery of the city's residents, or the efforts at restoring the feeling and the fact of safety and security, or the process of memorializing and of creating a memorial. We organized Rebuilding NYC to help New Yorkers understand these distinctions, with what have now grown to be 10 different topic sections. Our latest are one on the anniversary, and another called 9/11 in Art and Culture, in which we attempt to sort through and list the many 9/11-related books, films, songs, and so on. Each Friday, we also post a weekly "Rebuilding Roundup" (which we send out as an e-mail newsletter as well) for those who wish to keep up with all categories, but in less depth.

Our hope was to offer the most relevant information and the best ideas in a way that readers could absorb. It is safe to say that no other Web site has offered as comprehensive coverage of the aftermath of 9/11 and the rebuilding effort. This is true if for no other reason that none of the publications with far more resources have included links to their competitors, and few even link to many non-competitive sources that were not of their own creation. But no sources are off-limits to us.

We have done more than simply summarize, digest and link to the news and views from other publications and organizations. We attended every conceivable rebuilding meeting and conference and panel discussion, and posted transcripts of the best of them. We posted original articles of analysis and reporting. Our small staff wrote many of these, but as much as possible, we have sought out writers who have direct expertise in the issues of rebuilding. For example, we asked Mike Kuo to analyze the reports and recommendations that had recently been published by the major rebuilding coalitions that had sprung up spontaneously in the aftermath. He is a graduate student in urban planning and a member of most of the coalitions, and he is also the son of a man who had worked at the World Trade Center and was killed during the attack.  We ran an essay by Debbie Almontaser, an Arab-American who wears the hjiab or head-covering of a devout Muslim (and whose son was a soldier standing guard at Ground Zero). She talked about the effects of 9/11 on Muslims in New York, and her involvement in several multi-ethnic groups trying to repair the damage --  an example of how we defined rebuilding in different ways.

The site's features developed over time, in layers. We offer a calendar of rebuilding events; there is still something going on nearly every day. We have a section called Rebuilding At A Glance, which includes a quick overview of the basic facts and figures; a timeline; maps of the past, present and various proposed futures of Ground Zero; photographs of Sept. 11 and the aftermath, selected from museum exhibitions.  We have another section called Participate In The Rebuilding, where we stuck the message board and created two other features. One of them is the "Ground Zero Planner," which was inspired by a flash game created for the Web site of the Everett, Wash., Herald, where the residents were trying to figure out how to develop their waterfront. In our game, visitors can choose icons representing housing or parkland or a memorial or "new towers," etc. and move them onto a map of the 16 acres, thereby offering their own specific visions of the future of Lower Manhattan.

We also give a chance for our readers to communicate directly with the experts and the officials overseeing the rebuilding process through our series of live online chats, some of which are debates between people who envision different futures for the city.  During the day of the anniversary, we had lives chats with different psychologists throughout the day. Many of our readers were directly affected by the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Much of what we do is something that could only be done on the Web , but the tone we attempt in Rebuilding NYC comes from a lesson I learned as a student of John Hersey, who is best known for his account of the bombing of Hiroshima. I remember these lines about that book from his obituary in the New Yorker nine years ago: "If ever there was a subject calculated to make a writer overwrought and a piece overwritten it was the bombing of Hiroshima; yet Hersey's reporting was so meticulous, his sentences and paragraphs so clear, calm and restrained, that the horror of the story he had to tell came through all the more chillingly." The power of "Hiroshima," in the words of the obituary writer: "It simply tells."