The market, of course, tanked something ferocious. As I file this to the Web site, the Standard & Poor’s 500 is down 5 percent, the Nasdaq market is down 6 percent, the Dow Jones industrials are down 9 percent. The screens on which I track my personal holdings are all red-and heavily so-but who cares? Tomorrow, we can get back to greed. For today, it’s only money. And some day, possibly soon, things will stabilize and the world will go on.
The opening itself was just extraordinary. NYSE Chairman Richard Grasso, who had called for two minutes of silence, sounded the opening bell. Amazingly, the ever-present background noise vanished. For the full two minutes. Then Marine Maj. Rose-Ann Sgrignoli sang “God Bless America.” And four rescue officers pushed the button to open trading.
Think about it. Grasso, an Italian-American with a classic New York accent, makes way for Sgrignoli, nee Wix, a career military officer born in Columbia Station, Ohio, to Dutch immigrants, who sings a song written by a Russian-Jewish immigrant, Irving Berlin. And then the start-trading button is pushed by policemen, firemen and a paramedic with names like Manuel Delgado, David Lim, Patrick Boylan and David Fischer. All of different ethnic origins, but all of them Americans. No one made a big deal about this religious, ethnic and racial mixture-or even mentioned it. It’s perfectly normal in New York City, and in much of the rest of the country. The very naturalness of this mixing is enough to make someone like me-a second-generation American of Eastern European Jewish origin married to a French-Irish woman-appreciate just how different America is on its good days. And this was definitely one of them.
The financial world was represented in all its diversity, too. The head of the rival Nasdaq stock market was on the podium, as was Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan wasn’t there in the flesh, but he was hovering over the market, courtesy of the Fed’s half-point rate cut early in the day.
The New York Stock Exchange trading floor, which had missed four consecutive trading days, was back to its usual pushy self with a few exceptions. The words GOD BLESS AMERICA were on trading screens when I toured the floor with an NYSE official shortly after 10 a.m.; red, white and blue clothing and American flags were on display; a normally empty area held traders from the rival American Stock Exchange, whose building is uninhabitable. And, finally, when the wind blew in the wrong direction, the acrid burning smell outside wafted onto the trading floor.
The train trip into Manhattan from my home in New Jersey was eerie. The twin towers that used to dominate the skyline were gone, replace by billows of smoke. It was as if a Biblical plague, rather than homicidal religious maniacs, had struck the city.
Getting into the stock exchange building used to be a breeze. You called the public-relations folks, who were happy to have you visit, you caught a subway to within a block or two of the exchange, breezed through a metal detector and there you were, at the heart of America’s capitalist system.
Not so Monday. With some subway stations out of service, probably forever, you got off a quarter or half a mile away. You walked through the haze and grit. If, like me, you’re too clueless to have picked up a mask, you’d have had trouble breathing. For us print-media types, getting into the exchange Monday took almost as long as getting to the exchange in the first place. You had to make your way through three separate checkpoints, where your name had to be on a list. Mine, thankfully, was. Then, you and everything you carried had to be vetted by Nick, the bomb-sniffing dog. If you passed, you got a pass pinned on your lapel, walked through yet another checkpoint, then through the metal detector.
One of the most reassuring things is that after five days of preternaturally polite behavior, we New York City types-or at least some of us-were starting to revert to normal. There was the usual jostling and shoving in the subway, and I was almost knocked over by a stock exchange employee because I made the mistake of standing between him and the carton of drinks that had just passed through the metal detector.
Life in New York and in the New York Stock Exchange will never be the same as it was before Sept. 11. But it will go on. And that’s the important thing.
