NYT,pg1: Handing Out Hors d'Oeuvres, Recalling 107th Floor (heartbreaking)

[DeepModem Mom]

ABOUT NEW YORK
Handing Out Hors d'Oeuvres, Then Recalling the 107th Floor


Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
Waiters at Noche, a Times Square restaurant, who used to work at Windows on the World: from left, James Johnson, Monzur Ahmed, Ahad Ahmed, Victor Rojas and Memon Ahmed. Noche is closing this week.

By DAN BARRY
Published: September 1, 2004


To be a banquet worker is to be invisible. Do not engage customers in chitchat. Just collect the discarded shrimp tails, keep the cheese platters fresh and know how to pose simple questions - "Hors d'oeuvre?" - so unobtrusively that you might as well be a phantom.

These rules hold true no matter how often out-of-town customers turn a certain jagged phrase into a political rally cry, and no matter how often their bar-banter invocation of that phrase, September 11th, sends you back. You ask if they'd like another mojito, and you say nothing more.

Monzur Ahmed, who has been managing a buffet table this week for several Republican National Convention parties at the Noche restaurant in Times Square, says nothing as speakers use September 11th to justify four more years for their candidate. He tells no one about his life at Windows on the World, the glittery restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center's north tower, or about the 79 friends and colleagues who died, including a beloved uncle.

James Johnson, a former Windows employee who has been serving mojitos and hors d'oeuvres at Noche, never shares how he could not work for nearly a year afterward. Ahad Ahmed, another Windows veteran at the buffet, keeps to himself the memory of a colleague's little girl crying - oh was she crying - because daddy wasn't coming home.

And Victor Rojas, the bartender in the restaurant's penthouse, serves margaritas to out-of-towners, but never talks about the sunrises and sunsets he witnessed from the top of the world with people who are no longer here....


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/politics/campaign/01about.html


Personal note from one who lived 25 years in NYC, and for whom it will always be home: shame on the Republicans for bringing their political convention to a city still trying to heal the wounds and sorrows of 9/11, a process no outsider can understand.

[Hekate]

1. An amazing, heartbreaking story, DMM...thanks...

It's so good to see the point of view of New Yorkers who were there appear in the newspaper. It's nice that their story wasn't crowded out by the story about the political debut of the Idiot Twins (who seem to be working on some kind of a Paris Hilton act for the Vapidity Award).

Naturally the delegates are carrying their ignorant chatter wherever they go in NYC -- and of course the servers, wait staff, busboys, bellhops, and sales associates are all invisible to them.

With any luck, this article will be picked up by some other papers around the country, as a reminder of the real people out there in NYC, the walking wounded.

Hekate

[ParanoidPat]

2. I'll echo your sentiment as another person who lived in NYC 25 years....

.....and will always consider it 'home'.

Shame on those bastards! :(

I visited the WTC site when it was nothing more than a 7 story deep hole in the ground known as the 'bath tub'. I watched daily, from my kitchen window in College Point, as the towers were built. One of my younger brothers works for the Port Authority of NY and was on his way there that morning when the first plane struck. Other people that I grew up with worked there and lost friends, their jobs and in a couple of instances, their LIVES in those buildings!

The Bush* Administration could have, and should have, prevented those attacks. Their going there now, to campaign on what a 'good job' they're doing in the 'war on terror', is a slap in the face to all New Yorkers!

Sick bastards, all of them. :puke:

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. Nominated for homepage. Exactly point of view Republicans oblivious to.

Republicans are oblivious to the average New Yorker, period. To the extent they are aware of them, they think of them as "other".

[Javaman]

9. All repubilicans think of anyone else as an "other"...

[KurtNYC]

4. I told this to 2 delegates last night

There was a journalist talking with two delegates as they walked down 6th Ave. I got next to them just in time to hear her say: "...well I'm a democrat but it's worng for people to tell you are not welcome in this city. I could never tell you you are not welcome in this city."

So I spun around and said as much to her as to them, "Well, I CAN tell you you are not welcome in this city (then with a calm smile because I don't like to seem rude or menacing)... You are not welcome in this city."

Reporter: "I think that is rude"

Me: "I think it is rude to come here to exploit the deaths of 2,794 of my friends and neighbors. On that basis you are not welcome. Had you come for any other reason you would be."

They had nothing to say to that. We parted company there.

Glad to see this story DeepModem Mom. It really helps put real people back into a tragic event which has been hijacked for political purposes.

[Stuckinthebush]

5. I can't believe the reporter said that

What an ass!

It is not the reporter's job to tell you something you say is rude, it is the reporter's job to share it with the rest of us.

What are they teaching in journalism schools these days?

[KurtNYC]

6. Other NYers, a few, have said similar

It's like the Stockholm Syndrome or something.

[glitch]

14. Very well done KurtNYC

:yourock:
Maybe you made that reporter think a bit too.

[pagerbear]

15. You go Kurt!

[seventhson]

7. I used to deliver papers at the Twin Towers when I was a college student

and I had friends who were there that day (all survived - one stepped out for a cigaret just before the first plane hit.another was in the subway underneath and the train kept going).

Altho I left my NYC apartment years ago, I share the disgust at the Republicans glorifying themselves on the graves and in the mortuaries and mausaleums of the dead whom THEY bear responsibility for.

The bushes were partners with the Bin Ladens and the Saudis who carried this out.

In fact they were partners with Hitler in WWII.

It has all the hallmarks of an "electoral bomb" (as described by Goebbels regarding the Reichstag Fire burned by Nazis and blamed on "foreign terrorists" to justify the elimination of the German Constitution and absolute power placed in Hitler) It was an inside job. Only Bush and his corporo-military goons like Cheney and Rummie had the technology to make this happen.

I believe that it was MIHOP. I blame these Republicans. All of them. For the deaths in NYC and Virginia.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

8. It goes way beyond mere exploitation. NYC is getting SCREWED

As you can see by my screen name I am a proud New Yorker. I have lived here my entire adult life.

NYC got screwed on 9/11 and now we are getting screwed again.
Between police overtime, lost business, and transportation gridlock, this is easily the worst thing that has happened here since 9/11.

Fuck them. I was DELIGHTED to read about delegates getting verbal abuse all around Manhattan in yesterday's Times. Fuck them. They can't hear enough scorn to compensate for the pain this is causing us.
Fuck them.

[Javaman]

10. Juggling on the Plaza...

When I was 19 I used to juggle on the plaza by the twin towers. God, I miss that so much. Not because, I was young or that I loved to juggle, but I just loved that spot.
The towers were just wonderful.

A piece of me was lost on that day.

I'm outraged at the republicans using it as a political platform as if they are just promoting a product.

[elsiesummers]

11. The NYC back-to-school No sales tax days are from Aug31-Sept3.ep

This is way too convenient. For the rest of their stay these guys aren't even paying sales tax because the suspension which is designed to keep NYers from crossing to do back to school shoping in NJ is on while 10% of residents have left town and Repubs have invaded without even having the decency to spring for the local sales tax.

[Rose Siding]

12. Hastert had a follow-up to his prior insulting remarks...

about the NY reps who worked so hard to get fed help for the city. It's classic:

snip>
Meanwhile, at a fabulously elaborate General Motors-hosted brunch in Hastert's honor at Tavern on the Green, the Speaker tried to soothe frayed New York nerve-endings. "I like New York," he told me. "New York is a great city and I love to visit. And those folks did a great job with the money we got for them."

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/story/227158p-195011c.html

He's a pig.

[prodigal_green]

13. Exactly how I feel every time I hear them spew

Those are my fucking friends you're talking about assholes. What would they say about us if we went down to Oklahoma City and stood in front of the Federal building to have our picture taken. Or went into their bars or restaurants and chit-chatted about how we could make political hay out of it.

I'm so glad the Times printed this article. Not that any of the delegates will read it, since they hate the NY Times.

Compassion my lilly-white ass (actually, more olive-toned). These people wouldn't know compassion if it hit them with a right cross.