One day in the first or second week of April, when the weather was chilly and damp as is typical of early Spring in New York, I boarded a New Jersey Path train heading to Newark. The Path commuter station was at the World Trade Center, but my journey officially began the moment I left my apartment, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I had taken the ‘L’ train West, transferred at Union Square to the ‘4’ heading South until I arrived at the Wall Street station.

My itinerary, mundane as it must seem, wasn’t incidental. A few hours before I had been on the phone with an artist who lives in Newark and with whom I had a studio visit scheduled for that afternoon. The artist has a day job as an urban planner and his art often involves taking complex infrastructural systems and translating them into plain language, so that the average city dweller can better understand—and respond to—legislation that has a direct effect on his or her life. We spent an unusual amount of time planning the route I would take to reach his studio. I proposed taking the ‘E’ train to Penn Station, where one can catch the New Jersey Transit, but this entailed a complicated transfer in Jersey City: no good. There was also an entrance at Christopher Street, duly dismissed as inconvenient. Finally, we settled on the World Trade Center as my point of embarkation. “Go that way,” he told me with confidence, “it’s more beautiful.”

Aesthetic appraisals would have to wait. As soon as I exited the subway, I felt that panicky disorientation that often hits me when I’m walking in Lower Manhattan. Always, I end up lost. The streets are narrow and unfamiliar, and no other place in the city encroaches on your personal space to such an insane degree: the buildings almost seem threatening as they tower above wandering, confused souls who buffet mindlessly from Century 21 to the World Trade Center site and beyond, toward the Statue of Liberty. Determined not to look like a tourist, I plowed forward, glancing quickly at unhelpful arrows claiming to point me toward the Path station. I was late. My panic increased.

In front of me, then, I saw several men wearing lime-green fluorescent colored vests: Pedestrian Safety. Some sort of patrol engaged to help the tourists navigate the area, I realized. And behind them, a modest chain-link fence, and behind that, the sixteen-acre site that once contained the World Trade Center.

As I walked past the WTC site, once so evocative of tragedy, now only depressing farce as year after year passes with no clear plan for what will become of the vacant land, the memory came to me, as it always does when I’m in this part of the city. A few days after the 9/11 blast, I was sitting in the one-bedroom apartment I was sharing with my then-boyfriend. It was a railroad apartment in a four-story old tenement building on 9th Street between Avenues B and C. A window across from the abbreviated kitchen overlooked a tiny vacant lot to the East of our building that usually served as storage for the super’s junk. The apartment was unusually quiet for New York: it was across from La Plaza Cultural Community Garden, with its crazy geodesic dome that Buckminster Fuller helped design and a charming amphitheater that Gordon Matta-Clark helped build. Most impressive was an immense willow tree that shaded our living room. It was a warm autumn night and the windows were open. I was home by myself when I heard the opening strains of Roberta Flack singing “Ballad of The Sad Young Men” coming through the side window. Someone was playing a record; I could tell because the needle added a layer of susurration as it dragged through its groove. Roberta Flack’s voice was gentle and sweet despite the gravely quality of the recording. It floated through the night air like an aromatic, soothing breeze.

Sing a song of sad young men, glasses full of rye

All the news is bad again, kiss your dreams goodbye

I stood by the window and listened, aware that I was not alone, but that there was an audience of hundreds of other silent, anonymous listeners hungry for the exact sense of communal sympathy the song offered up. The East Village proved an apt cathedral. The sense of collective empathy was powerful, providing a cathartic grace unlike anything I have ever felt.

Misbegotten moon shine for sad young men

Let your gentle light guide them home again

All the sad, sad, sad, young men

When the song ended, the record player went quiet. No more was required.

That experience, ephemeral as it was, remains monumental to me. As Baudelaire and Guy DeBord and so many others have said before, our personal, private interactions with the city streets are what shape the urban landscape for us. Memories are our geographical markers, linking one block to another more concretely than signposts and sidewalks.

In real time, though, I was still late for my studio visit, and I still needed directions to the Path train. A “Pedestrian Safety” patrolman kindly pointed it out; it was basically staring me in the face. I boarded the train and, as it began its journey past basalt rock walls and industrial plants and on into Newark, New Jersey, the “Gateway to the World,” the memory receded along with the city behind me.