Vigil at the Armory

As family members waited for news of survivors, they had to contend with prank phone calls, Tony Soprano jokes and the dull ache of dwindling hope.

By Jay Dixit

Sept. 27, 2001 | NEW YORK -- It's just days after the destruction of the World Trade Center. Outside the New York State Armory on 26th Street, the wall is plastered with fliers about World Trade Center workers who are missing. The signs feature names, physical descriptions, color photos, names of employers, tower and floor numbers, home phone numbers and pleas for help. "Anyone who may have known Rich, please call us ANYTIME." "Floor 105, still hopeful family!!! Great Dad and missed soccer coach." Other signs offer hope for the families. "Hold on, help is on the way. Anything is possible when you believe."

"Come sit with us," says a woman sitting on the sidewalk and smoking a cigarette. "We can tell you about Lucy." The woman, Teresa Galdames, is looking for her cousin, Lucy Fishman. She worked on the 105th floor of World Trade Center Tower 2, as an administrative assistant for Aon Insurance. Lucy is 36 and has two children, one 3 and one 11. She was last heard from at about 8:55 a.m. on Tuesday morning, when her husband spoke with her. Teresa, Lucy's sister, Bertha Bracken, and dozens of other friends and relatives have been looking for Lucy for the past three days.

A couple of times, Teresa tells me, they've had false hope from "bogus Internet lists." On two different sites, she says, Lucy's name has come up, on one saying she was fine, and on another saying she was injured. Those reports turned out to be wrong -- Lucy was nowhere to be found. Anybody can post information about anybody on those lists, Teresa explains to me, and people have been putting up jokes, saying Tony Soprano is OK. She can't understand why anybody would want to play a prank on them.

We hear that the city is requesting DNA samples from missing people. "Shit, I would have brought in her toothbrush, I would have brought in her hairbrush," says Teresa. They've already faxed in Lucy's health and dental records. At the apartment, a friend of the family has been calling hospitals in New Jersey. But the main command post is at Lucy's home in Brooklyn. At one point, there were 30 people there working to locate her. "We were calling from the home phone, we had the computer, we had the fax line going and we had 12 cellphones going at the same time," says Teresa.

Inside the Armory is a brightly lit arena filled with people, soldiers and food. Lucy's sister Bertha is standing with Brian Howley, who is looking for his wife, Jennifer Dorsey, an insurance broker for Lucy's company, Aon. Jennifer is five and a half months pregnant. Bertha and Brian didn't know each other before, but they met three hours after the buildings collapsed. "Brian's going to be my friend for the rest of my life," says Bertha.

"Pataki gave me a hug," Brian says. "I gave him a picture."

Bertha, a junior at the NYU School of Social Work, is giddy from exhaustion. Her eyes are red from crying. "Look at me, I look like I've been smoking crack all day," she says. "I bathed with some baby wipes." She shows us an area where she's spread cardboard boxes on the wood floor of the Armory to sleep on. "This is my crack den, over here," she says. "This is my nice Castro Convertible."

Bertha says she spoke to somebody who saw her sister at work that day. That's the last time anybody saw her alive, she says.

The arena is hot from the bodies of hundreds of people. "I've been sitting in this corner all day, just so I don't have to be around all those people, crying, smelly, hot," says Bertha. "I've never seen so many volunteers in my life; you'd think they could bring a fan."

Food is abundant -- "like a movie set," says Bertha -- and every few minutes, somebody comes up to us offering snacks or drinks. "For three days, I've been like an animal, lying on the floor, eating with my hands, peanut butter under my nails," she says. "I was like, 'Can somebody call their grandmother and get some hot food over here?' I'm not kidding -- like half an hour later, there's 50 plates of pasta."

Teresa has a TV interview scheduled with NBC for midnight. "I hate when they ask, 'What kind of a person is she?'" says Teresa. "'How would you describe her in just one word? Generous? Kind? Giving?'"

"I hate how TV reporters are always like, 'What do you make of this? How do you feel?'" says James. "There's like 8 million burnt bodies, how do you think I feel? Shut the fuck up."

"Every time I try to think about something else, every time I try to talk about something else, I always come back to this horror," says Teresa. "I try to think, this is my daughter's first day of school. But it always comes back to this."

We go outside to an area where TV news crews have set up. "Don't cry during the interviews," Bertha warns Teresa. "We have hope. People need to know that we're rational, we're serious."

As we're waiting, a stranger comes up. "I heard there were 10 people who were caught in a pocket of air. It's unconfirmed."

"I have hope. Look at earthquakes. They find people two weeks later," says Teresa. She gives him a flier. "This is Lucy. She's my cousin. She's missing."

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