New York - The clanking of pots and pans, murmur of voices and echo of laughter at Nino’s Restaurant sounded Jan. 1 like a New Year’s Eve party that had not ended.
Just blocks away, at the former site of the World Trade Center, recovery workers rang in the new year by digging through rubble of fallen buildings throughout the night. The New Year’s Eve skyline showed a pocket of lights in celebratory Times Square, and another pocket just as bright where the 110-story towers used to stand.
Seven Michiganians, including retired and current university employees, traveled 700 miles to join the team of volunteers at Nino’s on New Year’s Day, providing hunger and human relief for firefighters and police officers working what is often a 15-hour shift.
The restaurant serves more than 2,500 free meals a day to anybody with a badge, uniform or the mark of a volunteer at Ground Zero. The smoke and stench from the fire and collapse of the towers cleared, but the work continues.
“They feel at home here,” said James Scagnelli, who helps run the 70-seat restaurant on Canal Street. “They sit, they talk, they work. We’ve always got enough volunteers.
“A lot of the guys, they were heartbroken about it. Before, everybody minded their own business, but not anymore. People are so pleasant.”
Pleasantry and generosity
After months of lingering on every television news stations’ portrayal of tragedy turned recovery, MSU media relations project manager Kris Tetens was tired of minding her own business.
The distance between her and New York didn’t matter.
“You come to a point where you have to ask yourself, ‘What can I do?’” she said. “A very small group of people can get in a car, go to a big city that’s in trouble and actually make a difference.”
With hundreds of phone calls and e-mails, Tetens gathered a group of volunteers and created a schedule of work with labor-needy organizations.
Each volunteer donated at least $100 for travel costs. About $650 was donated by MSU library staff members and other individuals. Members of the Greater New York Metro Area Club of the MSU Alumni Association blew up air mattresses and stocked refrigerators for the travelers’ weeklong stay.
“Most of us living here have been able to find little or nothing we can do to make a difference in the aftermath of what happened,” club President Greg Hauser said. “We’ve just kind of picked up, gone back to work and gone on with our lives. We were left wondering what we can do, and this was an opportunity.”
Giving up a week of vacation for a week of work was easy for some.
An emotional numbness came over Debbi Schaubman, a librarian at the Main Library, when she saw the towers collapse Sept. 11. Her accent is evidence of her childhood in Brooklyn, when she saw the World Trade Center being built.
Even though she was too far away to feel the impact of the collapsing towers, she expected to realize a whirlwind of emotions while volunteering.
“That’s my home,” she said. “I needed to go, both for myself and to see the city was still there and the things I love. This is going to echo through the generations.
“It’s like you had a relative that was badly hurt and needed to see them.”
MSU police Lt. Sue Busnardo joined the team of volunteers the day before it planned to depart. She noticed an article about the trip on her drive to work and was packing her bags by the next day.
“My first reaction was ‘I’ll never go to New York again,’” Busnardo said. “But it was like the opportunity was too (available) not to go.
“I love being a cop. I’m proud to be a cop. I need to bring it home to the people I work with.”
The recovery in New York drew about 11,000 donations totaling $1.6 million from Clinton, Eaton, Ingham, Gratiot and Shiawassee counties from Sept. 11 to Dec. 14, the Mid-Michigan Chapter of the Red Cross reported.
Nationally, about $667 million was collected for the American Red Cross Liberty Fund. About 53,000 people volunteered in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., since Sept. 11.
“It’s unprecedented,” said Terry Vandlen, an executive assistant with the local Red Cross. “We probably don’t receive 11,000 donations over an entire year normally.”
Work and gratitude
While hauling recovery supplies, dishing out food and listening to the crunch of earth where the towers stood, adrenaline carried the volunteers through the week.
For two days, they served comfort food to recovery workers at Nino’s. The 30-year-old restaurant closed to the public Sept. 13 to welcome the hordes of hungry police and fire officials.
Donations and more than $200,000 of the owner’s personal money keep the child-art decorated doors to the restaurant open. The restaurant, which once served about 150 meals a day, has a waiting list of volunteers, a public relations firm to regulate the press and stacks of letters, drawings and art pouring in from elementary schools around the country.
For the police officers and firefighters, it’s a break from the near-freezing temperatures and whipping winds around Ground Zero.
“Everything changed drastically after Sept. 11,” said New York police Officer William Broschart, who joined the department about two months before the attacks. “The days themselves drag on longer. We learned a lot really fast. But this place, it’s famous. It’s not going to be forgotten.”
Yolanda Vicente, the restaurant’s floor manager, said it’s common to see people from out-of-state pile into the restaurant to offer help, but not often from Michigan. Every few hours, Vicente teaches a new group how to run a restaurant that never closes its doors.
“I’m the only one who knows what to do,” she said while checking food lines. “You have to meet everybody again every four hours. The guys are so appreciative about this. I don’t see a change in New York on the street - but I see it here.”
But the most colorful crayon drawings and the food that tastes almost like mom’s doesn’t make the pain of thousands of lost lives go away.
The laughter quieted Jan. 1, when a group of recovery workers came in after discovering more bodies - the remains of their co-workers.
Even in a room full of jubilant volunteers and child-written words of praise, a lone firefighter drinking coffee at the restaurant’s bar was enough to remind volunteers that the happiest moments don’t last.
“Nino’s is a really happy place to go, but at some point, that is going to go away too,” said volunteer Jennifer Cook, an engineer with General Motors Corp. “I realized those guys go there to get away from everything. I tried to just be cheerful and serve food.
“I felt it fading in my memory, but now I know it really happened, I know how much destruction there was. I talked to the people that went in.”
But even the most vivid stories from recovery workers didn’t capture the enormity of the site.
Volunteer Sylvia Stevens delivered a warm breakfast to Ground Zero on Friday after spending all morning cooking and grilling with the expertise she’d gained during years of cooking for her own family.
“In some ways, it feels like the same kind of sacred ground as Gettysburg,” said Stevens, a retired administrative assistant from the Department of Family and Community Medicine. “That, for me, was the culmination of everything we had seen and done.
“I full well realize that we were there for such a tiny parcel of time. We drop ourselves in and then we leave. But we still did what had to be done.”
The Statue of Liberty, Broadway’s theaters and uptown shops kept volunteers busy during the off-hours, but the trip wasn’t for tourist attractions.
Some volunteers never snapped a photo, purposely avoiding the six-block wait to stop at the Ground Zero viewing platform.
“You can’t have your skin showing 24 hours a day for three months,” Schaubman said. “You need some kind of shell.”
Homecoming and sadness
It wasn’t until Tetens, the trip’s organizer, walked into her East Lansing apartment Saturday that she felt the impact of Sept. 11.
Despite the 13-hour drive home, she found the energy to cry for two hours.
“Everything finally hit me,” Tetens said. “We saw how people live and did what they did. We saw how their life happens, and to realize that thousands of people did what we did, went to work and didn’t come home was really overwhelming.
“You see the tremendous energy of that city. You get back here and say, ‘How could this happen? It’s the greatest city in the world.’”
Remembering the blockwide hole in the ground where the World Trade Center towers once stood, group members began to forget the smiles on firefighters’ faces and remember only the slightly smoky smell from the buildings.
“It was a token effort,” Cook said during the ride home. “I had never walked up to a firefighter and said, ‘Thank you, I really look up to you.’ I felt like I needed to say it to at least one.
“It was like laying a rose on a grave.”
Cook plans to make an audio tape of her Sept. 11 thoughts - from watching the second of three hijacked planes crash into the building to her last look at the now-changed skyline.
Other volunteers plan to write in journals. Some want to save their stories in their memories.
“Everyone is going to have their own way,” said Busnardo, who plans to create a scrapbook of the trip. “It’s important to preserve the past and tell the story. They’re not gawky pictures. They’re not snapshots. It gives the stories meaning.
“I know I’m going to have some stuff to deal with when I get home. I’m not worried about it, but I’m going to have to go through it.”
Without photos to hang up or a journal to read from, Julia Lenardon, an assistant professor for MSU’s Department of Theatre, said memories are worth more when they can be used by the future.
“If my students are interested, I feel it’s my responsibility to share it with them,” she said. “That’s all part of educating. It’s an experience in my life I’ll continue to learn from.
“Even though I’m home in East Lansing now, it doesn’t mean it’s over.”
Jamie Gumbrecht can be reached at gumbrec1@msu.edu.
