But they converged on Manhattan, where the FDNY’s Pipes & Drums set began their procession. The bagpipers were everywhere on this thin island, flanking Central Park on both sides, and crawling down the edges of both rivers. If you had a window open anywhere in Manhattan early this morning, you could probably hear the bagpipes and the dirgeful drums. That helps to explain the crowd that followed them.
At 6 a.m., the FDNY’s pipers, with two engines and 25 rows of ordinary people in tow, turned off Broadway onto 14th Street. Some folks yahooed, others cried, but most people just looked stolid. But the crowd kept growing. People walked with cameras, dogs, bikes. Christians handed out literature. The crowd wore Rocawear, Armani, homemade 9-11 shirts, and World Cup jerseys.
Fire engineer Charles Carter, 62, from Station 14 San Jose, Calif., got up at 4:00 a.m. to wait for the pipers: he says fire department bagpipers are commemorating the occasion back home. He came out a year ago to help out, and today he was back “to enjoy New York.”
“I thought I was just going to watch [the procession] and pay my respects,” said Ashley Morgan of Ocracoke, N.C., “But I just sort of kept on going with it.” Morgan walked with an American flag slung across the shoulder which his brother, an Air Force radar technician, had brought on reconnaissance flights across Asia since 9-11. “I always thought I should have done something when this happened, but I lived a good thousand miles away. But I figured I can come up now and pay my respects.”
The crowd was 35 rows deep when the procession turned south again on 12th Street. A bald-shaven, fire-red goateed man idled his motorcycle adjacent to the pipers and turned his engine off. He took his FDNY helmet off, laid it in front of his handlebars and stared intensely at the procession. He shook his head when reporters asked to talk but smiled when people slapped him on the back. After the procession moved along, he tooled behind on his chopper, a brunette young woman riding behind him.
Mike Plantamura, a 52-year old Sanitation Department supervisor with his son’s birthday tattooed on his forearm, stood with his fingers wrapped around the chain-link fence that surrounds his building, watching the procession. “I work with all the firemen in the area, and people I work with had family down there,” he said as he gestured toward the empty skyline. “And they all got murdered down there last year. Just to see the people walking slowly down the street, it’s sad.” “Hopefully,” he said, as the crowd moved passed him, “today will end as peacefully as it began.”
By Clarkson Street in Greenwich Village there 50 rows of people following the procession, many of them holding hands. Walter Timmons, 22, dragged a suitcase on wheels behind him. “I woke up and I heard helicopters going past where I’m staying. Then I heard the band. So I just decided to catch up with them and see what’s going on.” He has to catch a flight home to Smithfield, N.C., tonight, but until then, he’d rather drag his luggage then have to leave any of this early.
Michael French, an actor from Los Angeles, was in town to drop his daughter off at school, but today he carried a spread of victims’ photos in today’s New York Times in front of him as if asking people to look. “I knew I was going to follow a pipe band,” he said, “and I knew I was gonna be here.” Windows open: people leaned out, waved, took pictures and called others to the window. Helicopters watch the crowd. Everyday Joes clapped as they walked past a firefighter who stood atop the ladder of an engine from Hose and Ladder 5.
A rat tried to scurry through the crowd: a man punted it across the street, and New Yorkers cheered.
. All the commotion caught Ron Martin, 38, unaware. “I woke up to a stampede,” said Martin, a rambling man who went to sleep last night in one of the tiny islands of mulch, gravel and shrubbery that line West Street along the Hudson River. “I hitchhike in the summertime, and I wanted to be here for this. I was born in Brooklyn, and I remember seeing the towers built.” As the crowd moved past, he began rolling up his sleeping bag so he could head down to Ground Zero.
Dick Hillenbran stood and saluted the procession, and a few firefighters nodded and waved. Hillenbran was a safety director for a crane and rigging company in Syracuse, N.Y., until 9-11, when he devoted himself to volunteering at Ground Zero. Now he lives in Battery Park City, adjacent to the World Trade Center site. “I worked with those guys on the pile,” he said. “I just wanted show my support to some of the parade groups, and I’m gonna go back home.” By the time the FDNY Pipes & Drums got to Chambers Street, near the northern edge of Ground Zero, there were more than 80 rows of people with them. Arthur Russo, who lost his son Wayne at the trade center, was waiting with his family to enter the site when the pipers came by. “I associate bagpipe playing with death,” he said. “I thought it was evocative.”
“In a normal year, we’d play three or four times a year,” said Lt. Jim Schumeyer, 46, from Rescue 4 in Queens, as he rested his hands from five hours of drumming. This year? “Over 200 times. Sometimes we’ve got to play twice, you know, when they recover the body.” Tom Killian, 34 played the bass drum for the FDNY this morning. He has a tattoo on his upper left calf: an enormous green shamrock with FDNY PIPES AND DRUM written in its center. As the band prepared to move into the WTC site, where the crowd that had followed him wasn’t allowed, Killian waved his oversized drumstick and thanked them all. The sun was just peeking over the buildings East of Chambers Street when the drum major yelled, “Put your lids on! Fall in!” He called out a song, and they walked back toward the site, in lock step.
