Ìàçóðîâà À. C.
Íàó÷íûé
ðóêîâîäèòåëü: àññèñòåíò êàôåäðû èíîñòðàííûõ ÿçûêîâ
Àíèñèìîâà
Ñâåòëàíà Àíàòîëüåâíà
Äîíåöêèé
íàöèîíàëüíûé óíèâåðñèòåò ýêîíîìèêè è òîðãîâëè èìåíè
Ìèõàèëà
Òóãàí - Áàðàíîâñêîãî, Óêðàèíà
New York: After the Fall
The aim of this work is to disclose the essence of the tragedy in New
York, took place on Sept. 11, 2001.
New York has had intimations of mortality before. On June 15th
1904, the steamship General Slocum caught fire when taking the
congregation of a German church in the Lower East Side on its annual picnic,
and 1,021 people died. At the time, that was a higher proportion of the city` s
population than the number killed in the attacks on the World Trade Centre.
Downtown "Klein Deutschland" (little Germany), a community of around
80,000, never recovered.
September 11th was very different in several ways. As an
attack on America, it shook not only New Yorkers but Americans and the world.
America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were direct results of it. Families
from all over the region lost someone, and the funerals and memorial services
went on for weeks. Many New Yorkers saw and heard their skyline's proudest
highlight collapse. Even more smelled the shroud of dust and smoke long
afterwards. About a quarter of the office space in lower Manhattan — the
country's third-largest business district — was destroyed and 23 buildings
damaged.
Many more could easily have been killed. About 40,000 people normally
worked in the twin towers, and around 150,000 visitors passed through the World
Trade Centre complex each day. At the time the first plane struck, at 8.46am,
the offices were not even half full. According to the National Institute of
Standards and Technology, between 16,200 and 18,600 people were in the towers,
and around 87% of them escaped. But every death was one too many. New Yorkers
shared a wave of grief and felt connected. Just under a year later, 46% told
pollsters that they personally knew someone who had been killed or hurt. As a
result folk wisdom has it, they got nicer.
The owner of several of the city's most popular restaurants says that
customers have become more mindful of their mortality since September 11th.
They drink more, he reckons, and are going out in larger groups because they
want to see more of their friends before the next disaster .strikes. But other
restaurateurs find nothing the sort. It seems that every
theory about how September 11th changed New Yorkers has an equally
plausible rebuttal. Even the economic impact of the attacks is uncertain.
Some things can be reckoned fairy straightforwardly. The clean-up took
around $1.5 billion, and repairing damaged infrastructure will cost about $3.7
billion. Economists at New York's Federal Reserve put the lost lifetime earnings of those killed at $7.8
billion. Firms got $9.5 billion in insurance payments for interruptions to
business. The cost of replacing destroyed buildings depends on how much gets
rebuilt, and there are other imponderables. But the intriguing
question is what happened to the city's prospects. New York's long boom of the 1990s
started to slow down in January 2001 and the city had begun to
shed jobs that May.
So it is hard to disentangle the effects of the attack from those of a recession that was already gathering pace and which it
intensified. It is clear that most of a sudden
plunge in New York's hotel, bar, restaurant and air-transport
jobs in October 2001 can be blamed on the attacks. The same
applies to over 17,000 jobs, mostly in finance, that moved across the Hudson to New Jersey in the
following weeks (although most had returned to New York
by the New Year). According to an analysis of trends
before September 11th by the New York office of the Bureau of Labour Statistics, the attacks were responsible for
around 30% of the wages lost in New York in 2000-02.
A comparison of New York
with broadly similar cities supports the idea that recession harmed its
workers much more than did September 11th. In a study for the Russell
Sage Foundation, a New York think-tank,
Cordelia Reimers of the City University of New York found that in 2002 the
household incomes of workers in New York declined by less than in the other cities
she examined. As for the longer term, another study by Andrew Haughwout of New
York's Federal Reserve Bank, found little evidence that the attacks made the
city a less desirable place to work or live.
But this does not mean that
nothing is changing. In New York, it always is. Two years after the attacks, just over half the larger tenants of destroyed
buildings had moved to mid town. About a quarter were back downtown and 15% had gone to New Jersey. Of those who eventually returned workers to New York, some firms, such as American Express, moved back almost all of them. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank that had been the World Trade Centre's largest tenant, will move around 2,000 workers upstate to a backup centre in Harrison, 23 miles (37km) from the city. Only one big employer left the city altogether after September 11th: Philip Morris, which puffed off to tobacco-friendly Virginia. But, jolted by the attacks, firms are reconsidering
where their people should be, and how many they need.
The combined effects of
September 11th and slugging growth have underlined or accelerated job trends
that were already under way. Firms had been drifting north from downtown for
much of the past century, largely because of midtown's big rail terminals;
Grand Central and Pennsylvania Station. The buildings of the World Trade
Centre in the 1970s were an attempt to stem that flow.
We considered this terrible tragedy, highlighting its
various aspects.