Posted on 10/06/2001 5:30:55 PM PDT by Pokey78
Profiteers exploiting the World Trade Centre atrocity were condemned this weekend as 'sleazy hawkers'. They are making a fast buck by peddling 'souvenirs' from the wreckage and even selling ashes from the site to families of the dead. Tourists are again flocking to Manhattan's financial district, where a mere two blocks now separate the surreality of not-quite-normal life - with its lunch-hour rush and sandwich bars - from a mass grave for more than 6,000 people. The holidaymakers - mostly from Europe and Japan - join genuinely grieving New Yorkers, and eagerly photograph gnarled metal and pulverised concrete. Ready to greet them is the ghoulish 'souvenir' market. Sidewalk stalls that usually sell 'I Love NY' T-shirts and fake Rolex watches are festooned with American flags and patriotic regalia for the locals and metal models or framed photographs of the twin towers for tourists. T-shirts now sport pictures of the World Trade Centre and such slogans as 'We shall overcome' or 'America: the spirit lives on'. Baseball caps that usually carry the logo of the New York Yankees bear those of the fire and police departments. There is only one postcard view visitors want to send home: one of tens of thousands, of rush reprints, showing the old skyline. Midtown gift shops are similarly crammed with 'disasteralia'. In the Just New York shop on 46th Street, fire department sweatshirts and plastic helmets for children were being swept off the shelves. 'Let freedom ring' is the slogan advertising a mobile phone company, and the internet service provider AOL urges customer to have a 'Patriotic Hallowe'en', selling firemen's uniforms. The flag business has enjoyed a boom without precedent. On Fifth and Sixth Avenues, cutting the length of Manhattan, are gauntlets of flag-sellers assailing vehicles at every stop light. Alan Epstein, of The Five Boro Flag, Banner and Sign Company, who is normally making bunting for street festivals at this time of year, accumulated a 10-week waiting list within a few days of the disaster. America's biggest flag-maker, Old Glory, Annin of New Jersey, has quadrupled its weekly production from 30,000 to 120,000. And it gets progressively sleazier. Hawkers are harvesting big bucks by printing up the most dramatic pictures of the disaster for sale - a get-rich-quick scheme which is 'completely out of control', says Keith Terracino of Gallery Electronics, who has refused to take part. The usual scam is to clip photographs from magazines and sell enlargements of them. Some feature the explosions after the planes ploughed into the towers. Others, more nightmarish, show trapped office workers at the windows, caught as they are forced to choose between two ways of dying - in the fire or jumping from the building. Looting has been limited, but a luxury watch store beneath the ruins of the centre was stripped of its designer and diamond-studded timepieces by rescue workers. The most dramatic piece of alleged looting was by the New York Mob, the Cosa Nostra, which is accused of stealing 250 tons of valuable scrap metal from Ground Zero. The metal turned up at three scrapyards believed to have past Mafia associations. The profiteers' nadir came when the office of Mayor Rudy Giuliani reported that some people mourning those missing under the rubble were being offered pieces of the building and dust from the wreckage as souvenirs of their loved ones. Rosemary O'Keefe, head of the city's Community Assistance Unit, said the families were contacted by telephone by traders after posting their numbers on the leaflets appealing for any word of the missing which cover the walls downtown. Giuliani 's response was to promise 'every single family' soil from Ground Zero in a wooden urn. As New York returns to ostensible normality - with shock and distress replaced by fear and annoyance at the extra inconveniences of Manhattan life - a stream of New Yorkers is leaving the city for good. Estate agents predict the exodus will match the 'white flight' of the early Seventies when thousands moved away to escape urban decay and rising crime. 'The phone hasn't stopped ringing,' says Bridgit Freed, an estate agent 60 miles away in the town of Cold Spring. 'People really want to get out of there. They fear for their safety in the city.' In the Hamptons, the playground of wealthy New Yorkers, school enrolment has soared by up to 200 per cent as people who usually rent houses for the summer now take them for the winter too. 'They just want a safe house,' says Sotheby's estate agent, Tara Newman. Demand for homes is rising around Woodstock in upstate New York, 'It's like a flood of refugees,' says agent Mari Hogan. There is talk of raising prices because of the demand. But Hogan insists: 'We should not get greedy. These people are buying out of fear.' Jen Posner, a 27-year-old entertainment publicist, is among those leaving. 'I love this city and New Yorkers are the strongest people in the world, but this was a big one and it's time to get out.'
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