## The Texture of New York After September 11
The city that Steve Buscemi returned to after his time at Ground Zero was not the same city he had lived in before September 11. New York’s particular response to the attacks — the combination of collective grief, collective anger, and a specific intensification of the bonds that define any great city — shaped the cultural and social environment for years.
Buscemi lived and worked in New York throughout this period. He was not a visitor to the city’s post-9/11 transformation; he inhabited it. The changes in Lower Manhattan — the fencing and the pile, then the years of construction, then the memorial and the museum — were changes to a neighborhood that he had specific, personal connections to. The street grid around Engine 55, the buildings and restaurants and bars and theaters of Lower Manhattan and the neighborhoods adjacent to it, were not generic urban backdrop; they were the geography of his life and career.
The New York arts and cultural scene of which he was part processed September 11 through films, theater productions, novels, documentaries, and the sustained work of trying to understand what had happened and what it meant. Some of this work was excellent. Some of it was indifferent. Some of it instrumentalized the tragedy in ways that people directly affected found difficult. The work of trying to represent the attacks, their victims, and the response without doing damage to the people whose real experiences the representations claimed to reflect was a challenge that artists of many kinds attempted and handled with varying degrees of success.